Los espejismos de la certeza

As a novelist and scholar, Siri Hustvedt has always believed that science and philosophy should go hand in hand to provide us with answers about who we are and how we relate to the world. In this new essay she directs her critical eye to an old dilemma that has preoccupied humanity since the dawn of time: how the mind works and how it relates to our body. Far from being a question already resolved, the ideas and preconceptions that we have about both have often distorted and confused contemporary thought. Drawing from disciplines as varied as neuroscience, psychiatry, genetics, artificial intelligence and evolutionary psychology, Mirages of Certainty is a fascinating essay in which Hustvedt offers a tour of the scientific findings and philosophical currents that have marked more than two thousand years of human history to take them to the limit, inviting us, along the way, to question what we think we know about ourselves.