Download or read book Cognitive Foundations of Natural History written by Scott Atran and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-01-29 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by a debate between Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, this work traces the development of natural history from Aristotle to Darwin, and demonstrates how the science of plants and animals has emerged from the common conceptions of folkbiology.
Download or read book Cognitive Foundations of Natural History written by Scott Atran and published by Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, Paris. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstruction cognitive du développement conceptuel d'une discipline scientifique dont l'anthropologie, la psychologie et les sciences historiques et philosophiques ont gardé la trace. L'auteur suit le développement de l'histoire naturelle d'Aristote...
Download or read book Minds and Gods written by Todd Tremlin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-02 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the world and throughout history, in cultures as diverse as ancient Mesopotamia and modern America, human beings have been compelled by belief in gods and developed complex religions around them. But why? What makes belief in supernatural beings so widespread? And why are the gods of so many different people so similar in nature? This provocative book explains the origins and persistence of religious ideas by looking through the lens of science at the common structures and functions of human thought. The first general introduction to the "cognitive science of religion," Minds and Gods presents the major themes, theories, and thinkers involved in this revolutionary new approach to human religiosity. Arguing that we cannot understand what we think until we first understand how we think, the book sets out to study the evolutionary forces that modeled the modern human mind and continue to shape our ideas and actions today. Todd Tremlin details many of the adapted features of the brain -- illustrating their operation with examples of everyday human behavior -- and shows how mental endowments inherited from our ancestral past lead many people to naturally entertain religious ideas. In short, belief in gods and the social formation of religion have their genesis in biology, in powerful cognitive processes that all humans share. In the course of illuminating the nature of religion, this book also sheds light on human nature: why we think we do the things we do and how the reasons for these things are so often hidden from view. This discussion ranges broadly across recent scientific findings in areas such as paleoanthropology, primate studies, evolutionary psychology, early brain development, and cultural transmission. While these subjects are complex, the story is told here in a conversational style that is engaging, jargon free, and accessible to all readers. With Minds and Gods , Tremlin offers a roadmap to a fascinating and growing field of study, one that is sure to generate interest and debate and provide readers with a better understanding of themselves and their beliefs.
Download or read book Mind Body World written by Michael R. W. Dawson and published by Athabasca University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cognitive science arose in the 1950s when it became apparent that a number of disciplines, including psychology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy, were fragmenting. Perhaps owing to the field's immediate origins in cybernetics, as well as to the foundational assumption that cognition is information processing, cognitive science initially seemed more unified than psychology. However, as a result of differing interpretations of the foundational assumption and dramatically divergent views of the meaning of the term information processing, three separate schools emerged: classical cognitive science, connectionist cognitive science, and embodied cognitive science. Examples, cases, and research findings taken from the wide range of phenomena studied by cognitive scientists effectively explain and explore the relationship among the three perspectives. Intended to introduce both graduate and senior undergraduate students to the foundations of cognitive science, Mind, Body, World addresses a number of questions currently being asked by those practicing in the field: What are the core assumptions of the three different schools? What are the relationships between these different sets of core assumptions? Is there only one cognitive science, or are there many different cognitive sciences? Giving the schools equal treatment and displaying a broad and deep understanding of the field, Dawson highlights the fundamental tensions and lines of fragmentation that exist among the schools and provides a refreshing and unifying framework for students of cognitive science.
Download or read book Romantic Science written by Noah Heringman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although "romantic science" may sound like a paradox, much of the romance surrounding modern science—the mad scientist, the intuitive genius, the utopian transformation of nature—originated in the Romantic period. Romantic Science traces the literary and cultural politics surrounding the formation of the modern scientific disciplines emerging from eighteenth-century natural history. Revealing how scientific concerns were literary concerns in the Romantic period, the contributors uncover the vital role that new discoveries in earth, plant, and animal sciences played in the period's literary culture. As Thomas Pennant put it in 1772, "Natural History is, at present, the favourite science over all Europe, and the progress which has been made in it will distinguish and characterise the eighteenth century in the annals of literature." As they examine the social and literary ramifications of a particular branch or object of natural history, the contributors to this volume historicize our present intellectual landscape by reimagining and redrawing the disciplinary boundaries between literature and science. Contributors include Alan Bewell, Rachel Crawford, Noah Heringman, Theresa M. Kelley, Amy Mae King, Lydia H. Liu, Anne K. Mellor, Stuart Peterfreund, and Catherine E. Ross.
Download or read book Ancient Natural History written by Roger French and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-08 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Natural History surveys the ways in which people in the ancient world thought about nature and finds that the same material was used to justify both Greek philosopher and Christian allegorist.
Download or read book Nature Human Nature and Human Difference written by Justin E. H. Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People have always been xenophobic, but an explicit philosophical and scientific view of human racial difference only began to emerge during the modern period. Why and how did this happen? Surveying a range of philosophical and natural-scientific texts, dating from the Spanish Renaissance to the German Enlightenment, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference charts the evolution of the modern concept of race and shows that natural philosophy, particularly efforts to taxonomize and to order nature, played a crucial role. Smith demonstrates how the denial of moral equality between Europeans and non-Europeans resulted from converging philosophical and scientific developments, including a declining belief in human nature's universality and the rise of biological classification. The racial typing of human beings grew from the need to understand humanity within an all-encompassing system of nature, alongside plants, minerals, primates, and other animals. While racial difference as seen through science did not arise in order to justify the enslavement of people, it became a rationalization and buttress for the practices of trans-Atlantic slavery. From the work of François Bernier to G. W. Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and others, Smith delves into philosophy's part in the legacy and damages of modern racism. With a broad narrative stretching over two centuries, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference takes a critical historical look at how the racial categories that we divide ourselves into came into being.
Download or read book Cultures of Natural History written by Nicholas Jardine and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-01-26 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This copiously illustrated volume is the first systematic general work to do justice to the fruits of recent scholarship in the history of natural history. Public interest in this lively field has been stimulated by environmental concerns and through links with the histories of art, collecting and gardening. The centrality of the development of natural history for other branches of history - medical, colonial, gender, economic, ecological - is increasingly recognized. Twenty-four specially commissioned essays cover the period from the sixteenth century, when the first institutions of natural history were created, to its late nineteenth-century transformation by practitioners of the new biological sciences. An introduction discusses novel approaches that have made this a major focus for research in cultural history. The essays, which include suggestions for further reading, offer a coherent and accessible overview of a fascinating subject. An epilogue highlights the relevance of this wide-ranging survey for current debates on museum practice, the display of ecological diversity and concerns about the environment.
Download or read book Cognitive History written by David Dunér and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first introduction to the new field called cognitive history. The last decades have seen a noticeable increase in cognitive science studies that have changed the understanding of human thinking. Its relevance for historical research cannot be overlooked any more. Cognitive history could be explained as the study of how humans in history used their cognitive abilities in order to understand the world around them and to orient themselves in it, but also how the world outside their bodies affected their way of thinking. In focus for this book is the relationship between history and cognition, the human mind’s interaction with the environment in time and space. It especially discusses certain cognitive abilities in interaction with the environment, which can be studied in historical sources, namely: evolution, language, rationality, spatiality, and materiality. Cognitive history can give us a deeper understanding of how – and not only what – people thought, and about the interaction between the human mind and the surrounding world.
Download or read book Common Sense and Science from Aristotle to Reid written by Benjamin W. Redekop and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2020-11-05 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Common Sense and Science from Aristotle to Reid reveals that thinkers have pondered the nature of common sense and its relationship to science and scientific thinking for a very long time. It demonstrates how a diverse array of neglected early modern thinkers turn out to have been on the right track for understanding how the mind makes sense of the world and how basic features of the human mind and cognition are related to scientific theory and practice. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources and scholarship from the history of ideas, cognitive science, and the history and philosophy of science, this book helps readers understand the fundamental historical and philosophical relationship between common sense and science.
Download or read book Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science written by Henri Cohen and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2005-10-25 with total page 1136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Categorization, the basic cognitive process of arranging objects into categories, is a fundamental process in human and machine intelligence and is central to investigations and research in cognitive science. Until now, categorization has been approached from singular disciplinary perspectives with little overlap or communication between the disciplines involved (Linguistics, Psychology, Philosophy, Neuroscience, Computer Science, Cognitive Anthropology). Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre have gathered together a stellar collection of contributors in this unique, ambitious attempt to bring together converging disciplinary and conceptual perspectives on this topic. "Categorization is a key concept across the range of cognitive sciences, including linguistics and philosophy, yet hitherto it has been hard to find accounts that go beyond the concerns of one or two individual disciplines. The Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science provides just the sort of interdisciplinary approach that is necessary to synthesize knowledge from the different fields and provide the basis for future innovation." Professor Bernard Comrie, Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany "Anyone concerned with language, semantics, or categorization will want to have this encyclopedic collection." Professor Eleanor Rosch, Dept of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Eighteenth century Philosophy written by Knud Haakonssen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume set presents a comprehensive and up-to-date history of eighteenth-century philosophy. The subject is treated systematically by topic, not by individual thinker, school, or movement, thus enabling a much more historically nuanced picture of the period to be painted.
Download or read book Cognitive Science written by Benjamin Martin Bly and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 1999-10-18 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science brings together elements of cognitive psychology, mathematics, perception, and linguistics. Focusing on the main areas of exploration in this field today, Cognitive Science presents comprehensive overviews of research findings and discusses new cross-over areas of interest. Contributors represent the most senior and well-established names in the field. This volume serves as a high-level introduction, with sufficient breadth to be a graduate-level text, and enough depth to be a valued reference source to researchers.
Download or read book Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible written by Lisa Zunshine and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2008-07-28 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fresh and often playful interdisciplinary study, Lisa Zunshine presents a fluid discussion of how key concepts from cognitive science complicate our cultural interpretations of “strange” literary phenomena. From Short Circuit to I, Robot, from The Parent Trap to Big Business, fantastic tales of rebellious robots, animated artifacts, and twins mistaken for each other are a permanent fixture in popular culture and have been since antiquity. Why do these strange concepts captivate the human imagination so thoroughly? Zunshine explores how cognitive science, specifically its ideas of essentialism and functionalism, combined with historical and cultural analysis, can help us understand why we find such literary phenomena so fascinating. Drawing from research by such cognitive evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists as Scott Atran, Paul Bloom, Pascal Boyer, and Susan A. Gelman, Zunshine examines the cognitive origins of the distinction between essence and function and how unexpected tensions between these two concepts are brought into play in fictional narratives. Discussing motifs of confused identity and of twins in drama, science fiction’s use of robots, cyborgs, and androids, and nonsense poetry and surrealist art, she reveals the range and power of key concepts from science in literary interpretation and provides insight into how cognitive-evolutionary research on essentialism can be used to study fiction as well as everyday strange concepts.
Download or read book Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire written by Sarah Irving and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-30 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Represents a history of the British Empire that takes account of the sense of empire as intellectual as well as geographic dominion: the historiography of the British Empire, with its preoccupation of empire as geographically unchallenged sovereignty, overlooks the idea of empire as intellectual dominion.
Download or read book An Invitation to Cognitive Science Thinking written by Daniel N. Osherson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than surveying theories and data in the manner characteristic of many introductory textbooks in the field, An Invitation to Cognitive Science employs a unique case study approach, presenting a focused research topic in some depth and relying on suggested readings to convey the breadth of views and results.
Download or read book Naturalism Theism and the Cognitive Study of Religion written by Aku Visala and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a critical philosophical analysis of the claim that contemporary cognitive approaches to religion undermine theistic beliefs. Recent scientific work into the evolution and cognition of religion has been driven by and interpreted in terms of a certain kind of philosophical and methodological naturalism. The book argues that such naturalism is not necessary for the cognitive study of religion and develops an alternative philosophical and methodological framework. This alternative framework opens the cognitive study of religion to theological and philosophical considerations and clarifies its relationship to other approaches to religious phenomena. This unique contribution to discussions regarding the philosophical and theological implications of the cognitive study of religion summarizes the so far fragmentary discussion, exposes its underlying assumptions, and develops a novel framework for further discussion.
