Seymour W. Itzkoff - Böcker

For this second edition, Seymour has written a new introduction and has added a new retrospective essay.Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man by Seymour W. Itzkoff is currently one of the few books available in the English language that discusses the philosophy of twentieth-century German philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Itzkoff's study brings Cassirer's perspective directly into the contemporary debate over the evolution of human thought and its relationship to animal life. Further, Itzkoff places Cassirer directly in the context of recent philosophical thought, arguing for the importance of his Kantian perspective, a significance that is amply vindicated by the current interest in Cassirer's ideas.

Why does poverty exist? Why is there social pathology and human degradation? Is it always because of oppression and discrimination? No, says Professor Seymour Itzkoff of Smith College. The real reason is the tragedy of low human intelligence, and the consequent inability of humans to compete in highly complex and dynamic economic and social environments. The Road to Equality: Evolution and Social Reality, contains Itzkoff's highly controversial analysis of the failures of the welfare approach to helping the poor. It also contains his radical solution to the perennial problems of inequality in nations and the consequent turmoil and revolution. Equalize the intelligence of your nation, Itzkoff argues, and you will soon eliminate the tragic social and economic differences between large portions of the population. It is high intelligence in groups of humans that create civilization and prosperity in the first place. Merely placing individuals of lower intelligence in such environments has not ensured their success. And it never will, predicts the professor, because it violates the facts of our evolutionary and sociobiological nature.The 21st century will change the relationship of nations to each other in the most radical manner that history has ever seen. The requirements of technological competency have put a premium on high educable intelligence. Even today we see that nations of uniformly high intelligence of various racial and ethnic heritage are pulling away from those with lower national intellectual profiles. Itzkoff writes that many of the social pathologies in nations such as the United States, as well as their relative economic decline can be so attributed. The future of human equality, he concludes, must lie in an international resolve to face up to the most basic challenge to world peace, the variability of intelligence in the human species.

. . . Mr. Itzkoff places most of the blame for America's alleged intellectual decline on what he sees as an economically and intellectually elite cast of misguided liberals. They have isolated themselves from American society, he says, by their paternalistic treatment of the underclass, by discounting the importance of traditional family values and by failing to raise enough bright children to sustain national competence. The New York Times Book Review Few doubt that the United States has slipped from its longstanding eminence as the world's wealthiest and most productive nation. The problem for the past 30 years has been the diagnosis of both the decline and then the cure. Literally trillions of dollars have been expended in futile programs to stanch the hemorrhaging of our economic wealth, jobs, educational achievement, and cultural elan.Itzkoff argues that we will never stop the fall until we understand our real national dilemma. This is the decline in our national intelligence profile: fewer citizens of high intelligence, educational potential, and economic productivity. These ideas are taboo. Itzkoff, however, insists that these are the facts, and they must be examined. In this book, he lays out the available evidence for our social disintegration and suggests a rational program of policy initiatives that would begin to restore us to what we were as recently as 1955--the great hope of the world.

. . . Mr. Itzkoff places most of the blame for America's alleged intellectual decline on what he sees as an economically and intellectually elite cast of misguided liberals. They have isolated themselves from American society, he says, by their paternalistic treatment of the underclass, by discounting the importance of traditional family values and by failing to raise enough bright children to sustain national competence. The New York Times Book Review Few doubt that the United States has slipped from its longstanding eminence as the world's wealthiest and most productive nation. The problem for the past 30 years has been the diagnosis of both the decline and then the cure. Literally trillions of dollars have been expended in futile programs to stanch the hemorrhaging of our economic wealth, jobs, educational achievement, and cultural elan.Itzkoff argues that we will never stop the fall until we understand our real national dilemma. This is the decline in our national intelligence profile: fewer citizens of high intelligence, educational potential, and economic productivity. These ideas are taboo. Itzkoff, however, insists that these are the facts, and they must be examined. In this book, he lays out the available evidence for our social disintegration and suggests a rational program of policy initiatives that would begin to restore us to what we were as recently as 1955--the great hope of the world.

This is a unique book for parents, educators, and policymakers. It is alone in setting forth a clear presentation of the learning stages through which children must pass in order to become fluent, independently literate readers and writers. It explains the developmental dangers unique to each child that parents and teachers may have to confront, as well as the educational confusions and pathways to success that may determine the educational fate of each child. It illustrates the learning process clearly and nontechnically, and does not hesitate to point to the educational errors as well as successes in the teaching of children to read. It will be controversial because of its clarity and scientific accuracy.This volume brings together the sciences of psycholinguistics and developmental psychology with the practical knowledge of classroom practice in literacy education to create a unique, but accessible explanation of how children learn to read. It explains the necessary educational and pedagogical steps that parents and teachers both can take in assisting the child to make a smooth transition from infant babbler to eight-year-old fluent reader. It also points to the possible developmental as well as educational danger signals that tell us when things are not going as they should and suggests what we can do to overcome the problems, slowdowns, and seeming failures to learn to read and write.This volume discusses such important issues as emergent literacy or reading readiness; phonics and slow reading; fluent reading and the reading system; the dangers of the first-grade Rubicon; reading problems of unique children; the dangers and benefits of Whole Language reading rograms; Reading Recovery for endangered young readers; the role of writing; parents, TV, and the school program. The book is clearly written, uses nontechnical terminology, and should provide teachers and parents a guide to evaluating the progress of youngsters from the time they approach child-care and pre-school stages of socialization to that point where they should be reading independently for pleasure as well as searching for information and subject-matter competency.

Judaism’s Promise, Meeting The Challenge Of Modernity follows Seymour W. Itzkoff’s well-received three-book series, Who Are the Jews? Judaism’s Promise, confronts the many revolutions that have reshaped Judaism over the centuries allowing it and its people a path of leadership into the modern world. It takes the writings of the Torah, Holy Scriptures, and Talmud seriously as exemplars of the human search for civilizational and moral intellectuality. The book’s basic concern is with the withering of Judaism as a force in contemporary Western civilization. Sadly millions of Jews have left the faith. Others venture forth only hesitantly into a synagogue, now a bastion of fossilized ritual and conspicuous consumption. These millions needed more from the orthodoxy, and this book attempts to show them the way back by giving renewed life to the heritages of Judaism, and, consequently, to its meaning for the modern world. Judaism’s Promise argues for a return to the synagogue’s originating Hellenistic commitment «to come together» in intellectual and moral study. As Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan argued, Judaism must once more become in the 20–21st century the civilization that it once represented to the wider world, and not a fossilized ceremonialism.

2284: World Society, Iaian Vernier’s Memoir is a fascinating study of mankind. Written as a work of fiction, it looks at the human condition 200 years in the future. Predicting the outcome of today’s social policies, 2284 is a cultural anthropology study that adds to Itzkoff’s extensive writing on the topic. Iaian Vernier writes in 2284 of the revolutionary internationalism that has been established in Nairobi, Africa. He chronicles the disasters that almost destroyed the twenty-first-century world. He describes in anecdote and philosophical depth the new scientific and secular world that has been established to bring peace, equality, ethnic diversity and democracy to humanity, while scrutinizing the plans for demographic stability that will sustain humanity into the future. In the twenty-third century, the forbidden rationality of the scientific minds of the twenty-first century have been unleashed.

Surviving evolutionary lines of animals and plants all had their adaptive keys for flourishing in the long run. In the case of humans, a lack of primate specializations opened the door to unique evolutionary possibilities. From the Miocene Era about 20 million years ago, nature began to offer new possibilities to creatures with larger brains and the behaviors that tempted curiosity. From that broad panorama of decisions, the future said “hold up, wait a minute.” A new menu of life plans and structures determined hominid interests and possible opportunities. The passage of time saw movement away from anthropoids who did not migrate east towards south Asia, if they were not pushed into African extinction by other proto-hominids. At the end point of millions of years, migration towards modernistic dominance of the hominids was located in Eurasia and Southern Africa, the former probably a product of the early migrations of the European ancestors of the Heidelberg type.Today, the remnants of the artistically talented human originating in Southern Africa are holding on. By contrast the Cro-Magnons, who were pressing the Eurasian Neanderthals and Harbin Asians humanoids into extinction 40,000 years ago helped carry a small measure of their genes into the contemporary populations of the world.The powerful modern human brain power revealed its worldwide potential in the last 10,000 years following the abatement of the Ice Age. With this universal cultural expansion came an optimism and expansive sense of futurity, as well as an attitude of “we can do no wrong.” With this outlook, the demographics of expansion flooded the landscape – at least until our times, with pandemics, the Holocaust, atomic power, threats to the environment, and bloodshed without end.Could it be time for Homo sapiens to say ""our time is up?” We have been around, from the evolutionary timetable, for a rather short try out. Maybe we should take another look at what our Cro-Magnon ancestors created with very primitive tools, inside a frosty cave.

Civilization, Beyond Our Fall explores the realities behind the rise and fall of historic civilizational ideals, especially on the fate of the Western vision. The book begins with the rise, durability, and fall of the historic civilizational profiles of humankind. It continues with the decline of the West, which from our perspective began with World War I and has continued at a faster pace in the 21st century. Itzkoff's prognosis for the next century or two is one of a dismal world of chaos, war, and deep pessimism throughout the world. The book concludes with a prediction of a world of scientific rationalism that will discard the ideologies, irrationalism, and selfishness that now characterize our elites. Here we leave dystopian realities for the perennial human hope of reason and for highly creative communities.

Seymour W. Itzkoff is one of the world’s leading intelligence researchers. His exciting new book Our Unfinished Biological Revolution offers a bold and highly original new study on the evolution of human intelligence from the origin of life to our times. With the help of evolutionary theory, Itzkoff explains the nature of human intelligence as we know it today. Most importantly, it demonstrates that evolution led to the rise of what intelligence researchers call the general intelligence factor: the human ability to plan ahead and solve problems for which natural selection did not prepare us. The book also argues that humans vary in intelligence (as with all traits shaped by Darwinian evolution), and hence in their propensity to think abstractly and anticipate long-term consequences of their actions. Our Unfinished Biological Revolution explores the social implications of these two factors as they unfold in modern technological societies, in which intelligence plays an increasingly important role. Finally, the book argues that human intelligence may offer our best hope in solving the daunting problems of the present era?including population growth, the exhaustion of natural resources, and the rise of simplistic and devastating ideologies.