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What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture


What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture

Paperback by Slingerland, Edward (University of British Columbia, Vancouver)

What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture

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ISBN:
9780521701518
Publication Date:
11 Feb 2008
Language:
English
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Pages:
390 pages
Format:
Paperback
For delivery:
Estimated despatch 3 - 8 May 2024
What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture

Description

What Science Offers the Humanities examines some of the deep problems facing the study of culture. It focuses on the excesses of postmodernism, but also acknowledges serious problems with postmodernism's harshest critics. In short, Edward Slingerland argues that in order for the humanities to progress, its scholars need to take seriously contributions from the natural sciences - and particular research on human cognition - which demonstrate that any separation of the mind and the body is entirely untenable. The author provides suggestions for how humanists might begin to utilize these scientific discoveries without conceding that science has the last word on morality, religion, art, and literature. Calling into question such deeply entrenched dogmas as the 'blank slate' theory of nature, strong social constructivism, and the ideal of disembodied reason, What Science Offers the Humanities replaces the human-sciences divide with a more integrated approach to the study of culture.

Contents

Introduction; Part I. Exorcising the Ghost in the Machine: 1. The disembodied mind; 2. They live among us; 3. Pulling the plug; Part II. Embodying Culture: 4. Embodying culture; Part III. Defending Vertical Integration: 5. Defending the empirical; 6. Who's afraid of reductionism?; Conclusion.

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