Second Nature: Brain Science and Human KnowledgeUpon publication of her 'field manual', The Origins of Totalitarianism, in 1951, Hannah Arendt immediately gained recognition as a major political analyst. Over the next twenty-five years, she wrote ten more books and developed a set of ideas that profoundly influenced the way America and Europe addressed the central questions and dilemmas of World War II. In this concise book, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl introduces her mentor's work to twenty-first century readers. Arendt's ideas, as much today as in her own lifetime, illuminate those issues that perplex us such as totalitarianism, terrorism, globalization, war, and 'radical evil'. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, who was Arendt's doctoral student in the early 1970s and who wrote the definitive biography of her mentor in 1982, now revisits Arendt's major works and seminal ideas. Young-Bruehl considers what Arendt's analysis of the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union can teach us about our own times, and how her revolutionary understanding of political action is connected to forgiveness and making promises for the future. The author also discusses The Life of the Mind, Arendt's unfinished meditation on how to think about thinking. Placed in the context of today's political landscape, Arendt's ideas take on a new immediacy and importance. They require our attention, Young-Bruehl shows, and continue to bring fresh truths to light. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 5 | |
| 12 | |
Selectionism | 23 |
From Brain Activity to Consciousness | 35 |
Epistemology and Its Discontents | 43 |
A BrainBased Approach | 53 |
Forms of Knowledge | 68 |
Causation Illusions and Values | 88 |
Creativity | 98 |
Abnormal States | 106 |
BrainBased Devices | 125 |
Second Nature | 142 |
Notes | 159 |
Bibliography | 173 |
| 183 | |
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Common terms and phrases
Abnormal Activity to Consciousness animal antibodies artifact basal ganglia behavior belief biological body Brain Activity brain areas Brain-Based Approach Brain-Based Devices brain-based epistemology Cambridge causal circuits complex concepts confabulation consider Consilience constraints cortex cortical creativity Darwin VII Descartes dynamic core Edelman emerged enormous entailed epigenetic evolution evolutionary Evolutionary Epistemology example experience Forms of Knowledge Freud Galilean Arc Giambattista Vico higher-order consciousness hippocampus Illusions input interactions issues language logic memory mental metaphor mind motor natural selection naturalized epistemology Neural Darwinism neuronal neuronal group selection neuroscience normative Notes to Pages notion origins patient pattern recognition perception Philosophical physical Piaget proposed psychology qualia Quine reentrant reentry Repairing the Rift responses result scientific sciousness Second Nature selectional system Selectionism sensory sensory receptors signals specific structure syndromes temology thalamocortical thalamocortical system thalamus thought tion traditional epistemology truth ture understanding University Press value systems Vico York