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Paolo Crocchiolo,
The Amorous Tinder
Contemporary European Cultural Studies
Series editors, Gianni
Vattimo and Santiago Zabala
In The Amorous Tinder: Is the Mind
a Product of Natural Selection? Paolo Crocchiolo explores
the extent to which the
human mind is formed by its biological nature, and concludes that
the world we inhabit, and our own mind, are only one of the worlds
and the minds that, out of the many possible, natural history has
produced. This very
evolutionary approach is extended by the author to various aspects
of the human mind, such as philosophy and the arts. Crocchiolo
proposes, for instance, to turn upside down Leibniz’s statement that
“ours is the best of all possible worlds.” Rather than living in the
best of all possible worlds, we seem to be the best
possible organism, built and selected, accumulating an
immense number of adaptive advantages, and still capable of
surviving and re-producing, even in the worst of all
imaginable worlds.
Reviews
"The Amorous Tinder: Is the Mind a Product of Natural Selection?
is a thoughtful and humanly rich collection of essays bridging the
new biology of the mind with the traditional inquiries of the
humanities. A delightful read."
— Antonio Damasio
Author of Descartes' Error and Looking for Spinoza
Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute and
David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience
University of Southern California
The Amorous Tinder is a very original book, which works out
of a modern world view of the human condition with which I closely
agree.
— Edward O. Wilson
University Professor Emeritus
Harvard University
"In a scholarly book that is beautifully written, Crocchiolo offers
a modern evolutionary viewpoint on some of the deepest issues in the
arts and sciences. His unique perspective on the human condition
challenges the limits of our imagination."
— Victor
Johnston, Professor of Psychobiology
New Mexico State University
Contents
Alberto Oliverio, Enlightened biology
The Amorous Tinder
An unexplored universe
April 6, 1327: First love is never forgotten
Adam and Steve in prehistory
Marilyn and the peacock’s tail
Let’s pretend it’s real
The ecstasy of S. Theresa and Stendhal’s syndrome
The spandrels of San Marco
Getting accustomed to the 1900s
De Prospectiva Pingendi
Calderón, Von Kleist: tribal ethics with variations
A stroll in Altemps Palace: Ars diabetica?
Amazonas
Hephaestus 2000: à la manière de Cesare Musatti
Inferiority of insects, or “equal dignity”?
Bocadillo
The alchemy of emotions
A chat among friends
Noam Chomsky
Christopher Columbus and the spirit of Ulysses
As you like it
Bibliography
Foreword
To speak of the human mind is not easy, and one can fluctuate
between a scientific and a philosophical, a psychological and a
literary, approach. To merge these different points of view within a
solid biological-naturalistic framework — the mind is without doubt
the product of evolution and natural selection — requires a light
touch and a multifaceted culture. Paolo Crocchiolo was able to take
an original path, quite unusual in our country. He looks at the mind
from a Darwinian point of view. He views it as a great river, the
Amazon River, where the stream carries an imaginary population
toward a point that is different from the point of departure; there
are those who float in the middle of the stream and those who float
near the shore. Obviously a metaphor, which, however, takes into
account the individual differences and the historical flux that mark
the transformations of nature, including human nature.
Within this framework, which paints a great fresco of the history of
the mind and its far-away roots, the author plays around by
inserting impossible dialogues between philosophers and scientists,
imaginary polemics, anecdotes placed in different contexts. The mind
he describes, while showing us its natural matrix, is contaminated
by the culture in which it is read, artificially placed, a virtual
reality, made precisely by grafts that belong to different cultural
environments. With this artifice, the natural history of the mind,
as narrated by Crocchiolo, becomes a sort of background canvas
against which he tests, or rejects, old philosophical positions,
questioning the ideology of cultural supremacy that in the past,
especially in Italy, conveyed to us an idealized and false image of
the mind. The story, an account composed of smaller stories, is
pleasurable to read, but the reader, while proceeding step by step,
is forced to face unusual questionings, and ask himself if the mind,
his or her mind, is really what he or she believed it to be, and if
his or her behavior is the fruit of a totally free will or if it is
not constrained by a force greater than himself or herself. It is a
short book, an entertaining essay, but permeated with a basic thesis
— a thesis that will also bring displeasure by the manner in which
it upsets a transfigured vision of what we are. It indicates that
the world we inhabit is not the best of all possible worlds, but one
of the worlds, or of the minds, that natural history has produced
out of the many worlds and minds possible.
—
Alberto
Oliverio
Author
Dr. Crocchiolo is Professor of Ethics and Global Policies, and
Professor of Biology of the Human Mind, at the American University
of Rome. He has authored numerous scientific publications on
biomedical and public health issues as well as publications
addressing drug policies, HIV/AIDS policies and the
biological/historical/ philosophical background underlying current
ethical visions and approaches. Books published include L’Esca
amorosa (2004) and Il tocco della vita (2005).
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