The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits - a doctrine held by many intellectuals during the past century - denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts.

Injecting calm and rationality into debates that are notorious for ax-grinding and mud-slinging, Pinker shows the importance of an honest acknowledgment of human nature based on science and common sense.

NOTE: Some changes to the original text have been made with the author's approval.

• How the Mind Works
• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
• Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
• The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
• The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
• The Selfish Gene
• The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
• The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values