A Girl Arranging a Vase of Flowers

French chef

Théodule-Augustin Ribot (August 8, 1823 – September 11, 1891) was a French realist painter.

He was born in Saint-Nicolas-d'Attez, and studied at the École des Arts et Métiers de Châlons before moving to Paris in 1845. There he found work decorating gilded frames for a mirror manufacturer; he also studied in the studio of Auguste-Barthélémy Glaize. After a trip to Algeria around 1848, he returned in 1851 to Paris, where he continued to make his living as an artisan. In the late 1850s, working at night by lamplight, he began to paint seriously, depicting everyday subjects in a realistic style.

He made his Salon debut in 1861 with four paintings of kitchen subjects.^[1] Collectors purchased the works, and his paintings in the Salons of 1864 and 1865 were awarded medals.^[1]

Ribot painted domestic genre works, still-lifes, portraits, as well as religious scenes, such as his Salon success St. Sebastian, Martyr (1865).^[2] His preference was for painting directly from nature, emphasizing the contrasts of light and dark. His use of chiaroscuro to suggest psychological states grew from his admiration for Spanish and Dutch baroque masters such as Ribera and Rembrandt,^[1] an enthusiasm shared by his contemporaries Courbet and Bonvin. Members of Ribot's family are the likely models for many of his figure compositions, in which the subjects engage in humble activities, such as preparing meals or gathering in groups to read to each other. The light draws attention to faces and hands, which emerge sharply from dimly lit surroundings.

Although the realism of Ribot's work aligns him with the most progressive artists of the generation preceding the Impressionists, he was no revolutionary, and his work met with a generally favorable response from the public and from critics.

In 1878 Ribot received the Légion d'honneur.^[1] At about this time, in ill health, he stopped painting and moved to Colombes, where he died in 1891.

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Rosenblum, Robert (1989). Paintings in the Musée d'Orsay. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang. ISBN 1-55670-099-7
• Turner, J. (2000). From Monet to Cézanne: late 19th-century French artists. Grove Art. New York: St Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-22971-2
• Weisberg, Gabriel P., "Théodule Ribot", Oxford Art Online

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Théodule-Armand Ribot
Théodule-Armand Ribot
Born	December 18, 1839 Guingamp
Died	December 9, 1916 Paris
Nationality	French
Fields	psychology
Institutions	École Normale Supérieure

Théodule-Armand Ribot (December 18, 1839 - December 9, 1916), French psychologist, was born at Guingamp, and was educated at the Lycée de St Brieuc.

In 1856 he began to teach, and was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in 1862. In 1885 he gave a course of lectures on Experimental Psychology at the Sorbonne, and in 1888 was appointed professor of that subject at the College of France. His thesis for his doctors' degree, republished in 1882, Hérédité: étude psychologique (5th ed., 1889), was his most important and best known book.

Following the experimental and synthetic methods, he brought together a large number of instances of inherited peculiarities. He paid particular attention to the physical element of mental life, ignoring all spiritual or nonmaterial factors in man. In his work on La Psychologie anglaise contemporaine: l'école expérimentale (1870), he showed his sympathy with the sensationalist school, and again in his translation of Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology.

Besides numerous articles, he wrote on Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosophie de Schopenhauer (1874; 7th ed., 1896), and on the contemporary psychology of Germany (La Psychologie allemande contemporaine, 1879; 13th ed., 1898), also four little monographs on Les Maladies de la mémoire (1881; x3th ed., 1898); De la volonté (1883; 14th ed., 1899); De la personnalité (1885; 8th ed., 1899); and La Psychologie de l'attention (1888), which supplied useful data to the study of mental illness.

Bibliography[link]

Works[link]

• La Psychologie anglaise contemporaine: l'école expérimentale (1870)
• Psychologie de l'attention (1889)[1]
• La Psychologie des sentiments (1896)
• L'Evolution des idées genérales (1897)
• Essai sur l'imagination créatrice (1900)
• La Logique des sentiments (1904)
• Essai sur les passions (1906)

English editions[link]

• English Psychology (1873)
• Heredity: a Psychological Study of its Phenomena, Laws, Causes, and Consequences (1875)
• Diseases of Memory: An Essay in the Positive Psychology (1882)[2]
• Diseases of the Will (New York, 1884), (tr. MM Snell, Open Court Publishing, Chicago 1894; 3rd ed., 1903)
• German Psychology of to-day, tr. JM Baldwin (New York, 1886)
• The Psychology of Attention (Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, 1890)
• Diseases of Personality (Chicago, 1895)
• The Psychology of the Emotions (1897)
• The Evolution of General Ideas, tr. FA Welby (Chicago, 1899)
• Essay on the Creative Imagination, tr. AHN Baron (1906).[3]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Théodule Ribot

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

This article about a psychologist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Steven Arthur Pinker
Steven Pinker in 2011
Born	(1954-09-18) September 18, 1954 (age 57) Montréal, Québec, Canada
Residence	United States of America
Citizenship	Canadian
Fields	Evolutionary psychology, experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, visual cognition
Alma mater	Dawson College, McGill University, Harvard University
Known for	How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate
Influences	Noam Chomsky, Thomas Sowell, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Richard Dawkins, Thomas Schelling[1]
Notable awards	Troland Award (2003, National Academy of Sciences), Henry Dale Prize (2004, Royal Institution), Walter P. Kistler Book Award (2005), Humanist of the Year award (2006, issued by the AHA), George Miller Prize (2010, Cognitive Neuroscience Society)
Website
http://www.stevenpinker.com/

Steven Pinker in Göttingen in 2010

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954, Montreal, Canada) is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University,^[2] and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his popular books, he has argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. He is the author of six books for a general audience: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), The Stuff of Thought (2007), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).

Biography[link]

Career[link]

Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1954, to a middle-class Jewish family. He graduated from Dawson College in 1971. He received a BA degree in psychology at McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his PhD degree in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, after which he became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995-96. As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.^[3] In June 2011 it was announced he would give lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.^[4]

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential scientists and thinkers in the world in 2004^[5] and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005^[6] and 2008;^[7] in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.^[8][9] His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003.

In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about a gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. Pinker noted that Summers's remarks, properly understood, could form the basis of a testable hypothesis. The remarks, Pinker said, claimed not that men are consistently smarter, but that there are "more idiots, [and] more geniuses" of the male gender.^[10]

On May 13, 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.^[11]

In 2009, Pinker wrote a highly critical review of Malcolm Gladwell's analytic methods in the New York Times.^[12] Gladwell published a rebuttal in the Times regarding Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy, the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League. Pinker then responded to Gladwell's rebuttal.^[13] The exchange prompted Advanced NFL Stats to step in and address the issue statistically, siding with Pinker in that draft order is indeed correlated with quarterback performance.^[14]

Pinker also serves on the Advisory Board of Secular Coalition for America and offers advice to Executive Director Sean Faircloth and the entire coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life. ^[15]

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry lists Pinker as one of their fellows. ^[16]

In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.^[17] Pinker appeared on the Colbert Report on 10/18/11.

Personal[link]

His father, a lawyer, first worked as a manufacturer's representative, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer, author of The Sexual Paradox.^[18][19] Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced.^[20] His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.^[21] He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew."^[22] As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969.^[23] He has reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as "neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian".^[24] Pinker confesses to having "experienced a primitive tribal stirring" after his genes were shown to trace back to the Middle East.^[25]

Theories of language and mind[link]

Pinker is known within psychology for his theory of language acquisition, his research on the syntax, morphology, and meaning of verbs, and his criticism of connectionist (neural network) models of language. In The Language Instinct (1994) he popularized Noam Chomsky's work on language as an innate faculty of mind, with the twist that this faculty evolved by natural selection as a Darwinian adaptation for communication, although both ideas remain controversial (see below). He also defends the idea of a complex human nature which comprises many mental faculties that are adaptive (and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models.

Written work[link]

Pinker's books, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and The Stuff of Thought combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. The Language Instinct has been criticized by Geoffrey Sampson in his book, The 'Language Instinct' Debate.^[26] The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been subject to sustained criticism in Jeffrey Elman's Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling), which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker has criticized.

Bibliography[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker in 2005

Books[link]

• Language Learnability and Language Development (1984) ISBN 978-0-674-51055-5
• Visual Cognition (1985) ISBN 978-0-262-66178-2
• Connections and Symbols (1988) ISBN 978-0-262-66064-8
• Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989) ISBN 978-0-262-66073-0
• Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (1992) ISBN 978-1-55786-354-6
• The Language Instinct (1994) ISBN 978-0-06-097651-4
• How the Mind Works (1997) ISBN 978-0-393-31848-7
• Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999) ISBN 978-0-465-07269-9
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) ISBN 978-0-670-03151-1
• The Best American Science and Nature Writing (editor and introduction author, 2004) ISBN 978-0-618-24698-4
• Hotheads (an extract from How the Mind Works, 2005) ISBN 978-0-14-102238-3
• The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (2007) ISBN 978-0-670-06327-7
• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) ISBN 978-0-670-02295-3

Articles and essays[link]

• Pinker, S. (1991). "Rules of Language". Science 253 (5019): 530–535. DOI:10.1126/science.1857983. 
• Ullman, M.; Corkin, S.; Coppola, M.; Hickok, G.; Growdon, J. H.; Koroshetz, W. J.; Pinker, S. (1997). "A neural dissociation within language: Evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system". Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 9: 289–299. 
• Pinker, S. (2003) "Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche" In M. Christiansen & S. Kirby (Eds.), Language evolution: States of the Art New York: Oxford University Press.
• Pinker, S. (2005). "So How Does the Mind Work?". Mind and Language 20 (1): 1–24. DOI:10.1111/j.0268-1064.2005.00274.x. 
• Jackendoff, R.; Pinker, S. (2005). "The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language" (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, & Chomsky)". Cognition 97 (2): 211–225. DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.04.006. 
• S. Pinker (2007), "In Defense of Dangerous Ideas" Chicago Sun-Times, July 15, 2007
• A number of Pinker's articles at Harvard

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Steven Pinker

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Steven Pinker

• Official website

Interviews

• In Depth interview with Pinker, November 2, 2008
• Steven Pinker discusses the "Games People Play: Indirect Speech as a Window into Social Relationships"
• Steven Pinker on The Hour
• Steven Pinker Multimedia. Extensive lists of audio and video files
• Biology vs. the Blank Slate Reason magazine interview with Pinker
• Live interview with Steven Pinker on The Blank Slate
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
• Online video interview with Pinker

TED talks

• Chalking it up to the blank slate, 2003
• The stuff of thought, 2005
• A brief history of violence, 2007

Debates

• The Two Steves Debate with Steven Rose
• The Science of Gender and Science Debate with Elizabeth Spelke