Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Biologism The Consequence Of An Illusion
Download Biologism The Consequence Of An Illusion full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Biologism The Consequence Of An Illusion ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Biologism – The Consequence of an Illusion by : Manfred Velden
Download or read book Biologism – The Consequence of an Illusion written by Manfred Velden and published by V&R Unipress. This book was released on 2009-11-18 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biologism – the idea that the science of biology supplies the means to exhaustively explain psychological processes – has become vastly popular in recent decades. It can be shown that the idea is illusory on fundamental and a-priori grounds. Several fields of inquiry are described, where the biologistic project has demonstrably failed, like, for example, heritability estimates for mental traits (like intelligence). It is argued as well that biologism is just a further instance of an older, more comprehensive and equally illusory concept: psychology as a natural science (a science that produces generally accepted basic facts, for example the creation of a psychological risk factor for coronary disease). It is shown that psychology, masquerading as a natural science, as it largely does, may create serious societal problems like, for example, its misuse for racist purposes. The peculiar use of methodology in psychology is also documented.
Book Synopsis Psychology – a Study of a Masquerade by : Manfred Velden
Download or read book Psychology – a Study of a Masquerade written by Manfred Velden and published by V&R Unipress. This book was released on 2016-10-10 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Die Psychologie als Fach, wie es heute an Universitäten angeboten wird, hat seit ihrer Entstehung im 19. Jahrhundert große Anstrengungen unternommen, eine den Naturwissenschaften vergleichbare quantitative Wissenschaft zu sein. Manfred Velden stellt an einer Reihe von Beispielen dar, dass es sich dabei um eine Maskerade handelt, bei der naturwissenschaftliche Methoden benutzt werden, ohne dass es zu entsprechend verlässlichen Ergebnissen kommt. Die Auswirkungen dieser Art von Wissenschaft waren zum Teil geradezu verheerend, so zum Beispiel im Zusammenhang mit Immigration, Zwangssterilisierung, der Zulassung zur Universität oder der Debatte über Rassenunterschiede.
Download or read book Darwin's Shadow written by Manfred Velden and published by V&R unipress GmbH. This book was released on 2012 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolutionary Psychology, an offspring of Sociobiology, claims to explain human mental (psychological) functions on the basis of evolution theory. Researchers in the field try to monopolize Darwin for their purpose by calling themselves Darwinists or by putting his portrait on the cover of their books. It is shown that Darwin, who actually tried to explain some human behavior, like altruistic behavior, in the context of evolution theory, found the intellectual and moral faculties to be predominantly shaped by sociocultural, not biological factors, however. It is also shown that the tendency to reduce mental functions to biological ones, biologism, affects many fields of inquiry to their detriment, such as education, criminology, psychiatry, or philology. Biologism's dehumanizing effect on our view of the human condition is the dominant topic of the book.
Book Synopsis Brain Death of an Idea by : Manfred Velden
Download or read book Brain Death of an Idea written by Manfred Velden and published by V&R unipress GmbH. This book was released on 2014 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a matter of scientific debate to what extent intelligence is hereditary. However, in a relatively broad part of the public the opinion prevails that intelligence is to a large extent hereditary, which means that it can only be minimally improved through social intervention. The book presents the scientific methods for determining heritability in the individual. It is clear from these methods that there can be no general value for heritability of intelligence, and that a heritability value says practically nothing as to the extent to which intelligence can be altered. The volume traces the history of research on the heritability of intelligence. The discipline is manifestly plagued by dubious practices and has caused social damage on a large scale, for example in the context of eugenics, immigration or education policy.
Download or read book Free Will written by Sam Harris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Faith, a thought-provoking, "brilliant and witty" (Oliver Sacks) look at the notion of free will—and the implications that it is an illusion. A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion. In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.
Book Synopsis Language, Biology and Cognition by : Prakash Mondal
Download or read book Language, Biology and Cognition written by Prakash Mondal and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the relationship between human language and biology in order to determine whether the biological foundations of language can offer deep insights into the nature and form of language and linguistic cognition. Challenging the assumption in biolinguistics and neurolinguistics that natural language and linguistic cognition can be reconciled with neurobiology, the author argues that reducing representation to cognitive systems and cognitive systems to neural populations is reductive, leading to inferences about the cognitive basis of linguistic performance based on assuming (false) dependencies. Instead, he finds that biological implementations of cognitive rather than the biological structures themselves, are the driver behind linguistic structures. In particular, this book argues that the biological roots of language are useful only for an understanding of the emergence of linguistic capacity as a whole, but ultimately irrelevant to understanding the character of language. Offering an antidote to the current thinking embracing ‘biologism’ in linguistic sciences, it will be of interest to readers in linguistics, the cognitive and brain sciences, and the points at which these disciplines converge with the computer sciences.
Book Synopsis Homo Novus - A Human Without Illusions by : Ulrich J. Frey
Download or read book Homo Novus - A Human Without Illusions written by Ulrich J. Frey and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-08-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Converging evidence from disciplines including sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and human biology forces us to adopt a new idea of what it means to be a human. As cherished concepts such as free will, naïve realism, humans as creation's crowning glory fall and our moral roots in ape group dynamics become clearer, we have to take leave of many concepts that have been central to defining our humanness. What emerges is a new human, the homo novus, a human being without illusions. Leading authors from many different fields explore these issues by addressing a range of illusions and providing evidence for the need, despite considerable reluctance, to relinquish some of our most cherished ideas about ourselves.
Book Synopsis The Western Illusion of Human Nature by : Marshall Sahlins
Download or read book The Western Illusion of Human Nature written by Marshall Sahlins and published by Paradigm. This book was released on 2008 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting the decline in college courses on Western Civilization, Marshall Sahlins aims to accelerate the trend by reducing "Western Civ" to about two hours. He cites Nietzsche to the effect that deep issues are like cold baths; one should get into and out of them as quickly as possible. The deep issue here is the ancient Western specter of a presocial and antisocial human nature: a supposedly innate self-interest that is represented in our native folklore as the basis or nemesis of cultural order. Yet these Western notions of nature and culture ignore the one truly universal character of human sociality: namely, symbolically constructed kinship relations. Kinsmen are members of one another: they live each other's lives and die each other's deaths. But where the existence of the other is thus incorporated in the being of the self, neither interest, nor agency or even experience is an individual fact, let alone an egoistic disposition. "Sorry, beg your pardon," Sahlins concludes, Western society has been built on a perverse and mistaken idea of human nature.
Book Synopsis History, Metaphors, Fables by : Hans Blumenberg
Download or read book History, Metaphors, Fables written by Hans Blumenberg and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History, Metaphors, and Fables collects the central writings by Hans Blumenberg and covers topics such as on the philosophy of language, metaphor theory, non-conceptuality, aesthetics, politics, and literary studies. This landmark volume demonstrates Blumenberg's intellectual breadth and gives an overview of his thematic and stylistic range over four decades. Blumenberg's early philosophy of technology becomes tangible, as does his critique of linguistic perfectibility and conceptual thought, his theory of history as successive concepts of reality", his anthropology, or his studies of literature. History, Metaphors, Fables allows readers to discover a master thinker whose role in the German intellectual post-war scene can hardly be overestimated.
Book Synopsis Freud, the Contemporary Super-ego, and Western Morality by : Giosuè Ghisalberti
Download or read book Freud, the Contemporary Super-ego, and Western Morality written by Giosuè Ghisalberti and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-09 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freud, the Contemporary Super-ego, and Western Morality traces the origins of the relationship between the morality of the super-ego and the destructive impulse of the death drive in the liberal democracies of the 21st century. Giosuè Ghisalberti begins by refuting the analysis by contemporary social theorists of the phenomenon described as "the return of the religious," presenting instead a comprehensive set of ideas as outlined by Freud in the writings of the 1920s and the analysis of a contemporary theological-political unconscious. Ghisalberti argues that the psyche of the liberal West has regressed to an infantile and primitive present, driven by an unconscious hostility towards the Oedipus complex and, more comprehensively, to Western civilization as a whole. The book re-examines Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas on the nature of obsessions, interpreted first from the murder of the primal father in Totem and Taboo, and turns to his grounding ideals of intelligence, creativity, and freedom as the affirmation of the coming-to-be-human in modernity. Freud, the Contemporary Super-ego, and Western Morality will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training. It will also be key reading for academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, philosophy, political theory and the humanities.
Download or read book Aping Mankind written by Raymond Tallis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neuroscience has made astounding progress in the understanding of the brain. What should we make of its claims to go beyond the brain and explain consciousness, behaviour and culture? Where should we draw the line? In this brilliant critique Raymond Tallis dismantles "Neuromania", arising out of the idea that we are reducible to our brains and "Darwinitis" according to which, since the brain is an evolved organ, we are entirely explicable within an evolutionary framework. With precision and acuity he argues that the belief that human beings can be understood in biological terms is a serious obstacle to clear thinking about what we are and what we might become. Neuromania and Darwinitis deny human uniqueness, minimise the differences between us and our nearest animal kin and offer a grotesquely simplified account of humanity. We are, argues Tallis, infinitely more interesting and complex than we appear in the mirror of biology. Combative, fearless and thought-provoking, Aping Mankind is an important book and one that scientists, cultural commentators and policy-makers cannot ignore. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by the Author.
Book Synopsis Masses, Classes, Ideas by : Etienne Balibar
Download or read book Masses, Classes, Ideas written by Etienne Balibar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Masses, Classes, Ideas, well-known French philosopher Etienne Balibar explores the relationship between abstract philosophy and concrete politics. The book gathers together for the first time in English nine of Balibar's most influential essays written over the last decade, which have been carefully revised and reordered in logical succession with an original preface. Balibar discusses the influence of political philosophy on collective movements, touching on issues of religious and class struggle, nationalism and racism, the rights of man and the citizen, and property as a social relation. He seeks to explain the novelty of Marxist philosophy and political theory with respect to the classical doctrines of "state" and "revolution." Masses, Classes, Ideas also examines the limitations and aporias which have become manifest in Marxist philosophy and critically assesses its legacy, offering a provocative contribution to the project of renewing democratic theory.
Book Synopsis Sociobiology vs Socioecology by : Sejin Park
Download or read book Sociobiology vs Socioecology written by Sejin Park and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-05-17 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a theory, sociobiology is opposed to socio-ecology, a discipline hampered since its birth. The indictment of the ideological intentions of the first has obscured the notion that the growing domination of the image of the “selfish gene” has obstructed the necessary rise of the second. For 40 years, a terrible force of inertia has thus frozen the global analysis of socio-ecological interactions outside the theoretical bias externally imposed on social sciences by so-called “behavioral ecology”, which amounts to a simple emanation of sociobiology. This book summarizes the methodological abuses and the illusory legitimations of a school whose sterility can no longer be concealed, but which is preparing to reinvent itself by cynically replacing its faltering laws by hijacking the recent advances in epigenetics. The authors shed light on unjustly sacrificed paths in the study of socio-ecological interactions.
Book Synopsis A Spiritual Hypothesis by : Daniel Punzak
Download or read book A Spiritual Hypothesis written by Daniel Punzak and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional Western religion explains that each human has a spiritual aspect called a soul. However, several passages in the Bible allude to humans having a soul and a spirit. Dan has explored this idea and found numerous modern psychological findings that support this notion. Shamanism and some Eastern religious concepts also support this idea. Diverse concepts such as creativity and mental illness can be explained by the idea that two spiritual forms are in each human.
Book Synopsis New Myth, New World by : Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal
Download or read book New Myth, New World written by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took root in late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and Stalinism.
Book Synopsis Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam by : Fethi Benslama
Download or read book Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam written by Fethi Benslama and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this title, the author demythifies both Islamic and western ideas of Islam by addressing the psychoanalytic root causes of the Muslim world's clash with modernity and subsequent turn to fundamentalism. It reveals an alternate history of Islam and looks at its future development.
Book Synopsis The Philosophy of Social Ecology by : Murray Bookchin
Download or read book The Philosophy of Social Ecology written by Murray Bookchin and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is nature? What is humanity's place in nature? And what is the relationship of society to the natural world? In an era of ecological breakdown, answering these questions has become of momentous importance for our everyday lives and for the future that we and other life-forms face. In the essays of The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Murray Bookchin confronts these questions head on: invoking the ideas of mutualism, self-organization, and unity in diversity, in the service of ever expanding freedom. Refreshingly polemical and deeply philosophical, they take issue with technocratic and mechanistic ways of understanding and relating to, and within, nature. More importantly, they develop a solid, historically and politically based ethical foundation for social ecology, the field that Bookchin himself created and that offers us hope in the midst of our climate catastrophe.
