"A philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against dehumanization, Darwinian, and developmentalist challenges.
A philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against dehumanization, Darwinian, and developmentalist challenges.
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.
After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and ""looping"" human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term ""human nature"" altogether."
Preface xv Acknowledgments xxxi 1 Introduction: What’s at Issue 1 1.1 Nature? 1 1.2 Human? 4 1.3 Three Different Concepts of Human Nature in Overview 7 I Three Challenges 13 2 The Dehumanization Challenge 15 2.1 The Vernacular Concept of Human Nature 16 2.2 Dehumanization Systematically Viewed 18 2.3 Social Perspectivity 28 2.4 The Challenge That Derives from Dehumanization 31 3 The Darwinian Challenge 33 3.1 What Essences Would Require 34 3.2 Challenging the Classificatory Role of Essences 41 3.3 Challenging the Explanatory Role of Essences 49 3.4 Situating the Anti-Essentialist Consensus 57 4 The Developmentalist Challenge 59 4.1 From Physis versus Nomos to Nature versus Nurture 60 4.2 Ignoring Interactions 67 4.3 The Interactionist Consensus 70 4.4 What Is the Challenge for a Concept of Human Nature? 85 Summary of Part I 87 II Three Natures: A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Reply to the Three Challenges 89 5 Genealogy, the Classificatory Nature, and Channels of Inheritance 91 5.1 Five Questions Regarding a Species’ Nature 92 5.2 Genealogical Nexus as the Classificatory Nature 96 5.3 Genealogy and the Channels of Inheritance 102 5.4 The Resulting Pluralism 114 6 Toward a Descriptive Human Nature 121 6.1 Descriptive Knowledge about Humans in General 122 6.2 The Relationship to the Classificatory and the Explanatory Nature 126 6.3 Typicality Necessary? 131 6.4 Typicality Sufficient? Or What Does “Important” Mean? 139 7 The Stability of Human Nature 147 7.1 Innate or Evolved? 148 7.2 Channelism, Stability, and the Nature–Culture Divide Revived 157 7.3 A Narrow Enough Concept of Human Nature in the Descriptive Sense 164 8 An Explanatory Nature 169 8.1 Explanatory Neo-Essentialism 170 8.2 A Population-Level Solution 179 8.3 The Explanatory Nature Established 184 9 Causal Selection and How Human Nature Is Thereby Made 189 9.1 Causal Selection, Control, and Normality 190 9.2 Choosing among Actual Difference Makers and the Willingness to Control 196 9.3 How Norms Make Human Nature Visible 202 9.4 How Norms Make Human Nature Real 206 Summary of Part II 210 III Normativity, Essential Contestedness, and the Quest for Elimination 213 10 Humanism and Normativity 215 10.1 Two Sufficient Entry Conditions for Moral Standing 216 10.2 The Ethical Importance of the Descriptive Nature 220 10.3 A Dialectic, Essentially Contested Concept of Human Nature 225 11 Should We Eliminate the Language of Human Nature? 231 11.1 Elimination versus Revision 232 11.2 Redundancy, Neutrality, and Risk of Dehumanization 233 11.3 Elimination versus Revision as a Matter of Values 238 Summary of Part III 241 Notes 243 References 265 Index 289
Maria Kronfeldner is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Central European University, Budapest.
