[Buddha-l] Re: New trans. of poetry of the Sixth DL

[jkirk]

........ Toward that end I have been enjoying the writings of Steven
> Pinker of late. One of these days I may start some discussions about his
> work and the implications of his writings for Western Buddhists.
>
> -- 
> Richard Hayes
> http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes
==============================
Not knowing who Pinker is, I checked with amazon and found this blurb for 
his recent book, _The Blank Slate : The Denial of Human Nature and Modern 
Intellectual Life_, that might help to clarify what he's up to:

>From Publishers Weekly
In his last outing, How the Mind Works, the author of the well-received The 
Language Instinct made a case for evolutionary psychology or the view that 
human beings have a hard-wired nature that evolved over time. This book 
returns to that still-controversial territory in order to shore it up in the 
public sphere. Drawing on decades of research in the "sciences of human 
nature," Pinker, a chaired professor of psychology at MIT, attacks the 
notion that an infant's mind is a blank slate, arguing instead that human 
beings have an inherited universal structure shaped by the demands made upon 
the species for survival, albeit with plenty of room for cultural and 
individual variation. For those who have been following the sciences in 
question including cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics and 
evolutionary psychology much of the evidence will be familiar, yet Pinker's 
clear and witty presentation, complete with comic strips and allusions to 
writers from Woody Allen to Emily Dickinson, keeps the material fresh. What 
might amaze is the persistent, often vitriolic resistance to these findings 
Pinker presents and systematically takes apart, decrying the hold of the 
"blank slate" and other orthodoxies on intellectual life. He goes on to tour 
what science currently claims to know about human nature, including its 
cognitive, intuitive and emotional faculties, and shows what light this 
research can shed on such thorny topics as gender inequality, child-rearing 
and modern art. Pinker's synthesizing of many fields is impressive but 
uneven, especially when he ventures into moral philosophy and religion; 
examples like "Even Hitler thought he was carrying out the will of God" 
violate Pinker's own principle that one should not exploit Nazism "for 
rhetorical clout." For the most part, however, the book is persuasive and 
illuminating.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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Joanna