This pioneering work is the first to trace how our understanding of
the causes of human behavior has changed radically over the course of
European and American cultural history since 1830. Focusing on the act
of murder, as documented vividly by more than a hundred novels
including Crime and Punishment, An American Tragedy, The Trial, and
Lolita, Stephen Kern devotes each chapter of A Cultural History of
Causality to examining a specific causal factor or motive for
murder--ancestry, childhood, language, sexuality, emotion, mind,
society, and ideology. In addition to drawing on particular novels,
each chapter considers the sciences (genetics, endocrinology,
physiology, neuroscience) and systems of thought (psychoanalysis,
linguistics, sociology, forensic psychiatry, and existential
philosophy) most germane to each causal factor or motive. Kern
identifies five shifts in thinking about causality, shifts toward
increasing specificity, multiplicity, complexity, probability, and
uncertainty. He argues that the more researchers learned about the
causes of human behavior, the more they realized how much more there
was to know and how little they knew about what they thought they
knew. The book closes by considering the revolutionary impact of
quantum theory, which, though it influenced novelists only marginally,
shattered the model of causal understanding that had dominated Western
thought since the seventeenth century. Others have addressed changing
ideas about causality in specific areas, but no one has tackled a
broad cultural history of this concept as does Stephen Kern in this
engagingly written and lucidly argued book.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781400826230
Publisert
2013
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter