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A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought
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.
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.
448 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 10, 2022
JANUARY
6.
by Stephen Kern (no photo)
Finish date: 09 January 2022
Genre: cultural history
Rating: C
Review:
Stephen Kern is an Distinguished Research Professor so I should not have been surprised how academic/scholarly this book was. But I was still a bit bushwhacked. My rating is still C because the book delivered exactly what was intended but it was a difficult read.
Good news: Kern examines a specific factors or motives for murder.
Insightful to read the differences between
19th C Victor Hugo/Charles Dickens:
overbearing religious training producing killers like Frollo Hunchback of ND and Headstone Our Mutual Friend
20th C Patricia Highsmith/André Gide protecting loss of identity (Tom kills Dickie Greenleaf) in The Talented Mr. Ripley desire to commit a 'motiveless crime' (Lafcadio pushes man to his death on a train ...for nothing. In other words: "I kill, therefore I am!") in Lafcadio .
Bad news Not really bad....but you should be warned this book is not for the fainthearted!
Personal There is a lot to be learned in this book and if you see it in the library....take a look!
The best advice I can give is to skim the chapters and select the items that refer to a books (literature) that catch your eye. I will certainly look more carefully in CF, detectives and novels for the
true motive (class difference, greed, fear, revenge, hatred, sexually repressed, traumatic childhood) for murder!
6.
by Stephen Kern (no photo)Finish date: 09 January 2022
Genre: cultural history
Rating: C
Review:
Stephen Kern is an Distinguished Research Professor so I should not have been surprised how academic/scholarly this book was. But I was still a bit bushwhacked. My rating is still C because the book delivered exactly what was intended but it was a difficult read.
Good news: Kern examines a specific factors or motives for murder.
Insightful to read the differences between
19th C Victor Hugo/Charles Dickens:
overbearing religious training producing killers like Frollo Hunchback of ND and Headstone Our Mutual Friend
20th C Patricia Highsmith/André Gide protecting loss of identity (Tom kills Dickie Greenleaf) in The Talented Mr. Ripley desire to commit a 'motiveless crime' (Lafcadio pushes man to his death on a train ...for nothing. In other words: "I kill, therefore I am!") in Lafcadio .
Bad news Not really bad....but you should be warned this book is not for the fainthearted!
Personal There is a lot to be learned in this book and if you see it in the library....take a look!
The best advice I can give is to skim the chapters and select the items that refer to a books (literature) that catch your eye. I will certainly look more carefully in CF, detectives and novels for the
true motive (class difference, greed, fear, revenge, hatred, sexually repressed, traumatic childhood) for murder!
January 28, 2023
Philosophy and science!
Since man began to ask such questions as "what am I", "where am I", "why" into his existence, philosophy and science have begun to constantly change and develop. While science constitutes the explainable part of the causality of our existence, the part that we have not yet been able to explain is the battleground of philosophy.
Does a person go after clear answers because he doesn't like uncertainty, or do the answers he thinks he's looking for and found push him into uncertainty? The book, in essence, pushes a person to think about this question. Of course, not to look for an answer, but to understand its causality. Because every answer sought brings with it the common component at the source of psychological disorders, that is, anxiety, and drowns people in contradictions...
Ambiguity and contradictions are life itself. After accepting this unchangeable situation, we can realize how much we do not know with each new information we learn about life and relieve the deep pains of our existence just as much.
In the book, he describes the effects of this principle of causality in both novels, literature, art and science, describing the answers that thinkers are looking for, thoughts on the subject and ways of questioning. But in the end, the confusing effect of the question of Why does not bring the end of the book. It just ends at some point.
A tremendous book that pushes people to thoughts in every way. I can say that his fluency also led to this. I recommend it for philosophy readers, have a pleasant reading.
Since man began to ask such questions as "what am I", "where am I", "why" into his existence, philosophy and science have begun to constantly change and develop. While science constitutes the explainable part of the causality of our existence, the part that we have not yet been able to explain is the battleground of philosophy.
Does a person go after clear answers because he doesn't like uncertainty, or do the answers he thinks he's looking for and found push him into uncertainty? The book, in essence, pushes a person to think about this question. Of course, not to look for an answer, but to understand its causality. Because every answer sought brings with it the common component at the source of psychological disorders, that is, anxiety, and drowns people in contradictions...
Ambiguity and contradictions are life itself. After accepting this unchangeable situation, we can realize how much we do not know with each new information we learn about life and relieve the deep pains of our existence just as much.
In the book, he describes the effects of this principle of causality in both novels, literature, art and science, describing the answers that thinkers are looking for, thoughts on the subject and ways of questioning. But in the end, the confusing effect of the question of Why does not bring the end of the book. It just ends at some point.
A tremendous book that pushes people to thoughts in every way. I can say that his fluency also led to this. I recommend it for philosophy readers, have a pleasant reading.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews