Abstract
It is argued that a chief obstacle to a naturalistic explanation of the origins
of mind is human exceptionalism, as exempli fi ed in the seventeenth century by
René Descartes and in the twentieth century by Noam Chomsky. As an antidote to
human exceptionalism, we turn to the account of aesthetic judgment in Charles
Darwin’s Descent of Man , according to which the mental capacities of humans differ
from those of lower animals only in degree, and not in kind. Thoroughgoing
naturalistic explanation of these capacities is made easier by shifting away from the
substance-metaphysical implications of the search for an account of mind , toward a
dispositional account of the origins of mindfulness .