In the age of life sciences, the question of how nature and culture are connected is more important than ever. This volume provides a new understanding of natural and cultural history, as well as of the development of cognition.
The book focuses on the modern understanding of human life-forms as constructs that followed an evolutionary history. The author thus finds science confronted with two questions: firstly, how the transgression of the virtual threshold between natural and cultural history was possible, secondly, how the socio-cultural constructs were able to develop in the course of history the way they did. The discussion concentrates on the problem of determining a processual logic in the development of societal structures as well as in the development of cognition. The focus of attention is the historico-genetic reconstruction of cognition. The book was originally published in German as 'Historisch-genetische Theorie der Kultur' (Weilerswist 2000: Velbrück).
