Drawn from preparatory works and dialogues at the Foundation Universal Forum of Cultures held in Barcelona in July 2004, these 21 papers hold that recent developments in Darwinism, especially the Synthetic Theory of Evolution, indicates the "innate modules," which allows us to develop higher cognition functions including moral knowledge, are the products of our evolutionary history. The contributors cover the idea of languages as defined under neuroscience, unselfishness as a taught virtue, learning from a bio-cultural development perspective, the time for ethical learning, eliminating the "we v. they," numbing and moral exaltation, the moral foundation of the world, psychological diversity of moral insensitivity, naturalistic perspectives on morality and possibilities, foundations of morality in infants, conflict and cooperation in humans, what we know of the social brain, evolutionary origins of the social brain, and language origination of the social brain, and human cognition and the recognition of humanity. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

This book examines philosophical and scientific implications of Neodarwinism relative to recent empirical data. It develops explanations of social behavior and cognition through analysis of mental capabilities and consideration of ethical issues. It includes debate within cognitive science among explanations of social and moral phenomena from philosophy, evolutionary and cognitive psychology, neurobiology, linguistics, and computer science. Cognitive Science (CS) provides an original corpus of scholarly work that makes explicit the import of cognitive-science research for philosophical analysis. Topics include the nature, structure, and justification of knowledge, cognitive architectures and development, brain-mind theories, and consciousness.