How History Made the Mind The Cultural Origins of Objective Thinking [Paperback]

How History Made the Mind, David Martel Johnson argues that what we now think of as reason or objective thinking is not a natural product of the existence of an enlarged brain or culmination of innate biological tendencies. Rather, it is a way of learning to use the brain that runs counter to the natural characteristics involved in being an animal, a mammal, and a primate. Johnson defends his theory of mind as a cultural artifact against objections, and uses it to question a number of currently fashionable positions in philosophy of mind, known theories of Julian Jaynes, which Johnson argues go too far in the direction of emphasizing the dissimilarities between ancient and modern ways of thinking.

This book argues that “reason,” or “objective thinking,” is not a natural product of an enlarged brain or of innate biological tendencies, but a way of learning that contradicts the natural characteristics of being an animal, a mammal, and a primate. Author David Martel Johnson shows how the concept of objective thinking was incubated in Homeric Greece and eventually canonized as truth. Challenging and thoughtful, this book eloquently questions conventional wisdom in the contemporary study of the mind and includes an extended examination of the work of Julian Jaynes.