On deep history and the brain [[electronic resource] /] / Daniel Lord Smail

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910777460603321
• Autore: Smail Daniel Lord
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Berkeley, Calif. ; ; London, : University of California Press, c2008
• ISBN: 1-282-35934-7; 9786612359347; 0-520-93416-4; 1-4356-0398-2
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (287 p.)
• Disciplina: 901
• Soggetti: History - Philosophy; Philosophy
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Front matter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: Toward Reunion in History -- 1. The Grip of Sacred History -- 2. Resistance -- 3. Between Darwin and Lamarck -- 4. The New Neurohistory -- 5. Civilization and Psychotropy -- Epilogue: Looking Ahead -- Notes -- Bibliography of Works Cited -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. Daniel Lord Smail argues that in the wake of the Decade of the Brain and the best-selling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.