What's left of human nature? : a post-essentialist, pluralist, and interactive account of a contested concept
Maria E. Kronfeldner (Author)
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
Print Book, English, 2018
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2018
xxxii, 301 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
9780262038416, 0262038412
1029800762
Introduction: What's at Issue
I. Three Challenges. The Dehumanization Challenge ; The Darwinian Challenge ; The Developmentalist Challenge
II. Three Natures : A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Reply to the Three Challenges. Genealogy, the Classificatory Nature, and Channels of Inheritance ; Toward a Descriptive Human Nature ; The Stability of Human Nature ; An Explanatory Nature ; Causal Selection and How Human Nature Is Thereby Made
III. Normativity, Essential Contestedness, and the Quest for Elimination. Humanism and Normativity ; Should We Eliminate the Language of Human Nature?