All content © RJ Robinson 2002-8
by RJ Robinson (2004)
ISBN 0954216857
Introduction
Despite the strident claims of ‘evolutionary psychologists’, ‘cognitive scientists’ and any amount of other special pleading, the sciences are farther than ever from a unified theory of human nature. The insight, integration and synthesis that should have capped a century of scientific effort continue to elude us.
What is the problem? Do we know too much for any practical reconciliation? Have we finally discovered that the whole notion of a unitary ‘human nature’ is spurious? Or have we simply lost the ability to think on a grand enough scale to conceive of human nature without belittling it?
The History of Human Reason proposes a comprehensive new analysis of the shape of consciousness, the origins and direction of history, and even what it means to be human. Surveying the entire structure of human nature, from the inmost depths of the psyche to entire social systems, the whole is integrated into a simple yet profound conception of human beings as uniquely defined by their intelligence - if not always by their rationality – and so by their capacity for both radical self-knowledge and radically new forms of action. Hence our status – in T.H. Huxley’s words – as ‘the only organic being in whose very nature is implanted the necessary condition for unlimited progress’.
Synthesising decades of Piagetian research with an enormous range of other sources - from anthropology, social theory and economics to cognitive psychology and the history of ideas, from the still barely tapped heritage of Marxism to the strange world of haiku - The History of Human Reason provides an antidote to both the fashionable reductionism and pessimism of recent biologism and the perennial fragmentation and self-absorption of the humanities. It is without doubt one of the most comprehensive and powerful works of synthesis since Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind.
Science
Etc.
Work in progress