About this item
Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love for stories is hard-wired.To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is hard-wired. Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool useful for survival into a defective theory of human nature.
About the Author
Alex Rosenberg
Alex's first novel, "The Girl From Krakow," is a thriller that explores how a young woman and her lover navigate the dangerous thirties, the firestorm of war in Europe, and how they make sense of their survival. Alex's second novel, "Autumn in Oxford" is a murder mystery set in Britain in the late 1950s. It takes the reader back to the second world war in the American south and England before D-day, France during the Liberation and New York in the late '40s.
Before he became a novelist Alex wrote a large number of books about philosophy. These books were mainly addressed to other academics. But in 2011 Alex published a book that explores the answers that science gives to the big questions of philosophy that thinking people ask themselves--questions about the nature of reality, the meaning of life, moral values, free will, the relationship of the mind to the brain, and our human future. That book, "The Atheist's Guide to Reality," was widely reviewed and was quite controversial.
When he's not writing historical novels, Alex Rosenberg is a professor of philosophy at Duke University.
