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Although science may claim to be "objective," scientists cannot avoid the influence of their own values on their research. In The State of Nature, Gregg Mitman examines the relationship between issues in early twentieth-century American society and the sciences of evolution and ecology to reveal how explicit social and political concerns influenced the scientific agenda of biologists at the University of Chicago and throughout the United States during the first half of this century. Reacting against the view of nature "red in tooth and claw," ecologists and behavioral biologists such as Warder Clyde Allee, Alfred Emerson, and their colleagues developed research programs they hoped would validate and promote an image of human society as essentially cooperative rather than competitive. Mitman argues that Allee's religious training and pacifist convictions shaped his pioneering studies of animal communities in a way that could be generalized to denounce the view that war is in our genes.
Modes of Thought was written 20 years ago from lectures delivered by Whitehead at Wellesley, the University of Chicago, and Harvard. In it Whitehead developed the brilliant new concepts of clarity and precision of statement which have since become fundamental principles of construction underlying all of the fields of modern intellectual analysis.
Neil Sinhababu defends the Humean Theory of Motivation, according to which desire drives all human action and practical reasoning. Desire motivates us to pursue its object, makes thoughts of its object pleasant or unpleasant, focuses attention on its object, and is amplified by vivid representations of its object. These aspects of desire explain a vast range of psychological phenomena - why motivation often accompanies moral belief, how intentions shape our planning, how we exercise willpower, what it is to be a human self, how we express our emotions in action, why we procrastinate, and what we daydream about. Some philosophers regard such phenomena as troublesome for the Humean Theory, but the properties of desire help Humeans provide simpler and better explanations of these phenomena than their opponents can. The success of the Humean Theory in explaining a wide range of folk-psychological and experimental data, including those that its opponents cite in counterexamples, suggest that it is true. And the Humean Theory has revolutionary consequences for ethics, suggesting that moral judgments are beliefs about what feelings like guilt, admiration, and hope accurately represent in objective reality.
This New York Times bestseller is an exciting and fearless investigation of language from the author of Rationality, The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Sense of Style and Enlightenment Now. "Curious, inventive, fearless, naughty." --The New York Times Book Review Bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books - including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate - have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important popular science writers. In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker presents a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. Considering scientific questions with examples from everyday life, The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
"Highly informative and remarkably entertaining." —Elle From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.
In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature itself. Ecological writers propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the "nature" they revere. The problem is a symptom of the ecological catastrophe in which we are living. Morton sets out a seeming paradox: to have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish the idea of nature once and for all. Ecology without Nature investigates our ecological assumptions in a way that is provocative and deeply engaging. Ranging widely in eighteenth-century through contemporary philosophy, culture, and history, he explores the value of art in imagining environmental projects for the future. Morton develops a fresh vocabulary for reading "environmentality" in artistic form as well as content, and traces the contexts of ecological constructs through the history of capitalism. From John Clare to John Cage, from Kierkegaard to Kristeva, from The Lord of the Rings to electronic life forms, Ecology without Nature widens our view of ecological criticism, and deepens our understanding of ecology itself. Instead of trying to use an idea of nature to heal what society has damaged, Morton sets out a radical new form of ecological criticism: "dark ecology."
This book focuses on the very nature and function of intuitive thought. It presents an up-to-date scientific model on how the non-conscious and intuitive thought processes work in human beings. The model is based on mainstream theorizing on intuition, as well as qualitative meta-analysis of the empirical data available in the research literature. It combines recent work in the fields of philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology and positive psychology. While systematic research in intuition is relatively new, there is an abundance of positions advocating more or less imaginative ideas of what intuition is about, ranging from quantum mechanical phenomena to new age ideologies. Research in the past few decades, in particular by proponents of the dual processing theory of thought such as Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Evans, offers powerful tools to address and evaluate the question of intuition without the need to resort to spiritual entities. Within the framework of the dual processing theory, backed up by findings in positive psychology, intuition turns out to be the capacity to carry out complex cognitive operations within a specific domain of operations familiar to the agent.
We have entered a new era of nature. What remains of the frontiers of modern thought that divided the living from the inert, subjectivity from objectivity, the apparent from the real, value from fact, and the human from the nonhuman? Can the great oppositions that presided over the modern invention of nature still claim any cogency? In Nature as Event, Didier Debaise shows how new narratives and cosmologies are necessary to rearticulate that which until now had been separated. Following William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Debaise presents a pluralistic approach to nature. What would happen if we attributed subjectivity and potential to all beings, human and nonhuman? Why should we not consider aesthetics and affect as the fabric that binds all existence? And what if the senses of importance and value were no longer understood to be exclusively limited to the human?