It is beautifully written, and addresses profound issues with courage and clarity.
Can it be that we have finally grown up?” - Melvin Konner, The American Prospect “This is a brilliant book. fine book helps with a task that we all must begin to take seriously. A well-informed and well-written account of limitations, a graceful interleaving of scientific and literary sources. He has written for The New York Times, Time, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, and Technology Review. He is an elected fellow of several scientific societies, associate editor of Cognition, and a member of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. Pinker has also received many awards for his teaching at MIT and for his books How the Mind Works (which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and The Language Instinct. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has earned prizes from the National Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological Association. THE BLANK SLATE Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. All this is done in the style that earned his previous books many prizes and worldwide acclaim: irreverent wit, lucid exposition, and startling insight on matters great and small. Pinker shows that the new sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution, far from being dangerous, are complementing observations about the human condition made by millennia of artists and philosophers. He shows that equality, compassion, responsibility, and purpose have nothing to fear from discoveries about an innately organized psyche. Pinker provides calm in the stormy debate by disentangling the political and moral issues from the scientific ones. Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them.
He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature and instead have embraced three dogmas: The Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), The Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and The Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology). In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. Yet many fear that scientific discoveries about innate patterns of thinking and feeling may be used to justify inequality, to subvert social change, and to dissolve personal responsibility. Our conceptions of human nature affect everything aspect of our lives, from child-rearing to politics to morality to the arts.
0 kommentar(er)
