Situates the human capacity for forming symbols in the long-term biological evolution of Homo sapiens, showing how it is linked through communication and orientation to group survival. This title proceeds to recast the question of the ontological status of knowledge, moving beyond the old philosophical dualisms of idealism/materialism.

Norbert Elias (1897-1990); Note on the text; Introduction; Towards a comprehensive understanding of human beings: reconfiguring sociology, evolutionary biology and philosophy; Languages as learned sound patterns and symbols as the 'fifth dimension'; 'Symbol emancipation' as an evolutionary breakthrough; The high survival value of communication by learned sound-symbols; To speak, to think, to know: the sociogenesis and psychogenesis of reality-congruent symbols; Human society as a level of nature: beyond idealism and materialism; From 'truth' to reality congruence: beyond traditional philosophical theories of knowledge; Concept-formation in the 'five-dimensional' human world: beyond abstraction explanations; The distant past and the long future: reality-congruent knowledge and human survival; Appendix: Previously unpublished passages in Elias's Introduction; Textual variants; Bibliography; Index.