The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin Press Science) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin Press Science) Book

In The Blank Slate, the bestselling author Steven Pinker produces his most polemical and convincing attack upon the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate. Pinker's previous books The Language Instinctand How the Mind Works have already attracted huge praise and controversy in arguing that language and cognition are natural rather than cultural. In The Blank Slate he refines and extends his arguments. The book is aimed at "people who wonder where the taboo against human nature came from", and promises to explain "the moral, emotional and political colorings of the concept of human nature in modern life". For Pinker, the belief that we are all born as "blank slates" upon which culture places its decisive imprint is not only wrong but dangerous. He persuasively argues that "the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to some of the greatest atrocities in history". This is all very well, but at over 500 pages it can also be daunting for the general reader, as Pinker takes on all-comers, from biologists and sociologists to a dizzying array of classical thinkers from Calvin and Hobbes to Marx and Dawkins. The sections on gender will undoubtedly inflame many feminist writers (the most persuasive of which Pinker sadly neglects to discuss), and the criticisms of modern art are flimsy, but The Blank Slate is an impressive and sustained broadside that cannot be ignored. -–Jerry BrottonRead More

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  • Amazon

    Argues that the biological understanding of human nature threatens humane values. This book reveals positive arguments for the compatibility of biology and humanism.

  • Foyles

    'A passionate defence of the enduring power of human nature ... both life-affirming and deeply satisfying' Daily TelegraphRecently many people have assumed that we are blank slates shaped by our environment. But this denies the heart of our being: human nature. Violence is not just a product of society; male and female minds are different; the genes we give our children shape them more than our parenting practices. To acknowledge our innate abilities, Pinker shows, is not to condone inequality, but to understand the very foundations of humanity.'Brilliant ... enjoyable, informative, clear, humane' New Scientist'If you think the nature-nurture debate has been resolved, you are wrong ... this book is required reading' Literary Review'An original and vital contribution to science and also a rattling good read' Matt Ridley, Sunday Telegraph'Startling ... This is a breath of air for a topic that has been politicized for too long' Economist

  • Play

    What is the truth about human nature? Are we each born a blank slate upon which experience is written? Steven Pinker argues that our usual explanations of human behaviour - stated most clearly in the human sciences of psychology ethics and politics - tend to deny what is now undeniable: the role of an inherited human nature. Differences in personality or achievement whether seen among races ethnic groups sexes or individuals are routinely explained away as due not to differences in innate constitution but differences in experience. This work argues otherwise.

  • BookDepository

    The Blank Slate : Paperback : Penguin Books Ltd : 9780140276053 : : 07 Feb 2019 : Recently many people have assumed that we are shaped by our environment: a blank slate waiting to be inscribed by upbringing and culture, with innate abilities playing little part. This title shows that this view denies the heart of our being: human nature.

  • Blackwell

    Recently many people have assumed that we are shaped by our environment: a blank slate waiting to be inscribed by upbringing and culture, with innate abilities playing little part. This title shows that this view denies the heart of our being...

  • Penguin

    In the past century many people have assumed that we are shaped by our environment: a blank slate waiting to be inscribed by upbringing and culture, with innate abilities playing little part.

  • 014027605X
  • 9780140276053
  • Steven Pinker
  • 5 June 2003
  • Penguin
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 528
  • New Ed
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