- 286 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
To the age-old debate over what it means to be human, the relatively new fields of sociobiology and artificial intelligence bring new, if not necessarily compatible, insights. What have these two fields in common? Have they affected the way we define humanity? These and other timely questions are addressed with colorful individuality by the authors of The Boundaries of Humanity. Leading researchers in both sociobiology and artificial intelligence combine their reflections with those of philosophers, historians, and social scientists, while the editors explore the historical and contemporary contexts of the debate in their introductions. The implications of their individual arguments, and the often heated controversies generated by biological determinism or by mechanical models of mind, go to the heart of contemporary scientific, philosophical, and humanistic studies. Contributors:
Arnold I. Davidson, John Dupré, Roger Hahn, Stuart Hampshire, Evelyn Fox Keller, Melvin Konner, Alan Newell, Harriet Ritvo, James J. Sheehan, Morton Sosna, Sherry Turkle, Bernard Williams, Terry Winograd This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- CONTENTS 1
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- General Introduction Morton Sosna
- PROLOGUE Making Sense of H umanity
- Prologue: Making Sense of Humanity Bernard Williams
- PART ONE Humans and A nimals
- ONE Introduction James J. Sheehan
- TWO The Horror of Monsters1 Arnold I. Davidson
- THREE The Animal Connection2 Harriet Ritvo
- FOUR Language and Ideology in Evolutionary Theory: Reading Cultural Norms into Natural Law Evelyn Fox Keller
- FIVE Human Nature and Culture: Biology and the Residue of Uniqueness Melvin Konner
- SIX Reflections on Biology and Culture John Dupré
- PART TWO Humans and M achines
- SEVEN Introduction James J. Sheehan
- EIGHT The Meaning of the Mechanistic Age Roger Hahn
- NINE Metaphors for Mind, Theories of Mind: Should the Humanities Mind? Allen Newell
- TEN Thinking Machines: Can There Be? Are We? Terry Winograd
- TWELVE Biology, Machines, and Humanity Stuart Hampshire
- PART THREE Coda
- Coda James J. Sheehan
- Contributors
- INDEX