What's left of human nature? : a post-essentialist, pluralist, and interactive account of a contested concept /

What's left of human nature? : a post-essentialist, pluralist, and interactive account of a contested concept /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Kronfeldner, Maria E., author.
Imprint:Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2018]
Description:xxxii, 301 pages ; 24 cm.
Language:English
Series:Life and mind: philosophical issues in biology and psychology
Life and mind.
Subject:
Philosophical anthropology.
Human behavior.
Human beings.
Human behavior.
Human beings.
Philosophical anthropology.
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11701624
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9780262038416
0262038412
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What's Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development result from nurture and nature.
Table of Contents:
  • Preface
  • Acknowledgments
  • 1. Introduction: What's at Issue
  • 1.1. Nature?
  • 1.2. Human?
  • 1.3. Three Different Concepts of Human Nature in Overview
  • 1. Three Challenges
  • 2. The Dehumanization Challenge
  • 2.1. The Vernacular Concept of Human Nature
  • 2.2. Dehumanization Systematically Viewed
  • 2.3. Social Perspectivity
  • 2.4. The Challenge That Derives from Dehumanization
  • 3. The Darwinian Challenge
  • 3.1. What Essences Would Require
  • 3.2. Challenging the Classificatory Role of Essences
  • 3.3. Challenging the Explanatory Role of Essences
  • 3.4. Situating the Anti-Essentialist Consensus
  • 4. The Developmentalist Challenge
  • 4.1. From Physis versus Nomos to Nature versus Nurture
  • 4.2. Ignoring Interactions
  • 4.3. The Interactionist Consensus
  • 4.4. What Is the Challenge for a Concept of Human Nature?
  • Summary of Part I
  • II. Three Natures: A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Reply to the Three Challenges
  • 5. Genealogy, the Classificatory Nature, and Channels of Inheritance
  • 5.1. Five Questions Regarding a Species' Nature
  • 5.2. Genealogical Nexus as the Classificatory Nature
  • 5.3. Genealogy and the Channels of Inheritance
  • 5.4. The Resulting Pluralism
  • 6. Toward a Descriptive Human Nature
  • 6.1. Descriptive Knowledge about Humans in General
  • 6.2. The Relationship to the Classificatory and the Explanatory Nature
  • 6.3. Typicality Necessary?
  • 6.4. Typicality Sufficient? Or What Does "Important" Mean?
  • 7. The Stability of Human Nature
  • 7.1. Innate or Evolved?
  • 7.2. Channelism, Stability, and the Nature-Culture Divide Revived
  • 7.3. A Narrow Enough Concept of Human Nature in the Descriptive Sense
  • 8. An Explanatory Nature
  • 8.1. Explanatory Neo-Essentialism
  • 8.2. A Population-Level Solution
  • 8.3. The Explanatory Nature Established
  • 9. Causal Selection and How Human Nature Is Thereby Made
  • 9.1. Causal Selection, Control, and Normality
  • 9.2. Choosing among Actual Difference Makers and the Willingness to Control
  • 9.3. How Norms Make Human Nature Visible
  • 9.4. How Norms Make Human Nature Real
  • Summary of Part II
  • III. Normativity, Essential Contestedness, and the Quest for Elimination
  • 10. Humanism and Normativity
  • 10.1. Two Sufficient Entry Conditions for Moral Standing
  • 10.2. The Ethical Importance of the Descriptive Nature
  • 10.3. A Dialectic, Essentially Contested Concept of Human Nature
  • 11. Should We Eliminate the Language of Human Nature?
  • 11.1. Elimination versus Revision
  • 11.2. Redundancy, Neutrality, and Risk of Dehumanization
  • 11.3. Elimination versus Revision as a Matter of Values
  • Summary of Part III
  • Notes
  • References
  • Index
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