Cognitive Foundations of Natural History PDF Download

Author: Scott Atran
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521438711
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
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.

Author: Scott Atran
Publisher: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, Paris
ISBN: 9782735102969
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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...

Author: Michael R. W. Dawson
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1927356172
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
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.

Author: Helen De Cruz
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262552450
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
An examination of the cognitive foundations of intuitions about the existence and attributes of God. Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously—at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos—even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition. De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality.

Author: Steven M. Platek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521884217
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
An essential primer presenting major topics of study undertaken by evolutionary cognitive neuroscientists.

Author: Justin E. H. Smith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176345
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
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.

Author: Noah Heringman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791486931
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
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.

Author: Nicholas Jardine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521558945
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
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.

Author: Roger French
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134962681
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
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.

Author: David Dunér
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110582384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
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.