Credit: Pixabay/John Hain. CC0 Public Domain.
Last fall Alan Jacobs published a slim book with a bold title: How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds. Jacobs is a professor of English literature, but in this book he joins a growing chorus of social psychologists who warn that enlightenment anthropology—what Jamie Smith memorably calls the “brains-on-a-stick” model of human persons—falls woefully short of reality. Rather, as people like Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Haidt have shown, our bodies—our senses, emotions, and intuitions—shape and direct our reasoning.
