Dawson Graduate Steven Pinker Says Life is Good
One of Dawson’s most famous graduates, Steven Pinker (Social Science, 1973), is a cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He teaches at Harvard University where he is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology. Best known as for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind, he is the author of several books on the subject, including his latest, Enlightenment Now, its precursor The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature , The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
Pinker is considered to be one of the world’s most influential intellectuals and has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the American Humanist Association.
A flurry of reviews has been published with the release of this latest book, one of which is linked here, from The Guardian, which says “Enlightenment Now is a bold, wonderfully expansive and occasionally irate defence of scientific rationality and liberal humanism, of the sort that took root in Europe between the mid-17th and late 18th century.”
Always provocative, Pinker relies on quantitative data in Enlightenment Now to make his point that, by and large, life has gotten “progressively better for most people.”
Read the review here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/14/enlightenment-now-steven-pinker-review
