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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2016
Anyone who has struggled to navigate the challenges that evolutionary and other natural sciences pose to a rich religious sense of the importance of human dignity will enjoy reading this book. Alan L. Mittleman gives the reader more than a robust understanding of the sciences; he also probes carefully their philosophical premises and makes a case for why a detailed engagement with Jewish sources in particular allows one to construct a reasonable and intellectually satisfying alternative to a purely naturalistic account based on the sciences. In the course of his investigation Mittleman deals skillfully with popular scientific motifs that were in the air half a century ago and that remain remarkably persistent today, such as the reductionist view, stemming from well-known writers like Desmond Morris, that humans are little more than naked apes; even at the height of Morris's popularity that view clashed with other philosophical perspectives that were equally prevalent and that stressed the existential alienation of human beings in the world.
Alan L. Mittleman, Human Nature and Jewish Thought: Judaism's Case for Why Persons Matter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Page references to Mittleman's book appear in the text.
1 See, for example, Jablonka, Eva and Lamb, Marion J., Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral and Symbol Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
2 Fuentes, Agustin, “Naturecultural Encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, and Ethnoprimatology,” Cultural Anthropology 25 (2010) 600–624CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Nagel, Thomas, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Goodman, Lenn E. and Caramenico, D. Gregory, Coming to Mind: The Soul and Its Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Scruton, Roger, The Soul of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 See Francione, Gary L., Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; see also the collection edited by Jewish ethicist Crane, Jonathan K., Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical Agents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Jon Marks, “Tales of the Ex-Apes” (public lecture at the Center for Theology, Science and Human Flourishing, University of Notre Dame, IN, 26 June 2015).