What Science Offers the Humanities by Edward Slingerland
What Science Offers the Humanities looks at some of the serious issues plaguing methods for studying culture. While emphasizing postmodernism’s excesses, it also recognizes that the movement’s fiercest detractors have fundamental flaws. Edward Slingerland essentially makes the case that for the humanities to advance, its academics must seriously consider contributions from the scientific sciences—in particular, research on human cognition—which shows that any division between the mind and the body is wholly illogical. Without accepting that science has the final say in ethics, religion, art, and literature, the author offers suggestions for how humanists may utilise these scientific advancements.
What Science Offers the Humanities by Edward Slingerland
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What Science Offers the Humanities bridges the gap between the humanities and sciences by challenging such widely held beliefs as the “blank slate” account of nature, strong social constructivism, and the ideal of disembodied reason.
This a good, easily understandable summary of the state of evolutionary and cognitive psychology at the moment (even where the genetics is a little dated, the logic still holds). The use of cognitive linguistics and metaphor theory with old texts was where it truly grabbed me. Slingerland made a rather stunning point about how strikingly similar the ways that different humans in various locations perceive the world are. His use of literary analysis as a tool to observe how human brains, rooted in biology and shared experiences of a common environment, bootstrap their way into understanding is fascinating to me. It’s exciting that understanding may be exchanged between many people and various civilizations. His argument, in my opinion, shows a route out of the agnostic rut in which postmodernism has found itself.
This book is for anyone working in the humanities who are interested in how cognitive science influences how we think about what we do. Slingerland presents a convincing case for an embodied philosophy of culture that, in his formulation, veers away from extreme postmodern constructivism and toward enlightened objectivism. The prose in this book is enjoyable to read in addition to giving those of us in the humanities much to ponder.
