Literature’s Contributions to Scientific Knowledge: How Novels Explored New Ideas about Human Nature
Feb 2019 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing
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155
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About this ebook
The most important intellectual development in the academy in the 21st century has been the forging of new relationships between the sciences and the humanities and the realization that interdisciplinary scholarship holds the promise of the unification of all knowledge. This groundbreaking book shows how this can be fulfilled. Through a wide-ranging analysis of arguments concerning the complementarity of arts and sciences advanced by Schelling and Goethe and those about the cognitive value of literature articulated by contemporary philosophers, the book shows that literary fiction can contribute to the scientific understanding of human nature. With a careful and original examination of autobiographical material and literary texts, it demonstrates that European novelists such as Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Italo Svevo, and Elias Canetti conducted ambitious and innovative literary explorations of the human mind and human behavior using Darwinian theory as their scientific framework, and, in doing so, they anticipated the theoretical developments and empirical findings of cognitive, social, and evolutionary psychology by almost 100 years. The work of these novelists was largely misunderstood by literary scholars, but this book’s re-discovery and illustration of what these writers attempted to accomplish and how they did it show one important path leading to the future unification of all knowledge about the human condition.
About the author
Dario Maestripieri is a Professor at the University of Chicago, in Chicago, USA, where he has taught and conducted research since 1999. He is a behavioral scientist interested in understanding the human mind and human behavior from an evolutionary and interdisciplinary perspective. He is also interested in the relative contributions of science and humanities to the generation and transmission of new knowledge. Dr Maestripieri has obtained many awards and prizes for his research. He has published 6 books and over 250 articles and book chapters in the field of interdisciplinary behavioral studies.
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