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This collection of aphorisms and philosophical comment represents Eric Hoffer at his best. It offers stunning insights that strike home with startling frequency, often most uncomfortably; it has a fine unity, a well-defined theme. That some of the statements invite argument and questioning is inevitable and stimulating. Here is a book of the "wry epigram and the icy aphorism" which made his earlier books so appealing and gained for him a wide audience.--Publisher description.
Originally published in 1961. Arthur O. Lovejoy, beginning with his book The Great Chain of Being, helped usher in the discipline of the History of Ideas in America. In Reflections on Human Nature, Lovejoy devotes particular attention to influential figures such as Hobbes, Locke, Bishop Butler, and Mandeville, tracing developments and changes in the concept of human nature through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He also discusses the theory of human nature held by the founders of the American Constitution, giving special attention to James Madison and the "Federalist Papers."
Volume 1 Autobiography of a Restless Mind is a fascinating, exceptionally diverse collection of observations and reflections written over the past twenty-five years by one of the most innovative thinkers, writers, and leaders of the past half century. Witty and wise, playful and profound, prophetic and immensely quotable, it is a companion no thinking, caring person should be without. Written in an unforgettable style reminiscent of Aurelius, Montaigne, Lao-Tse, and Bacon, it is a classic that will be read with pleasure and profit for generations to come.
Malcolm Jeeves, former editor-in-chief of Neuropsychologia, a leading international scientific journal in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, explores the intersection of science and faith in defining what it means to be human. He reports on recent scientific research on consciousness and the link between mind, brain, and behavior. He examines issues such as determinism by indicating the possible relevance of chaos theory to enduring concerns about freedom and responsibility. He looks at similarities and differences between human nature and animal nature. He reexamines traditional dualist views of soul and body in the light of contemporary research on mind and brain and argues for a wholistic model. This leads to addressing questions such as: does spiritual awareness depend on the intactness of our brains or does spirituality stand apart from our biological substrate?
In this provocative book, Douglas Candland shows that as we begin to understand the way animals and non-speaking humans "think," we hold up a mirror of sorts to our own mental world, and gain profound insights into human nature. Weaving together diaries, contemporary newspaper accounts, and his own enlightening commentary, Candland brings to life a series of extraordinary stories. He begins with a look at past efforts to civilize feral children. We meet Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, now famous as the subject of a Truffaut film; Kaspar Hauser, raised in a cell, civilized, and then assassinated; and the Wolf Girls of India, found early this century huddled among wolf pups in a forest den (they were originally believed to be ghosts by superstitious villagers, who nearly shot them as they were being captured). In each case, it was hoped that the study of these children would help clarify the age-old nature/nurture debate, but, as Candland shows, so much of the information "revealed" was really only a projection of beliefs previously held by the investigating scientists. Candland then turns to "clever animals." We learn how the investigation of "Clever Hans," the German horse who could calculate square roots, proved to be a first step in the direction of behaviorism (researchers found that Hans was being tipped off by the subtle and unwitting body language of his owner and other observers, who would bend almost imperceptibly at the waist with every hoof beat, and stand erect when the correct count was reached). And Candland discusses the many attempts to communicate with our closest neighbor, the apes. We read of Richard Lynch Garner's 1892 experiment living with chimpanzees in Gabon (he taught one to say the French word "feu"), and of Gua, raised by W.N. and L.A. Kellogg alongside their own son Donald, and of the latest successes of teaching sign language to such precocious apes as Sarah, Sherman, Austin, and Koko. Throughout, Candland illuminates the boldest and most intriguing efforts yet to extend our world to that of our fellow creatures. And he shows that, in the end, our effort to "make contact" is a reflection of the way in which we as a species create and order our universe. Humans have long shown a wish to connect with the silent minds around them. In assembling and interpreting the compelling tales in this book, Candland offers us a new understanding not only of the animal kingdom, but of the very nature of humanity, and our place in the great chain of being.
Being human isn't easy. We might think that consciousness and free will give us control over our lives but our minds are unpredictable places. We are susceptible to forces we don't understand. We are capable of inflicting immense cruelty on one another and yet we also have the capacity to be tender, to empathise, to feel. In his thought-provoking new book Richard Holloway holds a mirror up to the human condition. By drawing on a colourful and eclectic selection of writings from history, philosophy, science, poetry, theology and literature, Holloway shows us how we can stand up to the seductive power of the monster and draw closer to the fierce challenge of the saint.
Humans have long turned to gardens - both real and imaginary - for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh's garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens. With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur'an; Plato's Academy and Epicurus's Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt - all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power. Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison's earlier classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility - and its enduring importance to humanity.
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.
In this important and original book, eminent scholar Barbara Herenstein Smith describes, assesses, and reflects upon a set of contemporary intellectual projects involving science, religion, and human cognition. One, which Smith calls "the New Naturalism", is the effort to explain religion on the basis of cognitive science. Another, which she calls "the New Natural Theology", is the attempt to reconcile natural-scientific accounts of the world with traditional religious belief. These two projects, she suggests, are in many ways mirror images -- or "natural reflections"--Of each other. Examing these and related efforts from the perspective of a constructivist-pragmatist epistemology, Smith argues that crucial aspects of belief - religious and other - that remain elusive or invisible under dominant rationalist and computational models are illuminated by views of human cognition that stress its dynamic, embodied, and interactive features. She also demonstrates how constructivist understandings of the formation and stabilization of knowledge - scientific and other - alert us to simularities in the springs of science and religion that are elsewhere seen largely in terms of difference and contrast. In Natural Reflections, Smith develops a sophisticated approach to issues often framed only polemically. Recognizing science and religion as complex, distinct domains of human practice, she also insists on their significant historical connections and cognitive continuities and offers important new modes of engagement with each of them--Jacket.
This work explores a new development paradigm whose central focus is on human well-being. Increase in income is treated as an essential means, but not as the end of development, and certainly not as the sum of human life. Development policies and strategies are discussed which link economic growth with human lives in various societies. The book also analyzes the evolution of a new Human Development Index which is a far more comprehensive measure of socio-economic progress of nations than the traditional measure of Gross National Product. For the first time, a Political Freedom Index is also presented. The book offers a new vision of human security for the twenty-first century where real security is equated with security of people in their homes, their jobs, their communities, and their environment. The book discusses many concrete proposals in this context, including a global compact to overcome the worst aspects of global poverty within a decade, key reforms in the Bretton Woods institutions of World Bank and IMF, and establishment of a new Economic Security Council within the United Nations.