In Unnatural Doubts, Michael Williams constructs a masterly polemic against the very idea of epistemology, as traditionally conceived.

The opportunities to become a good person are not the same for everyone. Modern European ethical theory, especially Kantian ethics, assumes the same virtues are accessible to all who are capable of rational choice. Character development, however, is affected by circumstances, such as those of wealth and socially constructed categories of gender, race, and sexual orientation, which introduce factors beyond the control of individuals. Implications of these influences for morality have, since the work of Williams and Nagel in the seventies, (...) raised questions in philosophy about the concept of moral luck. In The Unnatural Lottery, Claudia Card examines how luck enters into moral character and considers how some of those who are oppressed can develop responsibility. Luck is often best appreciated by those who have known relatively bad luck and have been unable to escape steady comparison of their lot with those of others. The author takes as her paradigms the luck of middle and lower classes of women who face violence and exploitation, of lesbians who face continuing pressure to hide or self-destruct, of culturally Christian whites who have ethnic privilege, and of adult survivors of child abuse. How have such people been affected by luck in who they are and can become, the good lives available to them, the evils they may be liable to embody? Other philosophers have explored the luck of those who begin from privileged positions and then suffer reversals of fortune. Claudia Card focuses on the more common cases of those who begin from socially disadvantaged positions, and she considers some who find their good luck troubling when its source is the unnatural lottery of social injustice. (shrink)

The Unnaturalness Objection to De-Extinction: A Critical Evaluation Carolyn Mason, University of Canterbury, New Zealand Abstract De-extinction of species has been criticised for being unnatural, as have the techniques that might be used to accomplish de-extinction. This objection of unnaturalness will be dismissed by those who claim that everything that humans do is natural, by those who claim that naturalness is a social construct, and by those who argue that ethical concerns arising from considerations of unnaturalness rest on a (...) failure properly to distinguish facts from values. However, none of these criticisms of the objection of unnaturalness is convincing, for reasons I will explain in this paper. The objection of unnaturalness might be motivated by concerns about either: (i) the attitude to nature that underpins de-extinction practices; or (ii) the consequences of interfering with nature. I show that objections of type (i) are rare in the literature, while objections of type (ii) can generally be ameliorated by working with cultures that have ties to the flora and fauna at issue, careful research into the value and nature of ecological systems, limiting risky activities, and limiting the use of de-extinction processes whenever their consequences are unclear. I conclude that the unnaturalness objection to de-extinction is of real but limited force. It gives reasons for caution rather than prohibition. (shrink)

Shows that many of our understandings about scientific thought can be corrected once we realise just how unnatural science is. Quoting scientists from Aristotle to Einstein, the book argues that scientific ideas are, with rare exceptions, counter-intuitive and contrary to common sense.

In the recent article, “Against the New Racial Naturalism”, Adam Hochman argues that new racial naturalists have been too hasty in their racial interpretation of genetic clustering results of human populations. While Hochman makes a number of good points, the purpose of this paper is to show that Hochman’s attack on new racial naturalists is misguided due to his definition of ‘racial naturalism’. Thus, I will show that Hochman’s critique is merely a consequence of an unnatural interpretation of racial (...) naturalism. (shrink)

Unnatural States is a radical critique of international theory, in particular, of the assumption of state agency--that states act in the world in their own right. Peter Lomas argues that since the universal states system is inequitable and rigid, and not all states are democracies anyway, this assumption is unreal, and to adopt it means reinforcing an unjust status quo. Looking at the concepts of state, nation, and agency, Lomas sees populations struggling to find an agreed model of the (...) state, owing to inherited material differences; and unsurprisingly, among theorists of the nation, only controversy and a great confusion of terms. Meanwhile, the functional incarnations of the state agent are caricatures: the mandarin state, the lawyer state, the landlord state, the heir-to-history state, and the patriot state. Yet recent developments in international theory (constructivism, scientific realism, postmodernism) sacrifice state agency only at the price of an unhelpful abstraction. The states system is dysfunctional and obsolete, Lomas contends, and international theory must be recast, with morality as central, to inspire and to guide historic change. He focuses in his conclusion on prescriptions for change, led by four moral concerns: human rights, weapons of mass destruction, relations between rich and poor societies, and the environment. "I begin this book," writes Lomas, "with the commonest commonplace of international theory, to expose it as a meaningless cliche. In the masterly hands of Hobbes, it was elaborated into a shock formula for organized society, a reading of history as civilization's failure. Kant sought to rescue morality from Hobbes and create the structures of modernity, but Kant's influence is coming to an end. In the Cold War, politicians disagreeing over another philosopher almost brought the world to an end. Hence the challenges of our time. These are primary and profound. Philosophers have done much to define the modern world. The point of international theory is to change it.". (shrink)

Unnatural Horizons presents a selective history of the last five centuries of landscape architecture at the intersection of poetics and science, rhetoric and technology, and philosophy and politics. It investigates the relations between garden aesthetics and metaphysics, discussing issues similar to those raised by Weiss's critically acclaimed Mirrors of Infinity. The Western garden has always served as a setting for music, dance, theater, sculpture, and architecture, as well as the minor arts of meditative contemplation and erotic seduction. The history (...) of landscape architecture is therefore inextricable from the histories of the other arts, and must be studied from an interdisciplinary and polycultural point of view. Some of the topics included in this book are the influence of neo-Platonic philosophy on the Italian Renaissance garden, erotic fantasies and the 18th-century libertine garden, the contrast between Thoreau's romantic notion of virgin nature and changes in perception due to increasing speed and mechanization, and the limits of landscape architecture as art form in 20th-century gardens. (shrink)

Husserl famously characterized phenomenology as a science of “infinite tasks.” Among other things, this claim refers to the maximally general scope of phenomeno.

The realist programme has degenerated by now to the point where it is quite beyond salvage. A token of this degeneration is that there are altogether too many realisms. It is as though by splitting into a confusing array of types and kinds, realism has hoped that some one variety might yet escape extinct. I shall survey the debate, and some of these realisms, below. Here I would just point out the obvious; that in so far as the successes of (...) science mount while realism continues to decline we must conclude that scientific success lends no support to realism. Since it is unlikely to support anti-realism, we have some reason to suspect that the philosophical debate over realism does not concern issues that can be settled by developments in the sciences, no matter how successful science may be. Further, since that success grounds a culture of acceptance for science and its entities, we have reason to believe that the existence of those entities is also not actually the issue that concerns realism. Afortiori, it is not the issue that concerns anti-realism either; nor, I might add, is anti-realism the winner in the philosophical debate that realism has lost. (shrink)

An Unnatural Attitude traces a style of musical thinking and listening that coalesced in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic and its legacy-the phenomenological style, which involved a search for contact with the world of perception. Resisting the influence of naturalism, figures in this milieu argued for a new understanding and description of the musical experience as something based not in introspection but rather in an attitude of outward, open orientation, where musical experience acquires meaning when the act (...) of listening is physically (materially) shared with others. (shrink)

Jordi Fernandez has recently offered an interesting account of introspective justification according to which the very states that (subjectively) justify one's first-order belief that p justify one's second order belief that one believes that p. I provide two objections to Fernandez's account.

Arthur C. Danto's essays not only critique bodies of work but reflect upon art's conceptual evolution as well, drawing for the reader a kind of "philosophical map" indicating how art and the criteria for judging it has changed over the twentieth century. In _Unnatural Wonders_ the renowned critic finds himself at a point when contemporary art has become wholly pluralistic, even chaotic-with one medium as good as another-and when the moment for the "next thing" has already passed. So the theorist (...) goes in search of contemporary art's most exhilarating achievements, work that bridges the gap between art and life, which, he argues, is now the definitive art of our time. Danto considers the work of such young artists as John Currin and Renee Cox and older living masters including Gerhard Richter and Sol LeWitt. He discusses artists of the New York School, like Philip Guston and Joan Mitchell, and international talents, such as the South African William Kentridge. Danto conducts a frank analysis of Matthew Barney's _The Cremaster Cycle_, Damien Hirst's skeletons and anatomical models, and Barbara Kruger's tchotchke-ready slogans; finds the ghost of Henry James in the work of Barnett Newman; and muses on recent Whitney Biennials and art influenced by 9/11. He argues that aesthetic considerations no longer play a central role in the experience and critique of art. Instead art addresses us in our humanity, as men and women who seek meaning in the "unnatural wonders" of art, a meaning that philosophy and religion are unable to provide. (shrink)

In 1993, Jim Mason, journalist, advocate, and pioneering figure in the contemporary animal advocacy movement, published An Unnatural Order-a sweeping overview of the origins of our hatred and destruction of the natural world and its creatures, from the dawn of agriculture to the present day. Now fully revised and updated to reflect developments in paleoanthropology and ethology, as well as greater awareness of, and urgency regarding, the climate crisis, An Unnatural Order offers an expansive overview of what has (...) changed (both for good and for ill) and what has unfortunately remained the same. His message is clear: until we grapple with the question of the animal, and our relationship with animality and the natural world, we will not be able to confront the consequences of our perpetuation of environmental destruction, biodiversity collapse, and our alienation from the Earth and one another. As brilliantly polemical and richly descriptive as it was when it was published almost three decades ago, this new version of An Unnatural Order is sure to excite a passionate debate about our role in either saving the ecosystems upon which all species (including our own) rely, or bringing it all to an end. (shrink)

This paper argues for the following four claims: the terms “natural” and “unnatural” are ambiguous. Genetically modified food is unnatural in some senses of the term “unnatural”. Natural food should be favored over unnatural food in some senses of the terms “natural” and “unnatural”. Genetically modified food is not necessarily unnatural in a sense that would offer a good reason for favoring food that is not genetically modified. The claims are defended by distinguishing four (...) different senses of the terms “natural” and “unnatural”. Each sense is analyzed with respect to its moral relevance for food choice. (shrink)

Computer-based logic proofs are a form of unnatural language in which the process and structure of proof generation can be observed in considerable detail. We have been studying how students respond to multimodal logic teaching, and performance measures have already indicated that students' pre-existing cognitive styles have a significant impact on teaching outcome. Furthermore, a large corpus of proofs has been gathered via automatic logging of proof development. This paper applies a series of techniques, including corpus statistical methods, to (...) the proof logs. The results indicate that students' cognitive styles influence the structure of their logical discourse, via their differing methods of handling abstract information in diagrams, and transferring information between modalities. (shrink)

A critique of dubious contrasts between "science" and "religion" drawn on the basis of cognitive-evolutionary accounts of human psychology, e.g.,. the claim that religious concepts are “likely” and “natural” for the human mind whereas scientific thinking is “rare” and “unnatural.” Initially made by biologist Lewis Wolpert in *The Unnatural Nature of Science* (1993) and anthropologist Pascal Boyer in *Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought* (2001), they are developed at length by philosopher R. N. McCauley in a*Why (...) Religion is Natural and Science is Not* (2011). These contrasts involve tendentiously narrow or broad definitions of the terms “science” and “religion” and the obliteration of the complex historical and intellectual relations between the ideas and practices currently identified by those terms. (shrink)

The notion that "nature" comes equipped with its own set of categories, enabling us to divide up everything that exists without overlap or leftovers, has considerable explanatory and prescriptive power. I examine two apparently unrelated arenas in which this notion is at work; namely, in the alleged discovery and subsequent physical "improvement" of the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and in the surgical alteration of intersex infants. In both cases, reconstruction is undertaken as a means of eliminating an ambiguity regarded (...) as "unnatural" —an "error" in nature that culture must correct. Elilminating ambiguity, in turn, enables accessibility. Fixing a person or a river firmly in a category allows us to have various kinds of access to them. For a river, the access is in part physical; it means being able to walk up to its headwaters without wearing hip waders. For a person, the access is both intellectual and social; only once I know what sex a person, is do I know how to treat them, and only then do I know whether they are an "appropriate" object of my erotic attention. (shrink)

This paper argues that Locke offers qualified support for male-male intimacy. While one can find denunciations of sodomy and ‘debauchery’ in his work, these claims are embedded in a natural and divine law framework that did not formally specify how to define much less morally characterize these actions. At the very least, Locke makes it difficult to strictly condemn sodomy or other homosexual acts as inherently immoral. This paper will explore three areas of interest: 1) Locke’s Paraphrases of the Pauline (...) epistles in which he argues that Paul’s interest in sexuality concerns temple idolatry rather than a trans-generational sexual ethic; 2) the empirical terms in which he appears to reject the viability of sodomy and his interest in native sexual practices show that he tolerated alternative conjugal frameworks; and 3) the curious case of his own sexuality, the passionate letters he shared with close male friends suggest that sexual obligations to society were not permanent and that as one ages alternative forms of love may be permitted. (shrink)

In debates on the ethics of artificial gametes, concepts of naturalness have been used in a number of different ways. Some have argued that the unnaturalness of artificial gametes means that it is unacceptable to use them in fertility treatments. Others have suggested that artificial gametes are no less natural than many other tissues or processes in common medical use. We suggest that establishing the naturalness or unnaturalness of artificial gametes is unlikely to provide easy answers as to the acceptability (...) of using them in fertility medicine. However, we also suggest that we should be cautious about repudiating any relationship between nature and moral evaluation. The property of being natural or man-made may not per se tell us anything about an entity’s moral status, but it has an important impact on the moral relationship between the creator and the created organism. (shrink)

Human-wildlife conflicts involving protected predators are a major social and environmental problem worldwide. A critical aspect in such conflicts is the role of state institutions regarding predators' conservation, and how this is construed by affected local populations. These interpretations are frequently embodied in conspiratorial rumours, sharing some common traits related to wild and domestic categories, spatial ordering and power relations. In southern Chile, a one-year, multi-sited ethnographic study of human-animal relations in and adjacent to protected areas was undertaken, foregrounding conspiratorial (...) rumours concerning protected predators. Through an analysis of this study and related international cases, this article argues that the uncritical dismissal of rumours and the categories used to interpret such conflicts have detrimental impacts on the conservation of wild predators. Such rumours should be understood as significant comment devices within human-animal relations and the power dynamics that frame human groups affected by them. (shrink)

From the legendary inventor Daedalus to Goethe's tragic Faust, from the automata-making magicians of E.T.A Hoffmann to Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein – ...

From a cultural-historical perspective, nature and nurture are contested concepts. The paper focuses on the nature/nurture debate in the work of William Shakespeare and in the Romantic tradition, and argues that while our Romantic inheritance problematises nurture, it tends to mystify nature. Given that conceptions of nature are culturally driven, there is an urgent educational challenge to problematise nature as well as nurture.

From a cultural-historical perspective, nature and nurture (and thus education) are contested concepts. The paper focuses on the nature/nurture debate in the work of William Shakespeare (influenced by Montaigne) and in the Romantic tradition (evidenced by Rousseau and Wordsworth), and argues that while our Romantic inheritance (still highly influential in education) problematises nurture, it tends to mystify nature. Given that conceptions of nature are culturally driven, there is an urgent educational challenge to problematise nature as well as nurture.

This essay critically examines the so-called ‘unnaturalness’ of historical thinking. I identify and analyse three lines of argument frequently invoked by historians to defend the validity of historical inquiry in response to scepticism, which is often couched in postmodern terms. In doing so, I highlight that these lines of argument are predicated upon historians’ thought processes and concepts being domain general. This idea of historical thinking as part of our ordinary thinking could help us develop a history curriculum in which (...) students are required to employ those processes and concepts to solve both everyday and historical questions. With such a curriculum, students could more easily see the relevance of history education to their daily lives. (shrink)

This article focuses on medical trials performed by Dr. Albert Kligman on the inmates of Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison between 1951 and 1974, which have been widely criticized as exploitative. I seek to investigate the mechanics behind the “ethical blind spot” that enabled the American medical community to laud Kligman for his efforts while simultaneously condemning the medical atrocities of the Holocaust and supporting the development of the Nuremberg Code. I argue that this nonrecognition hinges on a colonial logic by which (...) certain populations are produced as waste, both rhetorically and materially. Drawing on the incarcerated men’s accounts included in Allen Hornblum’s books on the subject, I trace the process by which human beings come to be reclassified as natural resources and their exploitation recast as industrious cultivation. (shrink)

Professor Vogel claims that my responses to scepticism leave the traditional problems standing. I argue in reply that he fails to take sufficiently seriously the diagnostic character of my enterprise. My aim is not to offer direct refutations of sceptical arguments, taking such arguments at face value, but to undermine their plausibility by revealing their dependence on unacknowledged and contentious theoretical presuppositions. Professor Rorty is much more sympathetic to my approach but thinks that there is a simpler and more direct (...) way to get the job done: that sketched by Davidson, who argues that scepticism fails because belief is intrinsically veridical. I doubt this. My approach is to identify the distinctively epistemological presuppositions of sceptical argumentation. If this remains undone, Davidsonian reflections on belief and meaning will seem only to transform sceptical problems about knowledge of the world into problems about knowledge of meaning. (shrink)

Many interpretations of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion have labored under the assumption that one of the characters represents Hume's view on the Design Argument, and Philo is often selected for this role. I reject this opinion by showing that Philo is inconsistent. He offers a decisive refutation of the Design Argument, yet later endorses this very argument. I then dismiss two prominent ways of handling Philo's reversal: first, I show that Philo is not ironic either in his skepticism or (...) in his theistic reversal. Second, I reject the suggestion that the Design Argument is a natural belief, since it differs significantly from causal and external world beliefs. Finally, I argue that the control the Design Argument exerts is the product of a youthful indoctrination that prevents Philo from consistently maintaining his skeptical position. (shrink)

Recent discussions about moral enhancement presuppose and recommend sets of values that relate to both the Western tradition of moral philosophy and contemporary empirical results of natural and social sciences, including moral psychology. It is argued here that this is a typology of thought that requires a fundamental interrogation. Proponents of moral enhancement do not account for important critical analyses of moral discourse, beginning with that of Friedrich Nietzsche and continuing with more prominent twentieth century thinkers such as the poststructuralist (...) Michel Foucault, the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, and the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. In this paper, such analyses are taken into account to highlight the need for more fundamental philosophical interrogation of the project of moral enhancement. (shrink)

Long before self-awareness, memory, foresight and powers of conscious deliberation emerge to give an advantage over those creatures that lack those things, there is a more promising alternative to consciousness at every step of the way: more efficient unconscious mechanisms, which seem equally or more likely to be thrown up by spontaneous variation. If you had to undertake something really difficult – for example growing in utero a brain with all its connexions in place – consciousness is the last thing (...) you would want to oversee the task. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s “Lectures on Religious Belief” (LRB) provide a source for as yet unexplored connections to religious ideas as treated in Robert N. McCauley’s book Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not (2013), and to other CSR scholars who focus attention on how “cognitively speaking it is religion that is natural and science that is largely unnatural.” Tensions are explored in this paper between our “maturationally natural” religious inclinations to adopt religious ideas and the “unnatural” demands sometimes made (...) upon people, either a) by imposition of evidentialist norms over religious utterances, or b) by an agent’s adherence to perceived demands of theological correctness and to a particularly demanding conception of genuine or authentic faith. Wittgenstein uses Bertrand Russell and Father O'Hara to articulate these two tensions, and to offer alternatives which to some degree assuage them. I argue that such tensions are not only illuminating of the more and less helpful models of the relationship between reason and faith, but also open up new research questions which connect contemporary CSR and Wittgensteinian (or more broadly Continental) approaches to philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Many interpretations of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion have labored under the assumption that one of the characters represents Hume's view on the Design Argument, and Philo is often selected for this role. I reject this opinion by showing that Philo is inconsistent. He offers a decisive refutation of the Design Argument, yet later endorses this very argument. I then dismiss two prominent ways of handling Philo's reversal: first, I show that Philo is not ironic either in his skepticism or (...) in his theistic reversal. Second, I reject the suggestion that the Design Argument is a natural belief, since it differs significantly from causal and external world beliefs. Finally, I argue that the control the Design Argument exerts is the product of a youthful indoctrination that prevents Philo from consistently maintaining his skeptical position. (shrink)

Paul Virilio _The Vision Machine_ Translated by Julie Rose London: British Film Institute, 1994 ISBN 0-253-32574-9 (hbk) 0-253-20901-3 pbk 81 pages.