Lectures delivered in the Dept. of Philosophy of the University of Pennsylvania during the spring semester of 1967. Includes bibliographical references.

Maria Ossowska, leading philosopher of the Warsaw school, here sets out to show that moral ideas can be examined with scientific rigor. She proposes a sociology of morals that can be verified by observation and is philosophically based on the development of descriptive ethics.

In order to characterize the conception of dignity, the author quotes some examples of its derogation. The most drastic is the example of its derogation by the staff of concentration camps. Analysis of such examples leads to a formulation that dignity is manifested by those who know to defend certain values, recognized by themselves, when with the defence of these values the sense of their own value is connected. This is a pure formal characteristic. Its content can vary together with (...) variations of values which are defended. Generally, the observation of Hobbes seems to be justified which permits to associate dignity with the feeling of power and to consider self-degradation as a symptom of weakness. The use of the conception of dignity introduces a new scale of values into morality: it divides behaviour into honourable and degrading, while honour and degradation are not measured by the social effect of a deed. Among the known principles securing the dignity of a man two deserve to be mentioned: the principle of Kant which does not allow to consider a man exclusively as a mean leading to an end and the principle of Marx according to which man should be considered as the highest being. (shrink)

The common opinion is that moral principles act in social life like a lubricant which removes, or at least reduces, frictions occurring among men. The author analyses this opinion. For this purpose she takes into consideration successively: the conception of conflict, its kinds, and its function in the social life, as well as cases in which a moral norm can actually mitigate a conflict or even make it impossible. The author agrees with those views which emphasize the positive function of (...) certain conflicts and which demand that it is by moral norms that we should determine which conflicts ought to be removed and which maintained. Another question is whether all ethical rules perform the pacifying function which is generally attributed to them. To this question the author is inclined to give a negative answer. In the first place, there exist two groups of rules which do not act as a lubricant, that is, rules granting to man some rights which are maintained with full determination, even if they lead to collisions, and other rules putting certain demands on people in relation to a personal pattern, rules which are not abandoned, even if they do engender conflicts. (shrink)

The author tries to show that the old distinction between bodily and mental pains and pleasures, still maintained by many ethical writers, deserves to be forgotten. An analysis of the possible interpretations of this distinction leads to the opinion that people call mental those pleasures which they have in high esteem and that they treat as bodily pleasures the ones less approved. Thus the distinction which was expected to contribute to an elaboration of a hierarchy of values already implies one, (...) and the statement that mental pleasures belong to a higher order is a mere tautology. (shrink)

Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What’s Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to (...) social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development results from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and “looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term “human nature” altogether. (shrink)

"Dr. Montessori was par excellence the great interpreter of the child; and though she herself has passed on from the scene of her labours her work will still go on."-- Westminster Cathedral Chronicle One of the landmark books in the history of education--and one of the least expensive editions now available--this volume describes a new system for educating youngsters. Based on a radical concept of liberty for the pupil and highly formal training of separate sensory, motor, and mental capacities, the (...) system enabled youngsters to master reading, writing, and arithmetic rapidly and substantially. Included are discussions of scientific pedagogy; discipline; the importance of proper diet, gymnastics, and manual labor; and many other topics. Unabridged reprint of the classic 1912 edition. (shrink)

This paper addresses whether the often-bemoaned loss of unity of knowledge about humans, which results from the disciplinary fragmentation of science, is something to be overcome. The fragmentation of being human rests on a couple of distinctions, such as the nature-culture divide. Since antiquity the distinction between nature (roughly, what we inherit biologically) and culture (roughly, what is acquired by social interaction) has been a commonplace in science and society. Recently, the nature/culture divide has come under attack in various ways, (...) in philosophy as well as in cultural anthropology. Regarding the latter, for instance, the divide was quintessential in its beginnings as an academic dis-cipline, when Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the first professional anthropologists in the US, rallied for (what I call) the right to ignore—in his case, human nature—by adopting a separationist epistemic stance. A separationist stance will be understood as an epistemic research heuristic that defends the right to ignore a specif-ic phenomenon (e.g., human nature) or a specific causal factor in an explanation typical for a disciplinary field. I will use Kroeber’s case as an example for making a general point against a bias towards integration (synthesis bias, as I call it) that is exemplified, for instance, by defenders of evolutionary psychology. I will claim that, in principle, a separationist stance is as good as an integrationist stance since both can be equally fruitful. With this argument from fruitful sepa-ration in place, not just the separationist stance but also the nature/culture di-vide can be defended against its critics. (shrink)

This paper argues that indexical reference is a species of discourse reference, just like anaphora. Both varieties of discourse reference involve not only context dependence, but also context change. The act of speaking up focuses attention and thereby makes this very speech event available for discourse reference by indexicals. Mentioning something likewise focuses attention, making the mentioned entity available for subsequent discourse reference by anaphors. Empirical evidence is presented from grammatical centering in Kalaallisut and "shifty indexicals" in Slave attitude reports.

This paper reflects on the notion and structural components of two concepts: the human condition and human nature. Likewise, it is proposed that both concepts should be included in the basic themes not only in the field of Educational Philosophy, but also in all disciplines where the human being occupies a privileged place. Human condition is understood as a state of subjection to everything with which human beings interact and represents the starting point to ascend to three natures that correspond (...) to human beings. Hegel emphasizes two natures of man. The first is characterized by having a biological structure governed by instincts. The second is culture and to ascend to it requires processes of intellection that can be objectified through consciousness. The third human nature proposed in this paper is rooted in Ernst Bloch’s principle of hope. It is materialized by human actions tending to the construction of the future from the discovery of what is not-yet-conscious that, when identified, is achieved through actions. (shrink)