The Trouble with Human Nature
The Trouble with Human Nature

Author: Elizabeth D. Whitaker

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-02-03

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1315451727

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Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- CONTENTS -- PART I Pathways to the present -- 1 Envisioning evolution: representations of humanness and causation -- 2 Origin stories: the co-evolution of human anatomy and sociality -- 3 Losses and gains: economic and health transitions since the Neolithic Revolution -- PART II Plasticity, identity, and health -- 4 Thicker than water: blood and milk in human evolution -- 5 Risk and responsibility: power and danger in individualized approaches to preventive health -- 6 Difference as destiny: race, sex, and culture -- PART III Sex and gender -- 7 Choosers and cheaters: the sexual/reproductive conflict hypothesis -- 8 Hoe and plow, pig and cow: work, family, and gender stratification -- 9 Tale of two-spirits: constructing gender and sexuality, aptitudes and inclinations -- PART IV Conflict and violence -- 10 Savage empathy: sources of competitiveness and cooperativeness, greed and generosity -- 11 Why stratify? Inequality and interpersonal violence -- 12 Peace and war: patterns and prevention of violent intergroup conflict -- Appendix: Life expectancy rate calculations -- Index.

The Laws of Human Nature
The Laws of Human Nature

Author: Robert Greene

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-10-23

Total Pages: 626

ISBN-13: 0698184548

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From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power comes the definitive new book on decoding the behavior of the people around you Robert Greene is a master guide for millions of readers, distilling ancient wisdom and philosophy into essential texts for seekers of power, understanding and mastery. Now he turns to the most important subject of all - understanding people's drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves. We are social animals. Our very lives depend on our relationships with people. Knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess, without which our other talents can only take us so far. Drawing from the ideas and examples of Pericles, Queen Elizabeth I, Martin Luther King Jr, and many others, Greene teaches us how to detach ourselves from our own emotions and master self-control, how to develop the empathy that leads to insight, how to look behind people's masks, and how to resist conformity to develop your singular sense of purpose. Whether at work, in relationships, or in shaping the world around you, The Laws of Human Nature offers brilliant tactics for success, self-improvement, and self-defense.

The Trouble with Nature
The Trouble with Nature

Author: Roger N. Lancaster

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003-05

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 9780520236202

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Lancaster provides the disproof of evolutionary stories about men, women, and the nature of desire of the heterosexual fables that pervade popular culture, from prime-time sitcoms to scientific theories about the so-called gay gene.

Human Nature and Suffering
Human Nature and Suffering

Author: Paul Gilbert

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-08-05

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 1317189604

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Human Nature and Suffering is a profound comment on the human condition, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Paul Gilbert explores the implications of humans as evolved social animals, suggesting that evolution has given rise to a varied set of social competencies, which form the basis of our personal knowledge and understanding. Gilbert shows how our primitive competencies become modified by experience - both satisfactorily and unsatisfactorily. He highlights how cultural factors may modify and activate many of these primitive competencies, leading to pathology proneness and behaviours that are collectively survival threatening. These varied themes are brought together to indicate how the social construction of self arises from the organization of knowledge encoded within the competencies. This Classic Edition features a new introduction from the author, bringing Gilbert's early work to a new audience. The book will be of interest to clinicians, researchers and historians in the field of psychology.

Beyond Human Nature
Beyond Human Nature

Author: Jesse J Prinz

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2012-01-26

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 1846145724

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In this provocative, revelatory tour de force, Jesse Prinz reveals how the cultures we live in - not biology - determine how we think and feel. He examines all aspects of our behaviour, looking at everything from our intellects and emotions, to love and sex, morality and even madness. This book seeks to go beyond traditional debates of nature and nurture. He is not interested in finding universal laws but, rather, in understanding, explaining and celebrating our differences. Why do people raised in Western countries tend to see the trees before the forest, while people from East Asia see the forest before the trees? Why, in South East Asia, is there a common form of mental illness, unheard of in the West, in which people go into a trancelike state after being startled? Compared to Northerners, why are people in the American South more than twice as likely to kill someone over an argument? And, above all, just how malleable are we? Prinz shows that the vast diversity of our behaviour is not engrained. He picks up where biological explanations leave off. He tells us the human story.

The Future of Human Nature
The Future of Human Nature

Author: Jürgen Habermas

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-10-15

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 074569411X

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Recent developments in biotechnology and genetic research are raising complex ethical questions concerning the legitimate scope and limits of genetic intervention. As we begin to contemplate the possibility of intervening in the human genome to prevent diseases, we cannot help but feel that the human species might soon be able to take its biological evolution in its own hands. ‘Playing God’ is the metaphor commonly used for this self-transformation of the species, which, it seems, might soon be within our grasp. In this important new book, Jürgen Habermas – the most influential philosopher and social thinker in Germany today – takes up the question of genetic engineering and its ethical implications and subjects it to careful philosophical scrutiny. His analysis is guided by the view that genetic manipulation is bound up with the identity and self-understanding of the species. We cannot rule out the possibility that knowledge of one’s own hereditary factors may prove to be restrictive for the choice of an individual’s way of life and may undermine the symmetrical relations between free and equal human beings. In the concluding chapter – which was delivered as a lecture on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for 2001 – Habermas broadens the discussion to examine the tension between science and religion in the modern world, a tension which exploded, with such tragic violence, on September 11th.

What's Left of Human Nature?
What's Left of Human Nature?

Author: Maria Kronfeldner

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0262347970

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A philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against dehumanization, Darwinian, and developmentalist challenges. Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What's Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development result from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and “looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term “human nature” altogether.

Human Nature and the Limits of Science
Human Nature and the Limits of Science

Author: John Dupré

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0199248060

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Dupré warns that our understanding of human nature is being distorted by two faulty and harmful forms of pseudo-scientific thinking. He claims it is important to resist scientism - an exaggerated conception of what science can be expected to do.

The Brighter Side Of Human Nature
The Brighter Side Of Human Nature

Author: Alfie Kohn

Publisher:

Published: 2008-08-05

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 078672465X

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Drawing from hundreds of studies in half a dozen fields, The Brighter Side of Human Nature makes a powerful case that caring and generosity are just as natural as selfishness and aggression. This lively refutation of cynical assumptions about our species considers the nature of empathy and the causes of war, why we (incorrectly) explain all behavior in terms of self-interest, and how we can teach children to care.

On Human Nature
On Human Nature

Author: Roger Scruton

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 0691183031

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A brief, radical defense of human uniqueness from acclaimed philosopher Roger Scruton In this short book, acclaimed writer and philosopher Roger Scruton presents an original and radical defense of human uniqueness. Confronting the views of evolutionary psychologists, utilitarian moralists, and philosophical materialists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, Scruton argues that human beings cannot be understood simply as biological objects. We are not only human animals; we are also persons, in essential relation with other persons, and bound to them by obligations and rights. Scruton develops and defends his account of human nature by ranging widely across intellectual history, from Plato and Averroës to Darwin and Wittgenstein. The book begins with Kant’s suggestion that we are distinguished by our ability to say “I”—by our sense of ourselves as the centers of self-conscious reflection. This fact is manifested in our emotions, interests, and relations. It is the foundation of the moral sense, as well as of the aesthetic and religious conceptions through which we shape the human world and endow it with meaning. And it lies outside the scope of modern materialist philosophy, even though it is a natural and not a supernatural fact. Ultimately, Scruton offers a new way of understanding how self-consciousness affects the question of how we should live. The result is a rich view of human nature that challenges some of today’s most fashionable ideas about our species.