Aeon + PSYCHE Magazine

 

This week in

Friday 18 September 2020

Mood and emotion Essay Politics is visceral In an age thick with anger and fear, we might dream of a purely rational politics but it would be a denial of our humanity by Manos Tsakiris   Philosophy of language Essay Thoughts into words Here’s the paradox of articulation: are you excavating existing ideas, or do your thoughts come into being as you speak? by Eli Alshanetsky

Steven Pinker

 

Steven Pinker

Canadian-American psychologist

WRITTEN BY

Richard Pallardy See All Contributors

Richard Pallardy received a B.A. in English from Illinois State University in 2005. He was a research editor with Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. from 2008 to 2016 and worked on Britannica Blog from 2010...

LAST UPDATED: Sep 14, 2020 See Article History

Alternative Title: Steven Arthur Pinker

Steven Pinker, in full Steven Arthur Pinker, (born September 18, 1954, Montreal, Quebec, Canada), Canadian-born American psychologist who advocated evolutionary explanations for the functions of the brain and thus for language and behaviour.

Pinker was raised in a largely Jewish neighbourhood of Montreal. He studied cognitive science at McGill University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1976. He earned a doctorate in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979. After stints as an assistant professor at Harvard (1980–81) and at Stanford University (1981–82), he joined the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There he served as codirector of the Center of Cognitive Science (1985–94) and, having been made full professor in 1989, as director of the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (1994–99). Pinker returned to Harvard in 2003 as a full professor.

Hear Psycholinguist Steven Pinker outlining the evolution of several unique traits in humans as compared to other speciesPsycholinguist Steven Pinker outlining uniquely human traits.© World Science Festival (A Britannica Publishing Partner)See all videos for this article

aeon + psyche

This week in

Friday 14 August 2020

Love and friendship Essay Forgive and be free Hurts – your own or those done to you – keep you stuck. Forgiveness therapy can help you gain perspective and move on by Nathaniel Wade   Evolution Essay Catastrophes and calms Evolution is extraordinarily creative in the wake of a cataclysm. How does life keep steadily ticking over in between? by Renée A Duckworth

Dance Idea Lockdown dancing is both a solo conversation and a mass grieving by Dana Naomy Mills   Sex and sexuality Idea What rude jibes about Caesar tell us about sex in ancient Rome by Aven McMaster

How to get promoted as a woman Own your ambitions, know your potential, seek mentors and other advice for navigating around glass ceilings and cliffs by Jan Hills

Knowledge Video Orson Welles’s psychedelic 1973 adaptation of Plato’s timeless ‘allegory of the cave’ 9 minutes   Consciousness and altered states Video Why don’t we feel pain in dreams? The answer might lie in a new frontier of neuroscience 9 minutes

Global history Essay How Aztecs told history For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history was braided from many voices by Camilla Townsend   Design and fashion Essay What do shoes do? Partly of the earth, partly of our body, the shoe sits on the edge of an ontological threshold. Where can it transport us? by Randy Laist

Parenting and families Idea DNA testing is easy. It can also turn your family upside down by Libby Copeland   Human nature Idea Do humans really have a killer instinct or is that just manly fancy? by Nadine Weidman

Chemistry Video Dramatic close-ups capture something percolating and exploding – but what is it? 5 minutes   Film and visual culture Editors’ pick Video Rod Serling on how imagination turns science fiction into fact 5 minutes

Dance Film  How the acrobat and choreographer Yoann Bourgeois plays with gravity and time 5 minutes

Future and Past

Left: Richard Feynman at 41 years old, from his Cornell Lectures in 1959. Right: Richard Feynman 27 years later at his office at the California Institute of Technology in 1986, aged 68 (Photos: Wikimedia Commons)

Richard Feynman on the Distinction between Future and Past

“We have a different kind of awareness about what might happen than we have of what probably has happened”

Jørgen Veisdal in Cantor’s Paradise8 min read