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Ouvrages Année : 2022

Understanding Human Life

Résumé

How to try to understand human life is the challenge addressed by this book, which compares our life experience with the attempts to grasp it by astrologers, eugenicists, psychologists, neuroscientists, social scientists, and philosophers. The main opposition in the previous list lies between understanding and misunderstanding, and the difficulty to capture a human life is also a main methodological problem to address. First, we examine how certain approaches may lead to misunderstand human life. The example of astrology used by ancient civilizations, but also practiced today by many pseudosciences, is contrasted with astronomy, now prevalent since Galileo. Another more recent approach regards human life as predetermined by genes: the methods used by eugenicists, and later by political regimes under the name of hereditarianism, came to compete with genetics. A broader point of view will show how astrology and eugenicism are not truly scientific approaches. On the other side, we examine how one can capture an imaginary or real human life story. A comprehensive approach will try to fully understand their complexity, while a more explanatory approach will consider only some more specific phenomena of human life. For example demography study only births, deaths and migratory movements. The problems relating to memory and its transmission are also crucial in the collection of life histories. Psychology and psychoanalysis developed different schools to try to explain them. Finally, this book offers a deep view of the different approaches to understand the various aspects of life stories: mechanisms, systems, hermeneutics and autonomy.
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hal-04109141 , version 1 (02-06-2023)

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Daniel Courgeau. Understanding Human Life: A methodological and interdisciplinary approach. Springer, 19, pp.269, 2022, Methodos Series, Robert Franck; Daniel Courgeau, 978-3-031-16142-1. ⟨10.1007/978-3-031-16143-8⟩. ⟨hal-04109141⟩
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