How History Made the Mind
Subtitle: The Cultural Origins of Objective Thinking
Publisher: Open Court
Published: April 2003
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9780812695366
Subjects: Cognition & cognitive psychology; History of ideas, intellectual history; Philosophy Of Mind; Philosophical anthropology; Reasoning; Philosophy; Epistemology; Movements - Humanism; Philosophy / Mind & Body; Knowledge, Theory of; Cognitive Psychology; Metaphysics; Objectivity
First sentence: Shortly after Steven Pinker published his book, How the Mind Works (1997), I saw this author being interviewed on television.
Description: In How History Made the Mind, David Martel Johnson argues that what we now think of as "reason" or "objective thinking" is not a natural product of the existence of an enlarged brain or culmination of innate biological tendencies. Rather, it is a way of learning to use the brain that runs counter to the natural characteristics involved in being an animal, a mammal, and a primate. Johnson defends his theory of mind as a cultural artifact against objections, and uses it to question a number of currently fashionable positions in philosophy of mind, know theories of Julian Jaynes, which Johnson argues go too far in the direction of emphasizing the dissimilarities between ancient and modern ways of thinking.