Cultural History of Causality
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€49.99
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Aestheticism
Aggression
Anomie
Archetype
Author_Stephen Kern
Behavior
Category=DSBH
Causality
Charles Reade
Colonialism
Consciousness
Contextualism
Criminology
Cultural anthropology
Cultural history
Degeneration theory
Disease
Emotion
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Etiology
Existentialism
Explanation
Explanatory model
Good and evil
History
Human behavior
Imperialism
Intentionality
Irresistible impulse
Jacques Derrida
Language
Libido
Metaphysics
Monomania
Morality
Neurosis
Novelist
Oedipus complex
Paradigm shift
Phenomenon
Philosopher
Philosophy
Phrenology
Physiognomy
Postmodernism
Probability
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic theory
Psychological determinism
Reaction formation
Recapitulation theory
Religion
Reticular theory
Scientism
Semiotics
Serial killer
Sexology
Sexual desire
Sexual Desire (book)
Social determinism
Social science
Sociology
Stab-in-the-back myth
Symptom
The Realist
Theodore Dreiser
Theory
Thought
Traditionalist School
Transvaluation of values
Uncertainty
Victimology
Wittgenstein's ladder
Product details
- ISBN 9780691127682
- Weight: 680g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 06 Aug 2006
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This pioneering work is the first to trace how our understanding of the causes of human behavior has changed radically over the course of European and American cultural history since 1830. Focusing on the act of murder, as documented vividly by more than a hundred novels including Crime and Punishment, An American Tragedy, The Trial, and Lolita, Stephen Kern devotes each chapter of A Cultural History of Causality to examining a specific causal factor or motive for murder--ancestry, childhood, language, sexuality, emotion, mind, society, and ideology. In addition to drawing on particular novels, each chapter considers the sciences (genetics, endocrinology, physiology, neuroscience) and systems of thought (psychoanalysis, linguistics, sociology, forensic psychiatry, and existential philosophy) most germane to each causal factor or motive. Kern identifies five shifts in thinking about causality, shifts toward increasing specificity, multiplicity, complexity, probability, and uncertainty. He argues that the more researchers learned about the causes of human behavior, the more they realized how much more there was to know and how little they knew about what they thought they knew.
The book closes by considering the revolutionary impact of quantum theory, which, though it influenced novelists only marginally, shattered the model of causal understanding that had dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century. Others have addressed changing ideas about causality in specific areas, but no one has tackled a broad cultural history of this concept as does Stephen Kern in this engagingly written and lucidly argued book.
Stephen Kern is Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University. He is the author of "The Culture of Time and Space, The Culture of Love", and "Eyes of Love".
