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  • Published: 8 January 2019
  • ISBN: 9780141979090
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 576
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

Enlightenment Now

The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress





One of the world's greatest thinkers tells the heroic story of human progress - and why we neglect it at our peril

Is modernity really failing? Or have we failed to appreciate progress and the ideals that make it possible?

If you follow the headlines, the world in the 21st century appears to be sinking into chaos, hatred and irrationality. Yet, as Steven Pinker shows, if you follow the trendlines, you discover that our lives have become longer, healthier, safer and more prosperous - not just in the West, but worldwide. Such progress is no accident: it's the gift of a coherent value system that many of us embrace without even realizing it. These are the values of the Enlightenment: of reason, science, humanism and progress. The challenges we face today are formidable. But the way to deal with them is not to sink into despair or try to lurch back to a mythical idyllic past; it's to treat them as problems we can solve, as we have solved other problems in the past. This is the case for an Enlightenment newly recharged for the 21st century.

  • Published: 8 January 2019
  • ISBN: 9780141979090
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 576
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

About the author

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is an experimental cognitive scientist. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won many prizes for his research, teaching, and his eleven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Enlightenment Now. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, one of Foreign Policy's 'World's Top 100 Public Intellectuals' and Time's '100 Most Influential People in the World Today'.

http://stevenpinker.com

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