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(2017) Catching up with Aristotle, Dordrecht, Springer.

The creative double negation and the non-non-cascade

Niels Engelsted

pp. 95-111

This chapter describes how the Adam and Eve-like event unfolded to create the human being with its cascade of unique features. Employing a dialectical scheme, the negation of the negation, it is argued that a contradiction in the new way of being created human consciousness, self-consciousness, and language as new templates for evolution to fill out. An educated guess places the first time event with the Australopithecines. With reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss, it is further described how the event led to the development of human institutions like exogamy, totem and taboo, marriage, and social contracts. A brief sketch of society's subsequent economical history follows. A pivot in this history is the introduction of slavery, which fatefully changes the status of women, here quoted from Friedrich Engels' rendition of Lewis H. Morgan's work.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-51088-0_11

Full citation:

Engelsted, N. (2017). The creative double negation and the non-non-cascade, in Catching up with Aristotle, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 95-111.

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