Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape Our Lives

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Penguin UK, Jan 26, 2012 - Philosophy - 416 pages

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.

 

Contents

Preface
The NatureNurture Debate
Where Do Traits Come From? 2 Putting the Genome Back in the Bottle
Get Smart
Where Does Knowledge Come From? 4 What Babies Know
Sensible Ideas
Where Does Language Come From? 6 The Gift of the
Words and Worlds
Where Does Thinking Come From? 8 The Tao of Thought
Gender and Geometry
Where Do Feelings Come From? 10 Fear and Loathing in Micronesia
Gladness and Madness
Where Do Values Come From?
Copyright

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About the author (2012)

Jesse J. Prinz is currently a Distinguished Professor of philosophy at the City University of New York and an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he taught until January 2009. He works primarily in the philosophy of psychology and has produced books and articles on emotion, moral psychology, aesthetics and consciousness.

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