@article{438222,
      recid = {438222},
      author = {Fletcher, Angus,},
      title = {Evolving Hamlet seventeenth-century English tragedy and  the ethics of natural selection / [electronic resource] :},
      publisher = {Palgrave Macmillan,},
      address = {New York :},
      pages = {1 online resource (xvi, 192 p.)},
      year = {2011},
      abstract = {"Recent work in cognitive science has rooted our moral  dispositions in the more ancient and less plastic regions  of our brains, seeming to confirm Darwin's suspicion that a  biological approach to human life must necessarily produce  a narrowly conservative (and perhaps even immutable)  account of ethics. This book, however, explores a  now-forgotten suggestion made by William James and other  early pioneers of cognitive science who saw art as a means  to translate the experimental study of the mind into a  skeptical, pluralist, and progressive approach to the good  life. Using Hamlet and a number of other popular and  influential seventeenth-century tragedies as case-studies,  this book shows how aesthetic experience can help organize  the biological functions of our brains into adaptive social  networks that not only make us more resilient to the  pressures of natural selection, but fulfill the human need  for intentional life. Seen this way, art is not--as many  recent cognitive scientists have suggested--simply a mirror  of our natural mental functions. Rather, it is also an  active contributor to new functions, a useful tool for  translating the theoretical discoveries of science into  progressive ethical practice"--},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/438222},
}