David Haig
foreword by Daniel C. Dennett
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2020 David Haig
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Haig, David, 1958– author.
Title: From Darwin to Derrida : selfish genes, social selves, and the
meanings of life / David Haig ; foreword by Daniel C. Dennett.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019028387 | ISBN 9780262043786 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9780262358026 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Natural selection—History.
Classification: LCC QH375 .H35 2020 | DDC 576.8/2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028387
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For my mother, who gave me her seriousness and who, by her choice of my father, gave me his enthusiasm.
Would it not be a far more elegant way of interpreting the two-faced image, to say that Janus and Terminus are the same, and that the one face has reference to beginnings, the other to ends? For one who works ought to have respect to both. For he who in every forthputting of activity does not look back on the beginning, does not look forward to the end. Wherefore it is necessary that prospective intention be connected with retrospective memory. For how shall one find how to finish anything, if he has forgotten what it was which he had begun?
—Augustine of Hippo