What Science Offers the Humanities
Integrating Body and Culture

This book examines some of the problems facing the study of culture.

Edward Slingerland (Author)

9780521701518, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 11 February 2008

390 pages
22.9 x 16 x 2.1 cm, 0.52 kg

'I greatly enjoyed and admired Slingerland's What Science Offers the Humanities, and recommend it highly. It not only addresses a weariness and lack of curiosity at the heart of some major areas in the humanities, but is also very adept at summing up the best thinking in the natural sciences. It teems with ideas that will intrigue and delight an open mind, and is also lively and positive in its bridge building. Slingerland shows real intellectual brio. This is an important book.' Ian McEwan, bestselling author of Atonement and On Chesil Beach

What Science Offers the Humanities examines some of the deep problems facing the study of culture. It focuses on the excesses of postmodernism, but also acknowledges serious problems with postmodernism's harshest critics. In short, Edward Slingerland argues that in order for the humanities to progress, its scholars need to take seriously contributions from the natural sciences - and particular research on human cognition - which demonstrate that any separation of the mind and the body is entirely untenable. The author provides suggestions for how humanists might begin to utilize these scientific discoveries without conceding that science has the last word on morality, religion, art, and literature. Calling into question such deeply entrenched dogmas as the 'blank slate' theory of nature, strong social constructivism, and the ideal of disembodied reason, What Science Offers the Humanities replaces the human-sciences divide with a more integrated approach to the study of culture.

Introduction
Part I. Exorcising the Ghost in the Machine: 1. The disembodied mind
2. They live among us
3. Pulling the plug
Part II. Embodying Culture: 4. Embodying culture
Part III. Defending Vertical Integration: 5. Defending the empirical
6. Who's afraid of reductionism?
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Psychology [JM], Anthropology [JHM], Religion: general [HRA], Philosophy [HP]