This chapter contains sections titled: Nature, Nurture, and the Female Serial Killer Introduction Female Nurture and Human Nature: Some Philosophical Background Female Serial Killers: A Typology Of Poets and Monsters: Our Common Nature.

ABSTRACT Philosophers of education have written about the moral, ethical, racial, and gendered dimensions of the hidden curriculum of what we eat, who we eat with, and the significance afforded this moment of the school day. To this body of literature, we add the observation that female bodies were positioned by Jean Jacques Rousseau as necessary food for the stuff of society. We trace the ways in which Rousseau’s rendering of the natural female body have followed us into (...) our modern educational systems such that any hopes for gender equality in our educational and social structures must attend to the pervasive naturalization of the bodies – human and nonhuman – that we are taught to milk for all that they are worth. (shrink)

The central thesis of this article is that the notion of second nature that John McDowell has reanimated has something of ethical and educational importance, thereby possibly extending the borders of the philosophy of education. The argument to this conclusion is the subject of serious consideration and criticism. The aim of this article is therefore to clarify the educational implications of the conception of second nature by responding to the three likely objections: (1) the charge of idealism, (2) (...) the charge of anthropocentrism, and (3) the charge of triviality. Through critical discussions of these criticisms, it is made explicit that second nature, from the outset, illuminates every sphere of the lives of human beings. A lively appreciation of this leads to the conclusion that the issue of how we develop our world of meaning with the conception of second nature should come under the scope of serious philosophical discourse on education. (shrink)

The view of evil human nature is important in Chinese and western cultures. The thesis chooses evil human in St. Augustine’s thoughts and Hsun Tzu’s thoughts to compare and analyze evil in these two. St. Augustine, who is called “the Saint of God”, views the definition of evil, the resource of it, and salvations of it from the aspect of religious beliefs. He considers that evil is the privation of goodness and is not created by God. Because (...) God is omnipotent and all-good, it is impossible for God to create evil. Evil results from the free will of human beings themselves. If people want to attain their salvations, they should use their free will to choose good will and follow the goodness given by God. Hsun Tzu, one of Confucian scholars, puts forward evil human nature which is totally different from good human nature in Confucianism. He views the definition of evil, the source of it, and ways to change evil into good from the angle of social reality in Warring States Period. In Hsun Tzu’s views, evil results from the uninhibited extension of sound physical needs and desires for living. Hsun Tzu believes that human nature is evil and goodness comes from nurture, therefore, converting evil into good is to change human nature through nurturing. By further comparison and analysis, the thesis further looks into these two perspectives from their differences and similarities. It states their differences from five aspects: backgrounds, ways to change evil to good, categories, historical status, and positions of human beings. Apart from those, the thesis also refers to their similarities to complement the comparative analysis. From comparison and analysis, we can draw two conclusions: first, evil human nature from Hsun Tzu is simple in connotation and relatively objective compared with the view of St. Augustine; second, St. Augustine thinks that human beings are equal in front of evil, which has positive significance compared with the ideas posed by Hsun Tzu who insists on the distinction between saint and ordinary people, between monarchs and their subjects. (shrink)

Are women human? A puzzling, even bizarre, question, yet one raised by many philosophical theories regarding human nature and women. Human beings are a species, and species are defined, albeit in a very complicated way, by their biological attributes. Women, of all groups that have ever been oppressed, are most clearly and undeniably differentiated by their bodies. Since men have always been taken as the norm, the question was posed as to the implications of women's (...) differences from this norm. Although few philosophers seriously questioned whether women were a distinct species from men, many explicitly denied that women had the properties they defined as human, or else they designated traits historically more true of men as characteristically human. Aristotle referred to the female character as “a sort of natural deficiency.”. (shrink)

Habitus is a logical and ethical Aristotelian concept that was first introduced to the Islamic world through the translation of Greek philosophical works into Arabic in the ninth century. Following its introduction and until the nineteenth century, thinkers and scholars of the Islamic world naturalized it creatively in various intellectual systems. In ethical usage, habitus is a disposition that, once acquired and well established through a process of accustoming, allows humans to perceive and act in certain ways without deliberation (...) or reflection. This concept explained how humans transcended their inborn natures, and as such it was amenable to employment in manifold fields and contexts. The present article studies significant applications from the ninth to the nineteenth century by thinkers of the Islamic world, who fleshed out the Aristotelian concept and used it for their own purposes. Among other things, it shows that the two main trends of naturalization involved application of the concept to religious Islamic discourses and to the study of humans and their society, anticipating modern Western sociological usage. (shrink)

In this volume Donald Munro, author of important studies on early and contemporary China, provides a critical analysis of the doctrines of the Sung Neo-Confucian philosopher Chu Hsi (1130-1200). For nearly six centuries Confucian orthodoxy was based on Chu Hsi's commentaries on Confucian classics. These commentaries were the core of the curriculum studied by candidates for the civil service in China until 1905 and provided guidelines both for personal behavior and for official policy. Munro finds the key to the complexities (...) of Chu Hsi's thought in his mode of discourse: the structural images of family, stream of water, mirror, body, plant, and ruler. Furthermore, he discloses the basic framework of Chu Hsi's ethics and the theory of human nature that is provided by these illustrative images. As revealed by Munro, Chu Hsi's thought is polarized between family duty and a broader altruism and between obedience to external authority and self-discovery of moral truth. To understand these tensions moves us toward clarifying the meaning of each idea in the sets. The interplay of these ideas, selectively emphasized over time by later Confucians, is a background for explaining modern Chinese thought. In it, among other things, Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism co-exist. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Every student of the early history of mankind, and their numbers have greatly increased of recent years, must be well acquainted with the recent conflict between the advocates of diffusion in interpreting the origins and world-wide manifestations of civilization and those of independent development, or, in more exact terms, of the spontaneous generation of cultures. To an unbiassed observer of the evidence, it must also be a matter of astonishment that the ethnologists of the latter school have for so long (...) refused to admit a distribution of ideas, beliefs and customs which are not only of proved historical but daily and common occurrence. It is impossible to enter a library or a club, or to walk down Regent Street and look into the shop windows, without realizing that world-diffusion is the very stuff of civilized existence. It is impossible to travel the remoter regions of the globe to-day without being constantly reminded of London, Leeds and Manchester. Nobody, again,would dream of controverting the known phenomena of the spread of great religions, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, from a single original centre. The school of independent development of cultures not merely ignores or twists to its own purposes a gigantic mass of evidence bearing upon the subject in dispute and capable of being interpreted in only one way; it displays a singular disregardof common sense and human nature. The innate conservatism of humanity, its readiness to live on the. (shrink)

Alex Byrne’s article, “Are Women Adult Human Females?”, asks a question that Byrne treats as nearly rhetorical. Byrne’s answer is, ‘clearly, yes’. Moreover, Byrne claims, 'woman' is a biological category that does not admit of any interpretation as (also) a social category. It is important to respond to Byrne’s argument, but mostly because it is paradigmatic of a wider phenomenon. The slogan “women are adult human females” is a political slogan championed by anti-trans activists, appearing on billboards, pamphlets, (...) and anti-trans online forums. In this paper, I respond to Byrne’s argument, revealing significant problems with its background assumptions, content, and methodology. (shrink)

This series offers central philosophical treatises of Aquinas in new, state-of-the-art translations distinguished by their accuracy and use of clear and nontechnical modern vocabulary. Annotation and commentary accessible to undergraduates make the series an ideal vehicle for the study of Aquinas by readers approaching him from a variety of backgrounds and interests.

_Human Nature After Darwin_ is an original investigation of the implications of Darwinism for our understanding of ourselves and our situation. It casts new light on current Darwinian controversies, also providing an introduction to philosophical reasoning and a range of philosophical problems. Janet Radcliffe Richards claims that many current battles about Darwinism are based on mistaken assumptions about the implications of the rival views. Her analysis of these implications provides a much-needed guide to the fundamentals of Darwinism (...) and the so-called Darwin wars, as well as providing a set of philosophical techniques relevant to wide areas of moral and political debate. The lucid presentation makes the book an ideal introduction to both philosophy and Darwinism as well as a substantive contribution to topics of intense current controversy. It will be of interest to students of philosophy, science and the social sciences, and critical thinking. (shrink)

The lucid presentation makes the book an ideal introduction to both philosophy and Darwinism, as well as a substantive contribution to topics of intense current ...

In the face of the current climate and environmental crisis, not only pragmatic solutions but also a theoretical shift is needed. A philosophical and ethical reflection is most necessary to guide our actions by promoting a renewed relationship between human and non-human nature, providing the theoretical and ethical foundations to initiate a new path of coexistence on this Planet. In this paper, I will make the case for the relevance of evolutionary biology knowledge to current challenges (...) in environmental ethics. I argue that by acknowledging biological evidence, philosophy can fruitfully reconsider the complex issue of the human-nature relationship from a non-anthropocentric perspective. Evolutionary biology approaches the human-nature relation problem from an ecological dimension and a deep-time perspective. Contra anthropocentric theories, scientific evidence shows (i) that there has never been any ontological separation between humans and the rest of the natural world, and (ii) that considering the profound evolutionary interdependence between these two spheres is essential to understand the ongoing climatic and environmental crises. In considering some specific cases – namely, the relational approach to ecosystems, the holobiont theory, and the niche construction theory – , I put into focus the fallacy of the anthropocentric vision that marks the current development model pursued by globalized Western societies, and contrast this with an approach of ‘humanistic ecocentrism’. I argue that this approach is consistent with scientific evidence, and that overcoming the present crisis will require a profound transformation in societal and individual values, which can only be achieved through a scientifically and ethically based ‘ecological education’. (shrink)

This is a major new study of Thomas Aquinas, the most influential philosopher of the Middle Ages. The book offers a clear and accessible guide to the central project of Aquinas' philosophy: the understanding of human nature. Robert Pasnau sets the philosophy in the context of ancient and modern thought, and argues for some groundbreaking proposals for understanding some of the most difficult areas of Aquinas' thought: the relationship of soul to body, the workings of sense and intellect, (...) the will and the passions, and personal identity. Structured around a close reading of the treatise on human nature from the Summa theologiae and deeply informed by a wide knowledge of the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy, this study will offer specialists a series of novel and provocative interpretations, while providing students with a reference commentary on one of Aquinas' core texts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:TRANSIENT NATURES AT THE EDGES OF HUMAN LIFE: A THOMISTIC EXPLORATION PHILIP SMITH, O.P. Providence College Providence, R.I. T:HE CONCEPT OF human nature as the intrinsic and wdical source of characteristic human a;ctivity has great mportanoe for natural law ethics. But olosely allied to the concept of human nature is the possibility of there being tmnsient natures in humans, and this rpossirbility has (...) implications for human life at its outer edges. What transient natures are wiill he discussed 1in detail below. Let us,say for now that they are the life principles of entities transition from one state of being to another. These forms enjoy only a temporary existence before they disappear and are replaced by other emerging forms.1 When applied to the outer limits of human existence, such transient natures offer useful insights for addressing the difficult problems of when personhood begins and when death occurs. Thomistic philosophy defines a human person a;s a combination of mrutte1· and,form, more oommorrly referred to as a unity of hody and soul.2 Relativie to the beginning of Jife and the 1 Such natures are discussed in William A. Wallace, 0.P., "Nature and Human Nature as the Norm in Medical Ethics,'' in Catholic Perspectives on Medical Morals, ed. E.D. Pellegrino et al., Philosophy and Medicine Series, Vol. 24 (Dordrecht-Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1989). This essay was originally presented at an international conference held at the Joseph and Rose Kenned,y Institute of Ethies of Georgetown UniYersity, October 13-16, 1986. For further background against which Wallace's discussion should be situated, see his "Nature as Animating: The Soul in the Human Sciences,'' The Thornist 49 (l985) : 612-6'18, and "The Intelligibility of Nature: A Neo-Aristotelian View," Rev,iew of Metaphysics 38 (1984): 33-56. 2 Thomas Aquinas, St., Surnrna Theologiae, I, q.29, a.4. 191 19Q PHILIP SMITH, O.P. onset of death, this philosophy of person raises the question of w:hen tihe soul is infused into the body and when :it is 1separated from it. Is the newly-fortiilized zygote capable of :receiving and sustaining the rational soul as its,substantirul form? Or must the genetic materials be informed by one or more transient natures before they achieve ithe internal unity and stability necessary :for personhood? At the end of life, the person dies when the soul leaves the body. Does personail death coincide with the death of the human organism as a whole? Or can the destruction of only an essential part of the body, e.g. tihe cerebral cortex, cause personal death by damaging the body so severely that it is simply incapable of supporting a :rational soul, even though the rest of the body remains intact and spontaneously alive? If so, is the remaining organism informed by a succession of transient substantiail forms that maintain its existence but at ever lower levels of life as it gradually declines toward total death? In examining these questions posed by the possibility of transient natures, my point of departure will be an analysis of transient natures themselves. Recently, William A. Wallace, O.P., has 'begun to eX!plore the philosophical meaning and implications of transient natures for issues such as these.a His findings will he summarized here. The insights gathered from the exploration of transient natures will next he applied to the questions of when personhood begins and when death occurs. This will necessarily employ a fraiilework embracing both tihe empirical and the philosophical, with the empirical looking to the available biological data and the philosophical inquiring about the impact o.f these data for determining the status of human life at its outer edges. Since Aquinas's natural philoss Wallace, "Nature and Human Nature...," pp. 23-51. Additional background for his researches, apart from the essays cited in note l above, will be found in his "The Reality of Elementary Particles," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 38 (1964): pp. 154-166, and "Elementarity and Reality in Particle Physics," Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983), pp. 171-183 and pp. 185-212. TRANSIENT... (shrink)

For some, biology explains all there is to know about the mind. Yet many big questions remain: is the mind shaped by genes or the environment? If mental traits are the result of adaptations built up over thousands of years, as evolutionary psychologists claim, how can such claims be tested? If the mind is a machine, as biologists argue, how does it allow for something as complex as human consciousness? The Biological Mind: A Philosophical Introduction explores these questions (...) and more, using the philosophy of biology to introduce and assess the nature of the mind. Drawing on the four key themes of evolutionary biology; molecular biology and genetics; neuroscience; and biomedicine and psychiatry Justin Garson addresses the following key topics: moral psychology, altruism and levels of selection evolutionary psychology and modularity genes, environment and the nature-nurture debate neuroscience, reductionism and the relation between biology and free will function, selection and mental representation psychiatric classification and the maladapted mind. Extensive use of examples and case studies is made throughout the book, and additional features such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary make this an indispensable introduction to those teaching philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology. It will also be an excellent resource for those in related fields such as biology. (shrink)

ways in which his plots were developed, indicating, in many of them, a need for excavation and structuring of an analysis of individualities and nature of each of his characters, so much so that for a long time, some critics read him as a philosophy author, which, however, does not happen. Recognizing the different natural that his work has from the text philosophical, we intend, here, to strengthen a clear and direct relationship between the literary text and the (...) philosophical text - indicating this criticism of the philosophical form and model -, breaking the limits of subordination and/or inferiority between the areas, which allows for a broad dialogue between works and distinct concepts. To do this, I will take as a starting point the work The Brothers Karamazov to try to identify a paradoxically objective approach to the Christian narrative of sin, covering concepts such as the fall, original sin and hereditary sin. These observations will be stitched together through the effort of a reading that frames the debate on human nature in the formation and representation of the Karamazovs as representatives of the human race, going through their conflicts and clashes arising from the non-acceptance of this nature, in addition, obviously, to the complex relationship that each of the Karamazovs, similar to man, develops with their qualitative situation. (shrink)

Exposome research is put forward as a major tool for solving the nature-versus-nurture debate because the exposome is said to represent “the nature of nurture.” Against this influential idea, we argue that the adoption of the nature-versus-nurture debate into the exposome research program is a mistake that needs to be undone to allow for a proper bioethical assessment of exposome research. We first argue that this adoption is originally based on an equivocation between the (...) traditional nature-versus-nurture debate and a debate about disease prediction/etiology. Second, due to this mistake, exposome research is pushed to adopt a limited conception of agential control that is harmful to one's thinking about the good that exposome research can do for human health and wellbeing. To fully excise the nature-versus-nurture debate from exposome research, we argue that exposome researchers and bioethicists need to think about the exposome afresh from the perspective of actionability. We define the concept of actionability and related concepts and show how these can be used to analyze the ethical aspects of the exposome. In particular, we focus on refuting the popular “gun analogy” in exposome research, returning results to study participants and risk-taking in the context of a well-lived life. (shrink)

This paper examines the relation between the problem of human nature and political theory; it is claimed that every such theory is founded on some anthropological preconditions. The paper studies the political conceptions of four modern philosophers: Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Pyotr Kropotkin. It reveals that two opposing tendencies form the imaginary of the modern era: the authoritative one that identifies an egoistic/ unsociable human nature that needs control, and the libertarian one that (...) recognizes a human being capable of more advanced types of social fabric. The problem that is also investigated is how anthropological dualism can be transcended to permit the conception of a new anthropological type as well as the type of society that will help human potentiality of consciousness and coexistence to unfold. (shrink)

Ecofeminism is a term coined by Françoise D’Eubonne in her book Feminism or Death to show the affinities between ecology and feminism. Both women and nature are perceived as passive elements and like women who complain about patriarchal constraints, ecologists shed light on the impacts of human exploitation over nature which is affected by pollution. Some dimensions of ecofeminism are present in Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Yellow Woman. The postmodern novel contains a female character who forges (...) a link with the natural surroundings and is in a direct contact with some natural elements like plants and animals. What is specific about the heroine is that she escapes her matriarchal society and goes back to nature in order to reconstruct her identity. At the end of the narrative, the female narrator leaves the natural setting and goes back to her family to replay social roles. The present article sets out to study the importance of Mother Nature for the female narrator and to examine the affinities between Earth Mother and the female protagonist. The first part will offer a theoretical background about the basic principles of ecofeminism. Then, my analysis will touch upon the aspects of ecofeminism in the novel. However, the last part will focus on the way the narrator goes beyond her matriarchal culture and reshapes female identity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 558-559 [Access article in PDF] Stephen Gaukroger. Descartes' System of Natural Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 258. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $22.00. Stephen Gaukroger, author of a definitive biography of Descartes, has now written an excellent account of Descartes's natural philosophy as presented in his Principia philosophiae. Gaukroger claims that the roots of modernity lay in the (...) philosophies of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, both of whom regarded natural philosophy, rather than either moral philosophy or metaphysics, as the core of the philosophical enterprise. Whereas Bacon developed his ideas from a background steeped in the writings of the Renaissance humanists who emphasized moral philosophy, Descartes developed his ideas in the context of Scholastic philosophy, particularly the textbooks of the Jesuits that he had encountered at La Flèche and that located the foundations of philosophy in metaphysics.Regarding the unpublished early works, Le monde and L'homme, as suppressed parts of Descartes's mature project and taking seriously Descartes's stated intention of dealing with living things and humans along with the physical world in his natural philosophy, Gaukroger presents a detailed account of this "complete" version of the Principia philosophiae. In a series of six chapters, he explicates Descartes's views on the principles of knowledge, the principles of material objects, the visible universe, the Earth, living things, and man. In addition to Le monde and L'homme, Gaukroger draws on Les Passions de l'âme as an important source for Descartes's views on human nature.Gaukroger situates Descartes's natural philosophy in the context of the Scholastic textbook tradition in a chapter preceding his account of the Principa philosophiae. He delves into the history of medieval universities, the place of natural philosophy in the medieval curriculum, and the changing relationship between metaphysics and natural philosophy, particularly after the Condemnations of 1277. Difficulties in reconciling Aristotelian natural philosophy and Christian theology, which had been formulated in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics, continued into the sixteenth century and provided the immediate background to the Jesuit commentaries and textbooks to which Descartes was exposed as a student. In these works, Jesuit philosophers attempted to derive a coherently unified Christian Aristotelianism from first principles. Gaukroger reminds us that Descartes's Principia philosophiae was a deliberate attempt to replace these Jesuit textbooks with one based on mechanistic principles.Despite the strength of Gaukroger's book as a contextualized study of a major philosophical figure who is frequently treated in an entirely ahistorical way, the book is not without its problems. The main problem is one that plagues many studies of Descartes (and other canonical figures in the history of philosophy), to wit, the presumption that he is somehow unique. For example, Gaukroger writes at length about Descartes's views about the differences between animals and humans with regard to cognition, arguing that Descartes did not consider animals to be automata because they lack rational souls but rather that they actually experience some but not all of the more abstract or reflexive forms of cognition usually ascribed to humans. Gaukroger does not mention the fact that many other early modern philosophers held a view like this. For example, Descartes's contemporary and fellow mechanical philosopher Pierre Gassendi claimed that animals could know universals, as when a dog recognizes that it is a human that is approaching, but differ from humans in not being capable of contemplating the nature of universality per se. Descartes was part of a community of thinkers concerned with similar problems, and his natural philosophy can be illuminated by viewing him in that context as well as against the backdrop of Scholasticism.Gaukroger underplays the significance of theology for Descartes's philosophy. Although he discusses how God's attributes, especially immutability, provide the basis for Descartes's laws of motion, he does not explore the specific aspects of Descartes's theological presuppositions and the way they influenced his entire natural philosophical project. Gaukroger repeats the received view that "One of the principal tasks of a mechanistic natural philosophy... (shrink)

While almost everyone has heard of human rights, few will have reflected in depth on what human rights are, where they originate from and what they mean. A Philosophical Introduction to Human Rights – accessibly written without being superficial – addresses these questions and provides a multifaceted introduction to legal philosophy. The point of departure is the famous 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which provides a frame for engagement with western legal philosophy. Thomas Mertens (...) sketches the philosophical and historical background of the Declaration, discusses the ten most important human rights with the help of key philosophers, and ends by reflecting on the relationship between rights and duties. The basso continuo of the book is a particular world view derived from Immanuel Kant. 'Unsocial sociability' is what characterises humans, i.e. the tension between man's individual and social nature. Some human rights emphasize the first, others the second aspect. The tension between these two aspects plays a fundamental role in how human rights are interpreted and applied. (shrink)

How do the many exciting recent scientific discoveries in neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, genetics and paleoanthropology challenge and complicate £ but also enrich and illuminate £ the traditional Christian portrait of human nature? In Rethinking Human Nature an international team of scientists, historians, philosophers, and theologians presents both the wisdom of the past and the cutting edge of present and developing scientific research to explore answers to this vital question. Their discussions £ examining our brains, our (...) genes, our ancestors, our societies, and more £ will help us develop a more nuanced and complete understanding of what it really means to be human" -- Amazon.com. (shrink)

Plato's pigs -- Aristotle's wonderful animals -- Cynicism's dogs -- Jainism's birds -- Plutarch's grunter -- Descartes' beast-machine -- Kant's elephants -- Bentham's suffering animal -- Nietzsche's overhuman animal -- Derrida's cat -- Adams's absent referent -- Plumwood's crocodile -- Haraway's companion species.

Pasnau sets the philosophy in the context of ancient and modern thought, looking at some of the most difficult areas of Aquinas's thought: the relationship of soul to body, workings of sense and intellect, will and passions, and personal identity.

Ideas of Human Nature, now revised and updated in this second edition, presents twelve of the most influential Western thinkers on the topic of human nature.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Thomas Aquinas’s Two Approaches to Female RationalityElisabeth Uffenheimer-LippensAlthough the female human being was never at the center of his daily and intellectual attention, Thomas Aquinas as a religious thinker had no choice but to consider her in a wide range of different contexts. She is found in theoretical-speculative discussions (about creation, original sin and its punishment, resurrection) and in more practical ones (about marriage, reproduction, (...) ordination of women, women as teachers, as witnesses). Thomas’s ideas about the female human being have been investigated by theologians, philosophers, and historians. Often, but not always, the research has been inspired and even distorted by one form or another of feminism.In this article I shall not discuss all the different aspects of the topic “woman” as they can be found in Thomas’s works, but limit myself to one of them, namely, his understanding of female rationality. I have become intrigued by the fact that he thought about the rationality of woman in two different ways which he never integrated or explicitly connected. In the majority of his texts Thomas describes woman’s rationality as “inferior” in comparison to the “superior” male rationality. This justifies her subordination to the male human being and is expressed in her inability to control her passions. There are, however, other texts in which Thomas discusses the human mind in general, without specifying whether he means the mind of the male or the female human being. He recognizes in the human mind two aspects or functions of rationality, namely, a ratio superior which he labels symbolically “masculine” and a ratio inferior which he calls “feminine.” The meaning of this is [End Page 191] that woman’s rationality is not of an inferior kind, but includes both aspects of rationality.The thesis underlying this article is that not enough attention has been paid to the fact that two fundamentally different ways of understanding female rationality can be found in the work of Thomas Aquinas. His symbolic use of male and female has too often been confused with what one could call the “real” relationship between man and woman. The aim of this article is to present these two different understandings in Thomas, without making any detailed attempt to trace their historical origins. In addition, I want to show the new perspectives that are opened up by his second approach.The first part of this article will focus on the “inferior rationality” of women and try to understand what is meant by inferiority. The discussion will develop around an analysis of the words mollis and mollities. This will lead me to the relationship between inferior rationality and bodily weakness on the one hand, and between inferior rationality and the passions on the other hand. The practical consequences of woman’s inferior rationality shall also be treated. The second part of this article will focus on the human mind, and on the difference between ratio inferior and ratio superior. The definition of these two functions of human rationality will be followed by an analysis of texts where Thomas describes original sin as a paradigm for concrete sin, and where he connects ratio inferior to woman/feminine and ratio superior to man/male. The discussion will be completed by a study of the relationship between the ratio inferior and the vis cogitativa. This will allow me to bring out the importance of this second understanding of female rationality.I. Woman’s Inferior RationalityWoman’s intellectual capacity is repeatedly described by Thomas with the unflattering comparatives debilior (debilis meaning, among other things, “disabled, infirm, feeble, frail, [End Page 192] weak”)1 and inferior. Almost every woman does not have a “firm judgment of reason”; she is “unstable of reason.”2 She does not possess “sufficient strength of mind” (to resist concupiscence).3 There is clearly a “deficiency of reason”4 because she has an overall “weakness of nature.”5These descriptions of female rationality can only be understood insofar as they stand over and against the male rationality which is described in almost bodily comparatives as fortior, firmior, robustior. The male has more “strength of soul.”6 In him “the discretion... (shrink)

This study reviews various discourses around female sexual mutilation from the perspective of the human and social sciences, and also current debates between supporters of the cultural argument and those defending the universality of human rights. An aside about the Dogon myth of world order recorded by Marcel Griaule in Dieu d’eau or Aristotle’s philosophical discourse in the Reproduction of Animals is required in order to widen the debate and see its importance as regards the dignity (...) of the human person. In Aristotle woman is a freak accident, she interrupts the circle that goes from man to man so that he can start off again. Woman is a "catastrophe" necessary to the exercise of the male genitalia; her body is naturally mutilated and incomplete. In the Dogon myth the clitoris rises up like a termite-hill, it is oversized and must be knocked down, that is, excised. Between excessive size, monstrousness and ugliness come discourses which have since time immemorial accompanied and justified wounding the female genitals. But today a medical type of discourse, which is widely accepted, is aiming to repair excised genitalia and give back to women the happiness of a recovered body. Thus we may ask what "woman’s dignity" consists of and whether it is the same as the "dignity of the human person". (shrink)

The dichotomy between Nature and Nurture, which has been dismantled within the framework of development, remains embodied in the notions of plasticity and evolvability. We argue that plasticity and evolvability, like development and heredity, are neither dichotomous nor distinct: the very same mechanisms may be involved in both, and the research perspective chosen depends to a large extent on the type of problem being explored and the kinds of questions being asked. Epigenetic inheritance leads to transgenerationally extended plasticity, (...) and developmentally-induced heritable epigenetic variations provide additional foci for selection that can lead to evolutionary change. Moreover, hereditary innovations may result from developmentally induced large-scale genomic repatterning events, which are akin to Goldschmidtian “systemic mutations”. The epigenetic mechanisms involved in repatterning can be activated by both environmental and genomic stress, and lead to phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic changes. Hence, the effects and the mechanisms of plasticity directly contribute to evolvability. (shrink)

This commentary will extend the territory claimed in the target article by identifying several other areas in the social sciences where findings from the WEIRD population have been over-generalized. An argument is made that the root problem is the ethnocentrism of scholars, textbook authors, and social commentators, which leads them to take their own cultural values as the norm.

English description: "Emergence" is a term used in both the humanities and the natural sciences to denote the appearance of a new development that seems unpredictable at first, but can more or less be explained scientifically in hindsight. The term is always connected to a far-reaching philosophical background of the epistemological or science-theoretical kind. Historical examples of important emergences can be found in Darwin's evolutionary biology and Wilhelm Wundt's social psychology. They demonstrate that emergence contexts can methodologically be (...) explained by the purposive rationality of the actors within the process of research and theory construction, and thus be stripped of their mysterious aura. The volume is complemented by the correspondence between the author and an evolutionary theorist, which feeds on the tension between a more naturalistic perspective and a more culturalistic view. German text. German description: Emergenz ist ein in Natur- wie in Geisteswissenschaften anzutreffender methodologischer Leitbegriff, der ein nicht vorhersagbares oder ein induktiv nicht ableitbares, nachtraglich aber mehr oder weniger wissenschaftlich erklarbares Auftauchen von Neuem bezeichnet. Immer ist der Emergenzbegriff mit weitreichenden philosophischen Hintergrundueberzeugungen erkenntnis- und wissenschaftstheoretischer Art verknuepft.Historische Vorbilder fuer fachwissenschaftlich wichtige Emergenzen konnen in der Evolutionsbiologie Charles Darwins und in der Volkerpsychologie Wilhelm Wundts gesehen werden. Sie weisen darauf hin, dass sich emergente Verhaltnisse, anders als in den aktuellen, naturalistischen Emergenztheorien aus der Tradition der Analytischen Philosophie, methodisch auf die Zweckrationalitat von Akteuren im Prozess von Forschung und Theoriebildung zurueckspielen und dadurch ihres geheimnisvollen Charakters entkleiden lassen.Erganzt wird der Band durch eine Korrespondenz zwischen dem Autor und einem Evolutionstheoretiker. Sie speist sich aus der Spannung zwischen einer eher naturalistischen und einer eher kulturalistischen Sichtweise und ringt mit Problemen der Bestimmung von Emergenz und Teleonomie bei Kategorienspruengen in naturhistorischen Untersuchungen. (shrink)

This major study examines the most fundamental categories in terms of which we conceive of ourselves, critically surveying the concepts of substance, causation, agency, teleology, rationality, mind, body and person, and elaborating the conceptual fields in which they are embedded. The culmination of 40 years of thought on the philosophy of mind and the nature of the mankind Written by one of the world’s leading philosophers, the co-author of the monumental 4 volume _Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations_ (...) Uses broad categories, such as substance, causation, agency and power to examine how we think about ourselves and our nature Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of human nature are sketched and contrasted Individual chapters clarify and provide an historical overview of a specific concept, then link the concept to ideas contained in other chapters. (shrink)

The concept of ontogenetic niche is used here to interpret how species-typical behaviors develop through active, context-dependent processes. Ontogenetic niches typically include social stimuli, such as those arising from parents, siblings, and others that provide 'nurturing' in the form of resources, stimulation, and affordances for development. This approach is a useful alternative to wrestling with artificial dichotomies such as nature-nurture.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 221-223 [Access article in PDF] John J. Conley. The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers in Neoclassical France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 222. Cloth, $39.95. The rediscovery of forgotten women philosophers began in the 1970s and has yielded important results by broadening substantially the intellectual history of early modern Europe. In The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers (...) in Neoclassical France, John J. Conley expands even more the corpus of philosophical texts written by women to include five authors whose work has never been considered in this context. Five salonnières, traditionally considered the authors of light literature, are the subject of Conley's book. By expanding the "map of philosophy sites and genres" (159), Conley has looked beyond the university setting and beyond the female philosophers associated with the major male figures of [End Page 221] the period. He argues that the salon produced important female philosophers whose intellectual power was especially revealed in their highly original consideration and discussion of virtue and whose work provides an alternative to the philosophy produced by the canonical male authors of the seventeenth century.As he explores the moral philosophies of Sablé, Deshoulières, Sablière, Vallière, and Maintenon, Conley shows us how the salon promoted experimentation with alternative methods of philosophical analysis. Specifically, the salon produced philosophical arguments that were "characterized more by debate and by epigrammatic commentary than by the lecture and the treatise" (158). It promoted new methods of argument and focused thematically on moral issues.The works of the Jansenist Madame de Sablé rely on the maxime, the literary genre associated most closely with salon culture. In her Maximes, Sablé engages in moral psychology to offer a critique of aristocratic society. She writes about the pride and self-interest that defines this milieu, and she draws a clear distinction between a physical aristocracy (based on blood and rank) and a spiritual aristocracy of the virtuous. For this author, the essential trait of the individual is moral identity, not family or heritage.The poetry and philosophy of Madame Deshoulières is rooted in naturalism and inspired by the works of Lucretius and Gassendi. For her, virtue involves "an ecological reverence for the material world" (49). She addressed the vice and confusion that come from human misconceptions about nature. In particular, the human refusal to accept mortality reflects a broader refusal to accept the materialist nature of human beings. The belief in human superiority and immortality constitutes an attack on nature and explains human efforts to dominate nature. The belief in human immortality in turn raises issues of morality because it produces in humans hubris and the consequent mistreatment of the animal world and material environment. For Deshoulières virtue involves reverence for the material world.With Sablière the ethical person is the "redeemed saint, the sinner freed to a life of charity by the sovereign action of God and summoned to a particular set of moral duties in the midst of austere prayer" (94-95). Her maxims refer ultimately to spiritual abandonment to the will of God, and Sablière combines a deeply mystical piety, shaped by contact with Quietism, and the idea of the sovereignty of God, derived from Augustinian theology. The individual is dependent upon God's grace, and to live a moral life requires serious contemplation and communication with God and pyschological detachment from self, a relationship that springs from God's initiative.La Vallière also interprets virtue in an Augustinian vein, but her approach to virtue does not insist on abandonment of the world. She writes about knowing God through the experiences of repentance and conversion. Her Reflections on the Mercy of God is a dialogue with God on the part of repentent female voice. Her voice is definitely gendered, and she witnesses to God's mercy.Finally, Conley shows us in turn that the salonnières brought to their discussion of virtue an interest in etiquette and manners that derived from the distinctive experiences of women. Here the... (shrink)

Plato's most magisterial dialogue, the Republic, takes up the question "what is justice," and its central image is an imaginary city constructed in speech designed to aid in this inquiry. In Book V of the Republic, Socrates tells his interlocutors that they have completed the "Male Drama," of the city in speech and that it is now time for them to take up the "Female." The "Female Drama" is Socrates name for the action of the central books of (...) the Republic: V-VII. Much has been made of what this transition in the Republic signifies for political questions. The Republic is not only concerned with politics or political justice, however. Like all of the images and arguments in the Republic, the Female Drama of the city in speech has meaning both for political and individual justice, but there has been no systematic inquiry into the central books of the Republic for their meaning for individual justice. That is the ambition of this book. On the level of moral psychology, Thomas argues that while the Male Drama of Books II-IV presents images of fully formed versions of the psychological activities that come together to define justice in a human life, the Female Drama explores the modes of potentiality and becoming necessary for those psychological activities to come into being. More specifically, Books V-VII explore the three modes of potentiality necessary for the development of justice: genesis, trophe, and paideia. (shrink)

This learned book is a study of the fifteen questions of the first part of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae which deal with man as composed of body and soul, his faculties, and place in the universe. In twelve chapters Pasnau takes us from the theme of body and soul and the immateriality of the soul to closing pages on life after death. His philosophical approach of texts of a theological work have their justification in that “the real heart of Aquinas’s (...) theological project corresponds quite closely with what we consider the project of philosophy”, a claim which, although substantially correct, might be worded better, because the heart of Aquinas’s theology lies way beyond philosophy. Pasnau tries to explain Thomas’s texts acutely, raising the difficulties a modern reader would experience when hearing of these doctrines for the first time. The book is lively and stimulating, displaying acquaintance with many issues. (shrink)

In philosophy of religion the term of Immanence is mostly applied to GOD in contrast to the divine Transcendence. This relation, as we will see here, it is not far from the truth since one cannot be without the other, however they are not to be put in contrast, but in conjunction. The one-sided insistence on the immanence of God, to the exclusion of His transcendence, leads to Pantheism, just as the one-sided insistence upon His transcendence, to the exclusion of (...) His immanence, leads to Deism. These two can be separated, but the consequences are great for human knowledge and society; it is the two taken together that result in, and are necessary to Theism. But from the least complicated idea that even the name of God is a manifestation of His immanence contrasting with Deus absconditus, whose existence and name cannot be known or thought, theology and religion in general need to regard immanence of God as crucial for the acts of worship. What are the philosophical background for Christian theology to imply the immanence characteristic for God’s existence related to His creation? – This is the main question the present work tries to answer as an overview. (shrink)

The Centered Mind offers a new view of the nature and causal determinants of both reflective thinking and, more generally, the stream of consciousness. Peter Carruthers argues that conscious thought is always sensory-based, relying on the resources of the working-memory system. This system enables sensory images to be sustained and manipulated through attentional signals directed at midlevel sensory areas of the brain. When abstract conceptual representations are bound into these images, we consciously experience ourselves as making judgments or arriving (...) at decisions. However, our amodal propositional attitudes are never actually among the contents of this stream of conscious reflection. Our beliefs, goals, and decisions are only ever active in the background of consciousness, working behind the scenes. They are never themselves conscious.Drawing on extensive knowledge of the scientific literature on working memory and related topics, Carruthers challenges the central assumptions of many philosophers. In addition to arguing that non-sensory propositional attitudes are never conscious, he also shows that they are never under direct intentional control. Written with his usual clarity and directness, The Centered Mind will be essential reading for all philosophers and cognitive scientists interested in the nature of human thought processes. (shrink)

This dissertation critically examines Helmuth Plessner's philosophically ambitious explanation of laughter presented in his Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior. The aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate that Plessner's philosophical anthropology makes a distinctive contribution to our knowledge of the human capacity to laugh and, in the process, to our knowledge of human nature. This dissertation is accordingly addressed not only to philosophers interested in the question of human (...) nature, but to physiologists, psychologists, sociologists, and all other scientists interested in explaining laughter. ;Plessner, who lived from 1892 to 1985, was one of the founders and foremost representatives of the twentieth-century movement of thought known as philosophical anthropology, which he characterizes as "the systematic discussion of questions of the structure of human nature." Against Cartesian dualism, Plessner undertakes to investigate "how the psychological is clasped together with the physical." The project of Laughing and Crying , first published in German in 1940 and translated into English in 1970, is to investigate the conditions of possibility of these two forms of expression "in the basic figure of human existence under the spell of the body." ;Plessner's thesis in Laughing and Crying is that these two forms of expression outstandingly disclose "the secret composition of human nature," which in turn "constitutes the basis of laughing and crying." This dissertation is restricted to laughter in order to facilitate the exposition of this "secret composition," which Plessner names our "eccentric positionality." Chapter 1 establishes a role for philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of laughter in the light of physiological, psychological, and sociological findings. Chapter 2 discusses some of Plessner's earlier writings insofar as they form the background of and thus illuminate his approach to laughter. Chapter 3 examines and elaborates upon the development and details of Plessner's argument in Laughing and Crying. Chapter 4 assesses a criticism of Plessner's argument as "behaviorist." After locating Laughing and Crying within Plessner's corpus and Plessner's corpus within the movement of philosophical anthropology in his day, the conclusion addresses the question of the ongoing significance of this discipline of thought. (shrink)

Based on interviews with twenty leading scholars, Conversations on Human Nature probes the question of what it means to be human from evolutionary, biological, philosophical, cultural, and theological points of view.

The subject of this research is the philosophy of the Tyumen philosopher Yuri Mikhailovich Fyodorov – a representative of the Tyumen philosophical tradition, who focused on the problems of ethics, namely practical implementation of the ethical in the context of development of the North and establishment of a new society from fundamentally different individuals. Tyumen philosophers were concerned with the question of how to form a single moral essence out of the agonistic society. For solving this problem, Yuri Mikhailovich (...) Fyodorov turned to Neo-Platonism, cosmism, and Russian religious philosophy, as well as paid particular attention to the question of elevation of human to a moral entity. The ways for such subjectification proposed by Fedorov are examined in this article. The scientific novelty consists in the fact that the philosopher is not widely known, as well as in the emphasis on the process of subjectification, epimeleia heautou in interpretation of M. Foucault, or the self-nurturing practices. It is illustrated that creativity, freedom, kindness and love are the key practices of self-nurturing which Y. M. Fyodorov indicated as the procedures of subjectification. From his perspective, these four concepts are the goal and practice for an individual, who seeks to surpass his own foundations. The philosophy of Y. M. Fyodorov aims to substantiate the unity of man with man, man with being; as well as attach meaning, value and vector to human life; contra pose something genuine, profound and eternal to the concepts that deprive an individual of the right to power over himself and the right to the long-term existence. (shrink)

How is it possible that in more than one hundred years, the nature-nurture debate has not come to a satisfactory resolution? The problem, Dale Goldhaber argues, lies not with the proposed answers, but with the question itself. In The Nature-Nurture Debate, Goldhaber reviews the four major perspectives on the issue - behavior genetics, environment, evolutionary psychology and developmental systems theory - and shows that the classic, reductionist strategies are incapable of resolving the issue because they each (...) offer a false perspective on the process of human development. It is only through a synthesis of the two holistic perspectives of evolutionary psychology and developmental systems theory that we will be able to understand the nature of human behavior. (shrink)

With the arrival of biological evolutionism and behaviourism, the concept of human nature has become very unstable. The proposed method for detecting the features of human nature based on discomfort allows us to reconsider human nature and regard the species as ontological entities. The human species is represented by biosubstrates that instantiate essential universals. When society restricts fundamental behavioural expressions, individuals experience discomfort, which leads to rebellion. These expressions of discomfort lead us to (...) recognise the basic universals of human nature. Discomfort arises from the disruption of the symmetrical relationship between nature and nurture. These propositions are also supported in fiction, as seen in Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Men Like Gods, Abduction and Childhood’s End. (shrink)

The author disagrees with reductionist attitude to Wittgenstein’s philosophy as philosophy of language. Basing on researches in contemporary French philosophy, the author reveals anthropological dimension of Wittgenstein’s reflections both in the main themes of his philosophizing and in his philosophical method as such. Wittgenstein strives to clarify what we already know, trying to avoid explanation, generalization and uniformity. The research shows that clarification, übersichtliche Darstellung acquires in anthropology special meaning of description and helps to overcome explicative anthropological approach and (...) description of human action in terms of binary oppositions of nature/culture and instrumentality/rituality. The article shows practical results of “grammatical analysis” applied to the concepts of humanity, speech and thinking: this analysis discovers circularity of theoretical definitions of human being and opens the way of “immediate understanding” of humanity prior to any theoretical thinking. The article shows the role of Wittgenstein’s concepts of “ritual instinct” and “ceremonial animal”, which help to understand human activity as manifestations of “ritual instinct”, and ritual action as inseparable unity of natural reactions and conscious intentionality despite the debates between intellectualism and expressivism. (shrink)

Debates about human nature inform every philosophical tradition from their inception (see Stevenson 2000 for many examples). Evolutionarily based criticisms of human nature are of much more recent origin. Ironically, most evolutionarily based criticisms of human nature are directed at work whose avowed goal is to biologicize human nature and even to place human nature within an evolutionary frame. Here I will focus on accounts of human nature (...) that begin with and come after E.O. Wilson’s sociobiology. I will also focus on criticisms of human nature that arose first as responses to sociobiology. There are some more recent approaches to human nature that have much in common with the sociobiological approach and I will show that critical arguments developed to target sociobiology have purchase on related recent approaches to human nature. In what follows I will briefly outline some well-known accounts of human nature. Next I will briefly outline some key evolutionarily based arguments against such accounts of human nature. I conclude by summarizing the evolutionary case against biological accounts of human nature and endorsing it. (shrink)