billk2 / collective / tags / human nature

Tagged with “human nature” (3) activity chart

  1. RSA - The Better Angels of our Nature

    A radical re-assessment of human progress from one of the world’s most exciting public thinkers.

    In his latest work, Steven Pinker explores the ways in which modernity and its cultural institutions are actually making us better people.

    In ‘The Better Angels of our Nature’, Pinker traces a history of progress that reveals the historical circumstances and “civilising forces”, from commerce to cosmopolitanism, that have brought us to the most peaceful era humankind has yet experienced. Join Steven Pinker at the RSA for a fascinating insight into the conditions, norms and policies that combine to engage the "better angels" of human nature - our capacity for co-operation, empathy and altruism.

    Speaker: Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and author of ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes’ (Allen Lane, 2011).

    http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2011/the-better-angels-of-our-nature

    download

    Tagged with

    —Huffduffed by adactio one year ago

  2. Steve Pinker’s “Better Angels”: Dodging Our Own Bullet? | Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon

    Steven Pinker has written a game-changer on the little matter of how quickly humanity is headed for hell or redemption. The short form of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is that we’re on the verge of Liebniz‘s (and Candide‘s) “best of all possible worlds.” Much more than that, Better Angels is a tour de force in 700 pages of dense, witty prose, distilling and explaining the ever-steeper downward trends in battle-deaths, state executions, murder, rape, wife-beating and child-spanking, among others things. “Interesting if true” was my instinctive newspaper-guy response. After a month’s immersion, and this conversation, I’m staggered and stunned, avid for the new Enlightenment.

    http://www.radioopensource.org/steve-pinkers-better-angels-dodging-our-own-bullet/

    download

    Tagged with

    —Huffduffed by adactio one year ago

  3. Steven Pinker: The Stuff of Thought

    October 26 2007 - A discussion on Point of Inquiry - Pinker explores what our use of language can tell us about human nature. He discusses our use of metaphors, and what concepts may be innate, how the “language of thought” may be hard-wired in our brains. He also explains how to avoid the pitfalls of such hard-wiring, using the methods of science as the model.

    download

    Tagged with

    —Huffduffed by adactio 4 years ago