Abstract
Rousseau offers a complex response to the Western philosophic tradition that finds the best and most natural way of life within civilization. Rousseau agrees with that tradition in regarding speech as the defining human characteristic, and in seeking to take nature as a guide for human life. He offers a novel theory of the origin and evolution of human languages, which enabled our ancestors to become human and then to develop the social and individual pathologies that plague us today. This chapter compares Rousseau’s conjectures with the findings in several fields of modern science that bear on human evolution. Those findings are consistent with all of the major themes in Rousseau’s account.
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