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What's Left of Human Nature?: A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept [Hardback]

(Central European University)
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What's Left of Human Nature?: A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested ConceptPalielināt
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Permanent link: https://www.kriso.lv/db/9780262038416.html
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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Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas.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.



A philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against dehumanization, Darwinian, and developmentalist challenges.
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xxxi
1 Introduction: What's at Issue
1(12)
1.1 Nature?
1(3)
1.1 Human?
4(3)
1.1 Three Different Concepts of Human Nature in Overview
7(6)
I Three Challenges
13(76)
2 The Dehumanization Challenge
15(18)
2.1 The Vernacular Concept of Human Nature
16(2)
2.1 Dehumanization Systematically Viewed
18(10)
2.1 Social Perspectivity
28(3)
2.1 The Challenge That Derives from Dehumanization
31(2)
3 The Darwinian Challenge
33(26)
3.1 What Essences Would Require
34(7)
3.1 Challenging the Classificatory Role of Essences
41(8)
3.1 Challenging the Explanatory Role of Essences
49(8)
3.1 Situating the Anti-Essentialist Consensus
57(2)
4 The Developmentalist Challenge
59(30)
4.1 From Physis versus Nomos to Nature versus Nurture
60(7)
4.1 Ignoring Interactions
67(3)
4.1 The Interactionist Consensus
70(15)
4.1 What Is the Challenge for a Concept of Human Nature?
85(4)
Summary of Part I
87(2)
II Three Natures: A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Reply to the Three Challenges
89(124)
5 Genealogy, the Classificatory Nature, and Channels of Inheritance
91(30)
5.1 Five Questions Regarding a Species' Nature
92(4)
5.1 Genealogical Nexus as the Classificatory Nature
96(6)
5.1 Genealogy and the Channels of Inheritance
102(12)
5.1 The Resulting Pluralism
114(7)
6 Toward a Descriptive Human Nature
121(26)
6.1 Descriptive Knowledge about Humans in General
122(4)
6.1 The Relationship to the Classificatory and the Explanatory Nature
126(5)
6.1 Typicality Necessary?
131(8)
6.1 Typicality Sufficient? Or What Does "Important" Mean?
139(8)
7 The Stability of Human Nature
147(22)
7.1 Innate or Evolved?
148(9)
7.1 Channelism, Stability, and the Nature-Culture Divide Revived
157(7)
7.1 A Narrow Enough Concept of Human Nature in the Descriptive Sense
164(5)
8 An Explanatory Nature
169(20)
8.1 Explanatory Neo-Essentialism
170(9)
8.1 A Population-Level Solution
179(5)
8.1 The Explanatory Nature Established
184(5)
9 Causal Selection and How Human Nature Is Thereby Made
189(24)
9.1 Causal Selection, Control, and Normality
190(6)
9.1 Choosing among Actual Difference Makers and the Willingness to Control
196(6)
9.1 How Norms Make Human Nature Visible
202(4)
9.1 How Norms Make Human Nature Real
206(7)
Summary of Part II
210(3)
III Normativity, Essential Contestedness, and the Quest for Elimination
213(28)
10 Humanism and Normativity
215(16)
10.1 Two Sufficient Entry Conditions for Moral Standing
216(4)
10.1 The Ethical Importance of the Descriptive Nature
220(5)
10.1 A Dialectic, Essentially Contested Concept of Human Nature
225(6)
11 Should We Eliminate the Language of Human Nature?
231(10)
11.1 Elimination versus Revision
232(1)
11.1 Redundancy, Neutrality, and Risk of Dehumanization
233(5)
11.1 Elimination versus Revision as a Matter of Values
238(3)
Summary of Part III 241(2)
Notes 243(22)
References 265(24)
Index 289