A thoughtful, accessible, and enlightening book.
The “founder of neurophilosophy” considers the complex, abstract idea of conscience.
MacArthur fellow Churchland (Emerita, Philosophy/Univ. of California, San Diego; Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain, 2013, etc.) draws on neuroscience, genetics, psychology, religion, and philosophy to offer a clear, informative examination of the meaning of conscience. How, she asks, do individuals develop a sense of right and wrong? To what extent is conscience shaped by the social world? What accounts for similarities of cooperation and sharing in human behavior? What accounts for psychopathology and for the disdain for honesty, kindness, and decency displayed by some celebrities and politicians? No discipline provides a complete answer to these formidable questions, but Churchland gleans insights from all. Neurobiology identifies the hormone oxytocin as having a large role in facilitating attachment between mothers and infants and between mates. In “strongly bonded marmosets,” for example, “fluctuations in oxytocin levels are synchronized.” The author notes, however, that no single hormone or genetic inheritance accounts for moral behavior. “Empathizing,” she underscores, “is not a single operation, in contrast to, say, an eye-blink response to a puff of air.” She was surprised to learn that some complicated personality traits are inheritable: Studies of identical and fraternal twins reveal a genetic link for traits such as extroversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. But, Churchland cautions, these traits involve hundreds of genes and can be strongly influenced by one’s environment. Individuals learn caring behavior by internalizing social norms through a reward system: “the pleasure of social approval and the pain of social disapproval.” Psychopaths—narcissistic, pathological liars who show no guilt or remorse for their anti-social behavior—are puzzling outliers: Psychopaths have generated biochemical and psychological theories but no firm explanation for their lack of a moral compass. In addition to biology, Churchland looks to Judeo-Christian and Asian religions and to a range of philosophers who have grappled with ethical issues. She concludes, after all, that conscience “is a brain construct rooted in our neural circuity, not a theological entity thoughtfully parked in us by a divine being.”
A thoughtful, accessible, and enlightening book.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-324-00089-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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