Challenging commonly held biological, religious, and ethical beliefs, internationally well known historian of science Roger Smith boldly argues that human nature is not some "thing" awaiting discovery but is active in understanding itself. According to Smith, "being human" is a self-creation made possible through a reflective circle of thought and action, with a past and a future, and studying this "history" from a range of perspectives is fundamental to human self-understanding. Smith's argument brings together historical and contemporary debates concerning materialism (...) and human nature and the relations of the different fields of knowledge. He draws on classic writings from across the human sciences, touching on sociology, anthropology, brain sciences, history, philosophical hermeneutics, and critical theory, and demonstrates that there is no position outside history for an absolutely objective or eternally valid view of human nature. The question "what is human?" does not have and could not possible have one answer. Instead, there exists a variety of answers for different purposes, and there are good reasons for the many conceptions of what it is to be human. Smith does not treat human nature as only biological, economic, or moral, but as a multidimensional subject that should be considered in its proper historical context. By understanding this context, Smith believes, we can come to a truer understanding of ourselves. Persuasively and elegantly written, _Being Human_ takes an important new turn in the philosophical study of being human. (shrink)

The article began life as, and retains the character of, spoken argument for not allowing the neurosciences to shape the agenda of the history of the human sciences. This argument is then used to suggest purposes and content for the journal, History of the Human Sciences. The style is rhetorical, even polemical, but open-ended. I challenge two clichés about the neurosciences, that they intellectually challenge other areas of knowledge, and that they are reconfiguring the human with the notion of ‘brainhood’. (...) The suggestion is that the real challenges lie elsewhere; specifically with understanding the relations of different forms of knowledge and making it conceivable by political action, or simply mode of life, to implement one way of being human rather than another. The conclusion re-asserts the value of the heading, ‘history of the human sciences’, and of the value of the journal with this name, as a forum in which to reflect on the identity and relations of forms of knowledge about ‘the human’ in all their variety. (shrink)

Psychological terms, such as ‘mind’, ‘memory’, ‘emotion’ and indeed ‘psychology’ itself, have a history. This history, I argue, supports the view that basic psychological categories refer to historical and social entities, and not to ‘natural kinds’. The case is argued through a wide ranging review of the historiography of western psychology, first, in connection with the field’s extreme modern diversity; second, in relation to the possible antecedents of the field in the early modern period; and lastly, through a brief introduction (...) to usage of the words ‘soul’, ‘mind’, ‘memory’ and ‘emotion’. The discussion situates the history of psychology within a large historical context, questions assumptions about the continuity of meaning, and draws out implications for the philosophical and social constitution of ‘psychology’ and ‘the psychological’ from the existing literature. The historical evidence, this paper concludes, does not support the conventional presumption that modern psychological terms describe ‘natural kinds’. (shrink)

A number of writers have picked out the way knowledge in the human sciences reflexively alters the human subject as what separates these sciences from the natural sciences. Furthermore, they take this reflexivity to be a condition of moral existence. The article sympathetically examines this emphasis on reflexive processes, but it rejects the particular conclusion that the reflexive phenomenon enables us to demarcate the human sciences. The first sections analyse the different meanings that references to reflexivity have in the psychological (...) and social sciences, in philosophy and in material life, and they link these meanings to the post-positivist philosophy of the social sciences. The discussion considers the problems raised by being reflexive about reflexivity itself. They put a large question mark against hopes for a revived philosophical anthropology. Whatever the philosophical arguments, however, there is clearly a reflexive practice in the humanities and human sciences which there is not in the natural sciences. This leads to the argument that there are different forms of knowledge for different purposes and that it may therefore be divergence of purpose, not reflexivity itself, that creates differences among the sciences. It is the fact and purpose of human self-reflection that marks out the human sciences. If this is so, then it explains why an apparently circumscribed question about the classification of knowledge turns out to be inseparable from ontological and moral questions about human identity. (shrink)

Historians of the Victorian period have begun to re-evaluate the general background and impact of Darwin's theory of the origin of species by means of natural selection. An emerging picture suggests that the Darwinian theory of evolution was only one aspect of a more general change in intellectual positions. It is possible to summarize two correlated developments in the second half of the nineteenth century: the seculariszation of majors areas of thought, and the increasing breakdown of a common intellectual milieu. (...) Studies in linguistics, historical criticism, socio-political theory, theologys, and anthropology, besides evolutionary theory, contributed to these developments. It has also been argued that the background of evolutionary thought lay within a relatively unified early Victorian intellectual context with shared religious, moral, and scientific concepts. Evolutionary theory contributed to the disintegration of this shared context, but it did not intrinsically assume a clear demarcation between value-laden ideas and scientific ideas. On the one hand, in the later Victorian period, religious and scientific intellectuals found it increasingly hard to share common ground. On the other hand, they did sometimes share an enthusiasm for applying biological models to social and ethical theory. It is necessary to look closely before ascribing any increased differentiation of positions to the impact of evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Most analysts agree that democratic theorists have not offered a persuasive answer to the question of how the boundaries of a demos, a democratic people, should legitimately be defined. Some contend that boundaries should be maintained in ways that preserve sufficient sense of common identity to sustain support for redistributive policies. Many others endorse the “principle of all affected interests,” but it has been widely criticized as unrealistically destructive of too many existing community boundaries. This essay argues for an alternative (...) “principle of constituted identities.” It holds that, subject to certain important qualifications, modern constitutional democracies, at least, are morally obligated to extend the option of full membership to all those whose identities have been substantially constituted through such regimes’ coercive policies. Keywords : civic boundaries; principle of affected interests; constitutional democracy; stories of peoplehood; cultural identity (Published online: 25 August, 2008) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics 2008. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v1i3.1860. (shrink)

The paper examines the reputation of C. S. Sherrington as both eminent physiologist and eminent representative of scientific culture. It describes Sherrington's ‘figurehead’ status. In his career, research and personal manner, he embodied a life of science, not only not in opposition to humanistic values but in fact appearing to be the highest achievement of those values. An analysis of Sherrington's research, of his lectures on Man on His Nature and of his poetry supports this account. The paper uses Sherrington's (...) reputation to describe the values of an establishment group of English-speaking scientists and physicians in the 1930s and 1940s. (shrink)

On August 30, 2013, the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on political epistemology as part of its annual meetings. Co-chairing the roundtable were Jeffrey Friedman, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin; and Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University. The other participants were Scott Althaus, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Mark Bevir, Department of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley; Rogers Smith, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania; and Susan (...) Stokes, Department of Political Science, Yale University. We thank the participants for permission to republish their remarks, which they subsequently edited for clarity. (shrink)

Americans have always been divided over whether to welcome or to discourage immigration. But virtually all American leaders have rested their views on notions that the United States has unique providential or world-historical significance-as an asylum for the world's oppressed, as a model to the world, or even as the world's leader. Today, it is normatively desirable for the U.S. to view itself not as the world's "city on a hill" but simply as one worthy political society among many others. (...) Whether such a view can be made politically appealing to most Americans, however, remains in doubt. (shrink)

Ethics &International Affairs, Volume 24, Issue 4, Page 433-435, Winter 2010.

An important feature of some recent jurisprudential writings is the tendency to reject the precept of liberal individualism which affirms the priority of the principles of the "right conduct" over the substantive conceptions of "the good". This rejection, explicit in a recent book by Rogers M. Smith, and implicit in a recent work by Guido Calabresi, leads to strikingly illiberal consequences; hence, this provides indirect confirmation that the priority of the right over the good constitutes the most reliable defense of (...) individual liberty against majoritarian oppression. In Smith, an attempt to replace this priority with the principle of "rational liberty" leads to the disappearance of the guarantees of minority rights against orthodox majorities; in Calabresi, the doctrine of weighing and balancing competing moral principles of "the good" fails to provide an explanation for the strongly held moral intuition that some external preferences have to be disqualified at the outset, before they enter the forum of moral bargaining. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOn September 4, 2015, the Political Epistemology/ideas, Knowledge, and Politics section of the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on ideational turns in the four subdisciplines of political science as part of its annual meetings. Chairing the roundtable was Jeffrey Friedman, Department of Government, University of Texas, Austin. The other participants were Jeffrey Checkel, Department of Political Science, Simon Fraser University; Matthias Matthijs, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; and Rogers Smith, Department of Political Science, University of (...) Pennsylvania. We thank the participants for permission to republish their remarks, which they were offered the opportunity to edit after the fact. (shrink)

The study of politics seems endlessly beset by debates about method. At the core of these debates is a single unifying concern: should political scientists view themselves primarily as scientists, developing ever more sophisticated tools and studying only those phenomena to which such tools may fruitfully be applied? Or should they instead try to illuminate the large, complicated, untidy problems thrown up in the world, even if the chance to offer definitive explanations is low? Is there necessarily a tension between (...) these two endeavours? Are some domains of political inquiry more amenable to the building up of reliable, scientific knowledge than others, and if so, how should we deploy our efforts? In this book, some of the world's most prominent students of politics offer original discussions of these pressing questions, eschewing narrow methodological diatribes to explore what political science is and how political scientists should aspire to do their work. (shrink)

Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent traces America 's woes to an erosion of community and a loss of a sense of collective self?governance. He recommends a more communitarian, republican public philosophy as the cure. His book illuminates many important historical and contemporary issues, particularly the link between systems of political economy and visions of citizenship. His methods are, however, too impressionistic to support his empirical claims. He particularly neglects the role of civic republicanism in America 's history of racial, gender, and (...) religious discrimination. Hence his call for Americans to minimize liberal doctrines of individual rights in favor of communally minded republicanism is not fully persuasive. (shrink)

Larry May's "Genocide: A Normative Account" is not a study of genocide per se, but rather an attempt to draw attention to the conceptual and practical difficulties and "puzzles" of conceptualizing and prosecuting genocide under international law.