Wednesday, March 5, 2014

What Makes us Human?

Note: This post has been cross-posted on The Walkabout.

Yesterday, I posted the following photo on Facebook.


It is the book I intend to read next, once I'm done with Cindy Trimm's Commanding Your Morning and Mbugua Mumbi's Becoming an 'A' Student in Life.
A comment on that Facebook post has made it necessary to explain what the book is all about. And please note this is not a book review at all, just a sneak peek.

Well, this book is inspired by talks that were presented at a symposium held in Oxford, in March 2006.

The book, put simply, is an attempt to answer the following questions:
Are we half ape or half angel? Is it our cognitive abilities, our use of tools, our story-telling, our beliefs, our curiosity, our ability to cook, our culture, that make us human?

These are the book chapters:
  1. Imitation Makes us Human
  2. Memory, Time and Language
  3. Why are Humans not just Great Apes?
  4. The Hominid that Talked
  5. Half Ape, Half Angel?
  6. Material facts from a non-materialist perspective
  7. What Makes us Human? Our Ancestors and the Weather
  8. Curiosity and Quest
  9. Human Evolution and the Human Condition
  10. The Place of "Deep Social Mind" in the Evolution of Human Nature
  11. Causal Belief Maes us Human
  12. The Cooking Enigma.
The book What Makes us Human? is available on Amazon and elsewhere across the web.