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 results 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Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas.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. (shrink)

La discussione generale sulla filosofia della scienza contemporanea è complicata dal numero e dall’eterogeneità delle scienze, mentre lo studio di temi specifici porta inevitabilmente a dissertazioni specialistiche che mancano nel dare ragione della trama di senso sottostante. Questo Piccolo trattato di epistemologia intende occupare uno spazio vuoto, proponendo alcuni temi chiave per la comprensione dei meccanismi alla base della conoscenza scientifica: i rapporti tra filosofia e scienze, siano esse naturali o umane; la complessa relazione tra fatti e valori; la distinzione (...) tra scoperta e giustificazione; la necessità di un discorso etico sulla ricerca, che chiami in causa categorie come fiducia, empatia, altruismo ed egoismo. Con un approccio chiaro e rigoroso, il volume intende rivolgersi a quell’ampia fascia di pubblico interessata alle tematiche centrali dell’epistemologia, della filosofia e delle scienze. (shrink)

Creativity has often been declared, especially by philosophers, as the last frontier of science. The assumption is that it will defy explanation forever. I will defend two claims in order to oppose this assumption and to demystify creativity: (1) the perspective that creativity cannot be explained wrongly identifies creativity with what I shall call metaphysical freedom; (2) the Darwinian approach to creativity, a prominent naturalistic account of creativity, fails to give an explanation of creativity, because it confuses conceptual issues with (...) explanation. I will close with some remarks on the status and differences in some explanations available in contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

I argue that creativity is compatible with determinism and therefore with naturalistic explanation. I explore different kinds of novelty, corresponding with four distinct concepts of creativity – anthropological, historical, psychological and metaphysical. Psychological creativity incorporates originality and spontaneity. Taken together, these point to the independence of the creative mind from social learning, experience and previously acquired knowledge. This independence is nevertheless compatible with determinism. Creativity is opposed to specific causal factors, but it does not exclude causal determination as such. So (...) creativity can be naturalized. (shrink)

Recent philosophical work on the concept of human nature disagrees on how to respond to the Darwinian challenge, according to which biological species do not have traditional essences. Three broad kinds of reactions can be distinguished: conservative intrinsic essentialism, which defends essences in the traditional sense, eliminativism, which suggests dropping the concept of human nature altogether, and constructive approaches, which argue that revisions can generate sensible concepts of human nature beyond traditional essences. The different constructive approaches pick out one or (...) two of the three epistemic roles that are fused in traditional essentialist conceptions of human nature: descriptive, explanatory, definitional, or explanatory and definitional. These turns towards diverging epistemic roles are best interpreted pluralistically: there is a plurality of concepts of human nature that have to be clearly distinguished, each with a legitimate role in respective scientific contexts. (shrink)

Over the last four decades arguments for and against the claim that creative hypothesis formation is based on Darwinian ‘blind’ variation have been put forward. This paper offers a new and systematic route through this long-lasting debate. It distinguishes between undirected, random, and unjustified variation, to prevent widespread confusions regarding the meaning of undirected variation. These misunderstandings concern Lamarckism, equiprobability, developmental constraints, and creative hypothesis formation. The paper then introduces and develops the standard critique that creative hypothesis formation is guided (...) rather than blind, integrating developments from contemporary research on creativity. On that basis, I discuss three compatibility arguments that have been used to answer the critique. These arguments do not deny guided variation but insist that an important analogy exists nonetheless. These compatibility arguments all fail, even though they do so for different reasons: trivialisation, conceptual confusion, and lack of evidence respectively. Revisiting the debate in this manner not only allows us to see where exactly a ‘Darwinian’ account of creative hypothesis formation goes wrong, but also to see that the debate is not about factual issues, but about the interpretation of these factual issues in Darwinian terms. (shrink)

In the face of causal complexity, scientists reconstitute phenomena in order to arrive at a more simplified and partial picture that ignores most of the 'bigger picture.' This paper will distinguish between two modes of reconstituting phenomena: one moving down to a level of greater decomposition (toward organizational parts of the original phenomenon), and one moving up to a level of greater abstraction (toward different differences regarding the phenomenon). The first aim of the paper is to illustrate that phenomena are (...) moving targets, i.e., they are not fixed once and for all, but are adapted, if necessary, on the basis of the preferred perspective adopted for pragmatic reasons. The second aim is to analyze in detail the second mode of reconstituting phenomena. This includes an exposition of the kind of pragmatic-pluralistic picture resulting from the fact that phenomena are reconstituted by a move up to a level of greater abstraction. (shrink)

In this conceptual article, we argue that defining corporate social responsibility and corporate social irresponsibility as opposite constructs produces a lack of clarity between responsible and irresponsible acts. Furthermore, we contend that the treatment of the CSR and CSI concepts as opposites de-emphasizes the value of CSI as a stand-alone construct. Thus, we reorient the CSI discussion to include multiple aspects that current conceptualizations have not adequately accommodated. We provide an in-depth exploration of how researchers define CSI and both identify (...) and analyze three important gray zones between CSR and CSI: the role of harm and benefit, the role of the actor and intentionality, and the role of rectification. We offer these gray zones as factors contributing to the present lack of conceptual clarity of the term CSI, as a concept in its own right, leading to difficulties that researchers and managers experience in categorizing CSI acts as distinct from CSR. (shrink)

Human nature is a concept that transgresses the boundary between science and society and between fact and value. It is as much a political concept as it is a scientific one. This chapter will cover the politics of human nature by using evidence from history, anthropology and social psychology. The aim is to show that an important political function of the vernacular concept of human nature is social demarcation (inclusion/exclusion): it is involved in regulating who is ‘us’ and who is (...) ‘them.’ It is a folk concept that is used for dehumanization, for denying (a) membership in humankind or (b) full humanness to certain people in order to include or exclude them from various forms of politically relevant aspects of human life, such as rights, power, etc. (shrink)

The article addresses the question whether culture evolves in a Lamarckian manner. I highlight three central aspects of a Lamarckian concept of evolution: the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the transformational pattern of evolution, and the concept of directed changes. A clear exposition of these aspects shows that a system can be a Darwinian variational system instead of a Lamarckian transformational one, even if it is based on inheritance of acquired characteristics and/or on Lamarckian directed changes. On this basis, I apply (...) the three aspects to culture. Taking for granted that culture is a variational system, based on selection processes, I discuss in detail the senses in which cultural inheritance can be said to be Lamarckian and in which sense problem solving, a major factor in cultural change, leads to directed variation. (shrink)

This article illustrates in which sense genetic determinism is still part of the contemporary interactionist consensus in medicine. Three dimensions of this consensus are discussed: kinds of causes, a continuum of traits ranging from monogenetic diseases to car accidents, and different kinds of determination due to different norms of reaction. On this basis, this article explicates in which sense the interactionist consensus presupposes the innate?acquired distinction. After a descriptive Part 1, Part 2 reviews why the innate?acquired distinction is under attack (...) in contemporary philosophy of biology. Three arguments are then presented to provide a limited and pragmatic defense of the distinction: an epistemic, a conceptual, and a historical argument. If interpreted in a certain manner, and if the pragmatic goals of prevention and treatment (ideally specifying what medicine and health care is all about) are taken into account, then the innate?acquired distinction can be a useful epistemic tool. It can help, first, to understand that genetic determination does not mean fatalism, and, second, to maintain a system of checks and balances in the continuing nature?nurture debates. (shrink)

This paper addresses whether the often-bemoaned loss of unity of knowledge about humans, which results from the disciplinary fragmentation of science, is something to be overcome. The fragmentation of being human rests on a couple of distinctions, such as the nature-culture divide. Since antiquity the distinction between nature (roughly, what we inherit biologically) and culture (roughly, what is acquired by social interaction) has been a commonplace in science and society. Recently, the nature/culture divide has come under attack in various ways, (...) in philosophy as well as in cultural anthropology. Regarding the latter, for instance, the divide was quintessential in its beginnings as an academic dis-cipline, when Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the first professional anthropologists in the US, rallied for (what I call) the right to ignore—in his case, human nature—by adopting a separationist epistemic stance. A separationist stance will be understood as an epistemic research heuristic that defends the right to ignore a specif-ic phenomenon (e.g., human nature) or a specific causal factor in an explanation typical for a disciplinary field. I will use Kroeber’s case as an example for making a general point against a bias towards integration (synthesis bias, as I call it) that is exemplified, for instance, by defenders of evolutionary psychology. I will claim that, in principle, a separationist stance is as good as an integrationist stance since both can be equally fruitful. With this argument from fruitful sepa-ration in place, not just the separationist stance but also the nature/culture di-vide can be defended against its critics. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze the role of science and technology studies journal editors in organizing and maintaining the peer review economy. We specifically conceptualize peer review as a gift economy running on perpetually renewed experiences of mutual indebtedness among members of an intellectual community. While the peer review system is conventionally presented as self-regulating, we draw attention to its vulnerabilities and to the essential curating function of editors. Aside from inherent complexities, there are various shifts in the broader political–economic (...) and sociotechnical organization of scholarly publishing that have recently made it more difficult for editors to organize robust cycles of gift exchange. This includes the increasing importance of journal metrics and associated changes in authorship practices; the growth and differentiation of the STS journal landscape; and changes in publishing funding models and the structure of the publishing market through which interactions among authors, editors, and reviewers are reconfigured. To maintain a functioning peer review economy in the face of numerous pressures, editors must balance contradictory imperatives: the need to triage intellectual production and rely on established cycles of gift exchange for efficiency, and the need to expand cycles of gift exchange to ensure the sustainability and diversity of the peer review economy. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. First, to bring together the models of temporal phenomenology on offer and to present these using a consistent set of distinctions and terminologies. Second, to examine the methodologies currently practiced in the development of these models. To that end we present an abstract characterisation in which we catalogue all extant models. We then argue that neither of the two extreme methodologies currently discussed is suitable to the task of developing a model of temporal phenomenology. An (...) entirely top-down methodology is largely insensitive to empirical findings, while one that is entirely bottom-up is insensitive to both introspective evidence and more general philosophical considerations. We recommend a methodology that falls between these two extremes. (shrink)

This work proposes an analysis of the cognitive and motivational components of hope, its basic properties, and the affective dispositions and behaviors it is likely to induce. In our view current treatments of hope do not fully account for its specificity, by making hope overlap with positive expectation or some specification of positive expectation. In contrast, we attempt to highlight the distinctive features of hope, pointing to its differences from positive expectation, as well as from a sense of successful agency, (...) optimism, trust, and faith. Fear and anxiety are also addressed, and the latter is analyzed as a state of mind implying both fear and hope. Finally, the relationship between hope and motivation is explored, and “active” hope is compared with “passive” hope. Some concluding remarks summarize the results of our analysis, and stress the role of hope in fostering the individual’s well-being. (shrink)

The term ‘human nature’ can refer to different things in the world and fulfil different epistemic roles. Human nature can refer to a classificatory nature (classificatory criteria that determine the boundaries of, and membership in, a biological or social group called ‘human’), a descriptive nature (a bundle of properties describing the respective group’s life form), or an explanatory nature (a set of factors explaining that life form). This chapter will first introduce these three kinds of ‘human nature’, together with seven (...) reasons why we disagree about human nature. In the main, this chapter focuses on the explanatory concept of human nature, which is related to one of the seven reasons for disagreement, namely, the scientific authority inherent in the term ‘nature’. I will examine why, in a number of historical contexts, it was attractive to refer to ‘nature’ as an explanatory category, and why this usage has led to the continual contestation of the term within the sciences. The claim is that even if the contents of talk about ‘nature’ varied historically, the term’s pragmatic function of demarcation stayed the same. The term ‘nature’ conveys scientific authority over a territory; ‘human nature’ is a concept used to divide causes, as well as experts, and thereby conquer others who threaten to invade one’s epistemic territory. Analysing this demarcation, which has social as well as epistemic aspects, will help us to understand why the explanatory role has been important and why it is unlikely that people will ever agree on either the meaning or the importance of ‘human nature’ as an explanatory category. (shrink)

Alongside the renowned male pioneers of medical cytogenetics, many women participated in investigations at the laboratory bench and the bedside, both in Europe and the Americas. These women were committed to this new biological and clinical practice—cytogenetics, the origins of contemporary genetic diagnosis—and contributed to the creation of new biological concepts and settings centered on the study of chromosome imaging. This paper will review the contributions made by a group of woman scientists from a wide geographical distribution, situating their names (...) and research agendas within the history of a field dating back to early plant and insect cytogenetics. Rather than an exhaustive compendium of women geneticists, this essay presents a kind of historical reconstruction that can be achieved by placing women at center stage in their geographies and networks of circulating cytogenetic knowledge and practices thereby relating a history of genetic images though the work carried out by women, retrieving their agency and constructing an inclusive history of an influential contemporary biomedical practice as it gained increasing influence in the laboratory and the clinic. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze Kant’s ideas about eating and drinking. First, I show that gluttony and drunkenness are considered ways to oppose to the duty to oneself as an animal being. Second, I claim that for Kant there is a healthy way of having meals, which consists in eating together with friends. Then I indicate that Kant accepts that one can drink at dinner parties but has to avoid drinks that lead to drunkenness and unsocial behavior. In this sense, (...) he draws a classification of the various kinds of alcoholic drinks, according to their potential harm. Afterwards, I illustrate how Kant’s own intimate life was a daily practice of his thoughts on dietetic conceptions and on what is better for digestion and health. To conclude, I mention the idea of a philosopher’s medicine of the body and why a strict diet should be avoided. (shrink)

This paper is on the problem of causal selection and comments on Collingwood's classic paper "The so-called idea of causation". It discusses the relevance of Collingwood’s control principle in contemporary life sciences and defends that it is not the ability to control, but the willingness to control that often biases us towards some rather than other causes of a phenomenon. Willingness to control is certainly only one principle that influences causal selection, but it is an important one. It shows how (...) norms make causes. (shrink)

Most scholars of emotions concede that although cognitive evaluations are essential for emotion, they are not sufficient for it, and that other elements, such as bodily feelings, physiological sensations and behavioral expressions are also required. However, only a few discuss how these diverse aspects of emotion are related in order to form the unity of emotion. In this essay I examine the co-presence and the causal views, and I argue that neither view can account for the unity of emotions. In (...) particular, both views face the problem of fortuitous connection, and, as a result, they fail to identify and distinguish an emotion from other mental states. Consequently, they fail to account for our first person authority over our emotions. I finally argue that only an internal, conceptual relation between the cognitive/evaluative and affective/physiological aspects of emotion can avoid such problems, and suggest that the Aristotelian distinction of form and matter can provide such internal relation. (shrink)

What are intuitions? Do they exist as distinctive mental states? Do they have an epistemic function? Can we discern specific features that characterize intuitions? Questions like these are widely d...

Following the declaration of the COVID-19 outbreak as a global pandemic in March 2020, a state of alarm was decreed in Spain. In this situation, healthcare workers experienced high levels of stress, anxiety and depression due to the heavy workload and working conditions. Although Spain experienced a progressive decline in the number of COVID-19 cases until the last week of May and the work overload among health workers was substantially reduced, several studies have shown that this work overload is associated (...) with the later emergence of psychological symptoms induced by stress. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the levels of stress, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and compassionate fatigue in health professionals. The sample consisted of 973 health professionals 16.5% men, 82.9% women, and one non-binary person. The data were collected through an online questionnaire sent to the participants by e-mail. DASS-21 was used to measure anxiety, stress and depression, PCL-C to measure post-traumatic stress and ProQOL -vIV to measure compassion fatigue. In addition, other descriptive variables that could be related to these levels of psychological symptomatology were evaluated. The results reveal that after the work overload experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers report psychological symptoms, post-traumatic stress and compassion fatigue. It is therefore recommended that these professionals be provided with psychological help in order to reduce the emotional impact of COVID-19, and consequently improve their mental health. (shrink)

Motor learning can be defined as a process that leads to relatively permanent changes in motor behavior through repeated interactions with the environment. Different strategies can be adopted to achieve motor learning: movements can be overtly practiced leading to an amelioration of motor performance; alternatively, covert strategies (e.g., action observation) can promote neuroplastic changes in the motor system even in the absence of real movement execution. However, whether a training regularly alternating action observation and execution (i.e., Action Observation Training, AOT) (...) may surpass the pure motor practice (MP) and observational learning (OL) remains to be established. To address this issue, we enrolled 54 subjects requiring them to learn tying nautical knots via one out of three types of training (AOT, MP, OL) with the scope to investigate which element mostly contributes to motor learning. We evaluated the overall improvement of each group, along with the predictive role that neuropsychological indexes exert on each treatment outcome. The AOT group exhibited the highest performance improvement (42%), indicating that the regular alternation between observation and execution biases participants toward a better performance. The reiteration of this sequence provides an incremental, adjunct value that super-adds onto the efficacy of motor practice or observational learning in isolation (42% > 25% + 10%, i.e., OL + MP). These findings extend the use of the AOT from clinical and rehabilitative contexts to daily routines requiring the learning and perfectioning of new motor skills such as sports training, music, and occupational activities requiring fine motor control. (shrink)

In recent years there has been renewed interest in the participation of lay people in regulatory procedures. The debate peaked in the 1980s with the anti-nuclear movements and again more recently as a reaction to the food scandals of the mid-1990s. In the wake of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis there has been a proliferation of European Community rules on the production, processing and retailing of food products, along with the multiplication of scientific committees in order to cope with (...) increased ... (shrink)

'Ethics' was not developed as a separate branch of philosophy in Buddhist traditions until the modern period, though Buddhist philosophers have always been concerned with the moral significance of thoughts, emotions, intentions, actions, virtues, and precepts. Their most penetrating forms of moral reflection have been developed within disciplines of practice aimed at achieving freedom and peace. This Element first offers a brief overview of Buddhist thought and modern scholarly approaches to its diverse forms of moral reflection. It then explores two (...) of the most prominent philosophers from the main strands of the Indian Buddhist tradition – Buddhaghosa and Śāntideva – in a comparative fashion. (shrink)

This article exposes the neoplatonic element present in the metaphysics of causality elaborated in the seventeenth century by Leibniz. It explains this question in relation with medieval Neoplatonism, whose metaphysics of the Verb appears as the nucleus of the explanation of the relationship between causality and otherness.

Las fuentes de la revelación han afirmado siempre la presencia salvífica del Espíritu Santo más allá de los límites del antiguo y del nuevo Israel. Este artículo es un intento por percibirla en las ceremonias religiosas de los pueblos indígenas y mestizos del Sur Andino Peruano. Para alcanzar su objetivo, considera las circunstancias que acompañaron el anuncio del Evangelio en América y encuentra en la Carta a los Hebreos una clave para comprender e interpretar el proceso de inculturación del cristianismo (...) en los ritos dedicados a la Madre Tierra. Frente a la idolatría tributaria de la muerte, estos antiguos cultos aparecen como núcleos generadores de vida, que revelan la intervención providente de Dios en situaciones de sufrimiento injusto. (shrink)