Yesterday, I posted the following photo on Facebook.
It is the book I intend to read next, once I'm done with Cindy Trimm's Commanding Your Morning and Mbugua Mumbi's Becoming an 'A' Student in Life.
A comment on that Facebook post has made it necessary to explain what the book is all about. And please note this is not a book review at all, just a sneak peek.
Well, this book is inspired by talks that were presented at a symposium held in Oxford, in March 2006.
The book, put simply, is an attempt to answer the following questions:
Are we half ape or half angel? Is it our cognitive abilities, our use of tools, our story-telling, our beliefs, our curiosity, our ability to cook, our culture, that make us human?
These are the book chapters:
- Imitation Makes us Human
- Memory, Time and Language
- Why are Humans not just Great Apes?
- The Hominid that Talked
- Half Ape, Half Angel?
- Material facts from a non-materialist perspective
- What Makes us Human? Our Ancestors and the Weather
- Curiosity and Quest
- Human Evolution and the Human Condition
- The Place of "Deep Social Mind" in the Evolution of Human Nature
- Causal Belief Maes us Human
- The Cooking Enigma.
