The Importance of Evolution to Understandings of Human Nature (Value Inquiry Book Series / Cognitive Science, 388)

This interdisciplinary book that is thematically tied to Charles Darwin's extensively detailed observations of all forms of animate life across the global world--humans included--shows how neuroscience and phenomenology are complementary and how the driving force of wonder--what Darwin called "an intellectual emotion"--propels them both. Front Cover Half Title Series Information Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1 Evolutionary Realities of Animate Life I Darwin II Insects III Biodiversity IV Male-Male Competition V 21st-Century Archetypal Exemplifications of Male-Male Competition VI A Return to Darwin and His Principles of Natural Selection VII The Pan-animate Nature of Emotions VIII Vindications and Elaborations of Darwin’s Foundational Insights into Emotions IX Chapter 1 Summation Chapter 2 Phenomenological Realities of Animate Life I Naturalizing Phenomenology and a Proposed Neurophenomenology II Darwin’s Evolutionary Biology and Enaction III Pregiven and Pregivennesses: Sorting Basic Facts of Human Life from Biased Claims IV The Foundational Import of Pregivennesses V The Confluence of a Darwinian Perspective on Animate Life and Husserl’s Phenomenological Methodology VI Human Experience: the Nature and Challenges of Phenomenological Analyses VII Research Perspectives Complementary to Husserlian Phenomenology VIII The Neurodynamics of Embodied Minds and Naturalizing Phenomenology vs Real-Life Subject-World Relationships Chapter 3 Joint Concerns and Complementarities Linking Darwinian Evolutionary Biology and Husserlian Phenomenology I On the Road to Recovery: Beginning Correlations II The Centrality of Methodology and of Dynamics in Understandings of Human Nature Chapter 4 The Centrality and Critical Importance of Wonder and of an Ongoing Spiral of Inquiry in Understandings of Human Nature I Self-Imposed Ideational Limitations in the Pursuit of Human Knowledge and the Open-Ended “Wonderful” Nature of Darwin’s Thinking and Writings II The Complex Experiential Nature of Wonder: Its Value, Challenges, and Importance to the Nature of Human Knowledge III Obstacle #1: the Ongoing Decade of the Brain IV Obstacle #2: the Age of Information V Concluding Thoughts References Name Index Back Cover This interdisciplinary book focuses on Charles Darwin's extensively detailed observations of all forms of animate life across the global world—humans included. These existential realities of Nature are not commonly recognized in today's world, yet they are all of sizable import in impacting both flora and fauna, thus in human understandings of the nature of the world and the nature of all forms of animate life. Darwin's descriptively anchored observations furthermore tie in directly with Edmund Husserl's phenomenological analyses of experience. However different their inquiries and wonder at the world and at human experience, their analyses show how descriptive foundations and a concern with origins are integral to both, and how methodology and a living dynamics are central to a recognition of the complementarity of biological-neurological sciences and phenomenology.