PREFACE

The new fields of psychobiology, sociobiology, and artificial intelligence have focused attention upon ways in which thinking is a function of nature and natural processes. This serves as a timely corrective to the generally nonnaturalistic conception of thinking in modern Western culture. But essential to thinking also is a host of cultural contributions; thinking is an artifact, a range of historical phenomena. An apocalyptic destruction of civilization would eliminate the conditions for thinking in most of the forms we recognize. That we think at all requires culture, and how people think differs from one culture to another. Furthermore, the understanding of a culture's basic modes of thinking involves historical understanding of how it developed from modes of thinking in its cultural antecedents. The scientific focus may obscure the importance of the fact that thinking is concrete only in historically relative cultural contexts, and that our own culture's modes of thinking themselves have a history. If the exclusive scientific orientation were right, if thinking in its basic modes were only a natural product as understood by natural sciences, then there would be no point in making a critical historical appraisal of our own culture's conceptions of thinking...