Online research in philosophy

John Dupre warns that our understanding of human nature is being distorted by two faulty and harmful forms of pseudo-scientific thinking. Not just in the academic world but in everyday life, we find one set of experts who seek to explain the ends at which humans aim in terms of evolutionary theory, while the other set uses economic models to give rules of how we act to achieve those ends. Dupre demonstrates that these theorists' explanations do not work and that, if taken seriously, their theories tend to have dangerous social and political consequences. For these reasons, it is important to resist scientism: an exaggerated conception of what science can be expected to do for us. Dupre restores sanity to the study of human nature by pointing the way to a proper understanding of humans in the societies that are our natural and necessary environments. Anyone interested in science and human life will enjoy this book--unless they are its targets.

Appeals to the idea of human nature are frequent in the voluminous literature on the ethics of enhancing human beings through biotechnology. Two chief concerns about the impact of enhancements on human nature have been voiced. The first is that enhancement may alter or destroy human nature. The second is that if enhancement alters or destroys human nature, this will undercut our ability to ascertain the good because, for us, the good is determined by our nature. The first concern assumes that altering or destroying human nature is in itself a bad thing. The second concern assumes that human nature provides a standard without which we cannot make coherent, defensible judgments about what is good. I will argue (1) that there is nothing wrong, per se, with altering or destroying human nature, because, on a plausible understanding of what human nature is, it contains bad as well as good characteristics and there is no reason to believe that eliminating some of the bad would so imperil the good as to make the elimination of the bad impermissible, and (2) that altering or destroying human nature need not result in the loss of our ability to make judgments about the good, because we possess a conception of the good by which we can and do evaluate human nature. I will argue that appeals to human nature tend to obscure rather than illuminate the debate over the ethics of enhancement and can be eliminated in favor of more cogent considerations.

It is claimed to be a crucial advantage of supervaluationism over other theories of vagueness that it avoids any commitment to sharp boundaries. This thesis will challenge that claim and argue that almost all forms of supervaluationism are committed to infinitely sharp boundaries and that some of these boundaries are interesting enough to be problematic. I shall argue that only iterated supervaluationism can avoid any commitment to sharp boundaries, but on the other hand that is the model that Terrance Horgan has recently argued is a form of transvaluationism and thus logically incoherent. I shall first argue that infinitely higher-order vagueness gives rise to an infinite number of boundaries. I will then argue that an infinite number of these boundaries are, in the case of the vague term ‘tall’, located over a finite range of heights. I will argue that because of this, these boundaries must be infinitely sharp. I shall argue that on every plausible non-iterated supervaluationist model, some such boundary will mark a sharp boundary between heights that would make someone ‘more tall than not tall’ and heights that would not. Finally I shall argue that this is the sort of interesting sharp boundary supervaluationism must not admit.

This essay examines how nature pertains to social life. Part I describes the social ontology the essay employs to address this issue. This ontology is of the site variety and is opposed to ontologies of both the individualist and socialist sorts. Part II describes where nature appears in this ontology. Artifacts are differentiated from nature, and much of ?nature? is shown to be second nature, a type of artifact that looks and feels like nature. Part II concludes by disputing the idea that nature forms a backdrop against which society develops semi-autonomously. Part III examines the idea of human history as a natural history. Opposing construals of natural history that treat human-social existence as a piece of nature, it defends the necessity of maintaining distinctions between social life and nature and between social history and natural change. None the less, it continues, human history is a natural history. These claims are held together via a neo-Marxian conception of human natural history as the development of humankind through its entanglement with nature. Elements of the ?metabolism of humankind with nature are described.

The paper finds at least nine material differences between acts in history and entities in nature. (1) Nature rules out intentional structures essential to human acts. (2) Material trajectories in nature are unique, but acts in history are open to multiple interpretations.(3) In terms of set theory, history is bigger than nature. (4) Historical acts cannot be demarcated from the rest of the world by interactions with the world at a boundary. What happens far off-stage can transform human acts in focal view. (5) Human acts can be revised after the fact. Material trajectories in nature cannot be. (6) Meaning and interpretation are constitutive of human acts. (7) Human acts may involve physical motions; they do not always do so. (8) Human acts always involve final causes. (9) Efficient causes in nature determinetheir effects; efficient causes in history may not.

In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature , Steven Pinker maintains that at present there are three competing views of human nature—a Christian theory, a "blank slate" theory (what I call a social constructivist theory), and a Darwinian theory—and that the last of these will triumph in the end. I argue that neither the outcome of such competition nor the particular content of these theories is as clear as Pinker believes. In this essay I take a critical as well as a constructive look at the challenge presented by a Darwinian theory of human nature—a challenge to the social sciences and the humanities and also to theology and more specifically to a Christian understanding of human nature.

In Wuthering Heights a man and a woman fall in love and their passion for each other wreaks havoc on several lives, theirs included.1 Long after his beloved is dead, Heathcliff’s life revolves entirely around his love for her. Frustrated by events, his grand romantic passion expresses itself in destructive spasms of antisocial behavior. Catherine, the object of this passion, marries another man on a whim, but describes her feelings for him as like superficial foliage, whereas “her love for Heathcliff resembles eternal rocks beneath.” “I am Heathcliff,” she declares, shortly before dying at the age of nineteen.

Nussbaum seems to have had a spell during which she made villains heroes (and sometimes visa versa). Thus she has argued, in effect, that Steerforth is the hero of David Copperfield, and Heathcliff the most admirable character in Wuthering Heights. Here I discuss her more or less explicit claim that Alcibiades is the hero, (and Socrates the villain) in Plato’s Symposium.