The Making of the Modern Mind

The Making of the Modern Mind PDF Author: John Herman Randall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 676

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Book Description

The Making of the Modern Mind

The Making of the Modern Mind PDF Author: John Herman Randall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 676

Get Book

Book Description


The Making of the Modern Mind

The Making of the Modern Mind PDF Author: John Herman Randall (Jr.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
Surveys the intellectual background of man from medieval times through the Renaissance to modern times.

Origins of the Modern Mind

Origins of the Modern Mind PDF Author: Merlin Donald
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674253701
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
This bold and brilliant book asks the ultimate question of the life sciences: How did the human mind acquire its incomparable power? In seeking the answer, Merlin Donald traces the evolution of human culture and cognition from primitive apes to artificial intelligence, presenting an enterprising and original theory of how the human mind evolved from its presymbolic form.

Storytelling

Storytelling PDF Author: Christian Salmon
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784786594
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Politics is no longer the art of the possible, but of the fictive. Its aim is not to change the world as it exists, but to affect the way that it is perceived. In Storytelling Christian Salmon looks at the twenty-first century hijacking of creative imagination, anatomizing the timeless human desire for narrative form, and how this desire is abused by the marketing mechanisms that bolster politicians and their products: luxury brands trade on embellished histories, managers tell stories to motivate employees, soldiers in Iraq train on Hollywood-conceived computer games, and spin doctors construct political lives as if they were a folk epic. This "storytelling machine" is masterfully unveiled by Salmon, and is shown to be more effective and insidious as a means of oppression than anything dreamed up by Orwell.

The Age of Genius

The Age of Genius PDF Author: A. C. Grayling
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620403455
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
The Age of Genius explores the eventful intertwining of outward event and inner intellectual life to tell, in all its richness and depth, the story of the 17th century in Europe. It was a time of creativity unparalleled in history before or since, from science to the arts, from philosophy to politics. Acclaimed philosopher and historian A.C. Grayling points to three primary factors that led to the rise of vernacular (popular) languages in philosophy, theology, science, and literature; the rise of the individual as a general and not merely an aristocratic type; and the invention and application of instruments and measurement in the study of the natural world. Grayling vividly reconstructs this unprecedented era and breathes new life into the major figures of the seventeenth century intelligentsia who span literature, music, science, art, and philosophy--Shakespeare, Monteverdi, Galileo, Rembrandt, Locke, Newton, Descartes, Vermeer, Hobbes, Milton, and Cervantes, among many more. During this century, a fundamentally new way of perceiving the world emerged as reason rose to prominence over tradition, and the rights of the individual took center stage in philosophy and politics, a paradigmatic shift that would define Western thought for centuries to come.

Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind

Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind PDF Author: George Makari
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393248690
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind. Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither. In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows how writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing, but a natural one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment of secular ethics and political liberalism. Boldly original, wide-ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind.

The Making of the Mind

The Making of the Mind PDF Author: Ronald T. Kellogg
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1616147342
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Using the findings of recent neuroscience, a psychologist reveals what sets humans apart from all other species, offering a fascinating exploration of our marvelous and sometimes frightening cognitive abilities and potentials. According to human genome research, there is a remarkable degree of overlap in the DNA of humans and chimpanzees. So what accounts for the rapid development of human culture throughout history and the extraordinary creative and destructive aspects of human behavior that make us so different from our primate cousins? Kellogg explores in detail five distinctive parts of human cognition. These are the executive functions of working memory; a social intelligence with "mind-reading" abilities; a capacity for symbolic thought and language; an inner voice that interprets conscious experiences by making causal inferences; and a means for mental time travel to past events and imagined futures. He argues that it is the interaction of these five components that results in our uniquely human mind. This is especially true for three quintessentially human endeavors-morality, spirituality, and literacy, which can be understood only in light of the whole ensemble's interactive effects. Kellogg recaps the story of the human mind and speculates on its future. How might the Internet, 24/7 television, and smart phones affect the way the mind functions?

Making of the Modern Mind

Making of the Modern Mind PDF Author: Philip Hodgkiss
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847142869
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
The Making of the Modern Mind traces the emergence of "consciousness" in social thought from the 17th Century to the 21st. Against the classical notions of consciousness and self, alternative agendas began to be developed in the 19th Century by figures as diverse as Marx and Nietzsche. The struggles between classical conceptions of consciousness and these alternatives--which promised more radical and emancipatory interpretations--continued into the 20th Century.From the start, the concept of "consciousness" connected with a range of other notions. Questions of the self and of identity were widely disputed in the Enlightenment whilst the 20th Century contributed new concerns, chiefly the philosophical issues of being and acting and the problematic status of reality for a theory of mind. Today, consciousness is viewed much more as a public and linguistic world rather than a private and mentalistic one.The Making of the Modern Mind explores the contemporary debates around consciousness and identity, crucially setting the analysis within its social and historical context. Written in a clear and engaging style, the book will be of interest to students in Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology.

Prehistory

Prehistory PDF Author: Colin Renfrew
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0812976614
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
In Prehistory, the award-winning archaeologist and renowned scholar Colin Renfrew covers human existence before the advent of written records–the overwhelming majority of our time here on earth–and gives an incisive, concise, and lively survey of the past, and of how scholars and scientists labor to bring it to light. Renfrew begins by looking at prehistory as a discipline, detailing how breakthroughs such as radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis have helped us to define humankind’s past–how things have changed–much more clearly than was possible just a half century ago. As for why things have changed, Renfrew pinpoints some of the issues and challenges, past and present, that confront the study of prehistory and its investigators. Renfrew then offers a summary of human prehistory from early hominids to the rise of literate civilization that is refreshingly free of conventional wisdom and grand “unified” theories. In this invaluable account, Colin Renfrew delivers a meticulously researched and passionately argued chronicle about our life on earth–and our ongoing quest to understand it.

Law and the Modern Mind

Law and the Modern Mind PDF Author: Jerome Frank
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 135150956X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
Law and the Modern Mind first appeared in 1930 when, in the words of Judge Charles E. Clark, it "fell like a bomb on the legal world." In the generations since, its influence has grown-today it is accepted as a classic of general jurisprudence.The work is a bold and persuasive attack on the delusion that the law is a bastion of predictable and logical action. Jerome Frank's controversial thesis is that the decisions made by judge and jury are determined to an enormous extent by powerful, concealed, and highly idiosyncratic psychological prejudices that these decision-makers bring to the courtroom.