Where Now for the Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Study of the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind?

Abstract

I started out as a classicist using quite a bit of anthropology to try to get a handle on the reasoning practices—the modes of argumentation—in early Greek thought. It was only at quite an advanced age that, stimulated, or rather provoked, by the Chinese students whom I taught at Beijing Daxue (Peking University) in 1987, I saw that I really had to master classical Chinese to make the most of the evidently startling similarities and differences between ancient Chinese and Greek modes of reasoning. As I delved further into the commonalities and the specificities of human reasoning in different cultures and at different periods, I was drawn further and further into adjacent and sometimes indeed quite distant fields, evolutionary and developmental psychology, paleontology, ethology, linguistics, cognitive science, even neurophysiology. My “field,” insofar as I can call my interdisciplinary and crosscultural explorations a field, has been transformed in recent years, and this opportunity to contribute to KNOW provides the occasion for me to take stock of where I think we have got to and where we go from here. Contemplating recent work in those diverse disciplines