Description
Book SynopsisThis elegant treatise examines the nature of kindness through the fascinating lenses and contexts of ancient, medieval and contemporary philosophy, natural history, theories of mind, of natural selection, eco-psychology and sociobiology. It challenges the reader to consider the myriad potential consequences of human behaviour, examining various iconographic moments from the history of art and science as a precursor to the concept and vital potentials for ecological conversion. Focusing on the fundamental mechanisms of reciprocity among humans, other species, communities and nations, Tobias and Morrison lead readers on a remarkable journey whose itinerary, and the provocative questions explored, seek to affirm a pattern in evolution and in human thought that is emphatically oriented towards benevolence, not tyranny. Prosociality in all species - making others happy, kind gestures at any and every juncture of life - has, as a discipline of enquiry, enjoyed a social scientific renaissance during the last decade. Can natural selection move rapidly enough to meet that ultimate challenge? Can our species re-evolve in real time, moving from the ideas, to the ideals, to their applied engineering in a real world that is ecologically haemorrhaging? Which all the critical moral and cognitive changes in social communion such new human nature, as the Authors suggest, clearly requires? This ground-breaking work of ecological philosophy, with its roots in ancient Greek thought, represents a radical break with nearly every traditional scientific paradigm, in exploring the intuitive geography and dramatic questions of ourselves -- each and every one of us -- that will prove crucial to the survival of our species, and all those we co-habit this miraculous planet with.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments; Introduction; A Basis for Physiolatry; Options for Natural Selection; Prosociality; The Proportion of Handshakes; Violence and Utopia; The Puffendorf Hypothesis; The Rudimentary Ethics of Parmenides; Being-in-the-Worldness: das-in-der-Welt-sein; The Metaphysics of the Peaceable Kingdom; Equations of Potentiality; Indigenous Critical Mass: Neural and Biocultural; Dependent Transitional States; Albrecht Dürer and the Nature of Ecological Conversion; The Dialectics of Epiphany; Re-Negotiating the Labyrinth; Ten-Crossing Knots; Semiotic Holons; Future Symbols; A New Natural Positivism; Non-Asymptotic Boundary Solutions; Parasparopagraho Jīvānām; The Fourth Order Simile; Biological Scaling for a New Nature; Reciprocity Paradoxes; Theories of Pairing in a World of Differences; The Procaccini Effect; Bereitschaftspotential; Zoosemiotic Translations; Conscious Speciation; Coda; About the Authors/Translator; Index.
