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Author: Elizabeth Hannon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198823657
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
Is human nature something that the natural and social sciences aim to describe, or is it a pernicious fiction? What role, if any, does human nature play in directing and informing scientific work? Leading figures from teh life sciences, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology present new essays exploring these questions.
Author: Elizabeth Hannon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198823657
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
Is human nature something that the natural and social sciences aim to describe, or is it a pernicious fiction? What role, if any, does human nature play in directing and informing scientific work? Leading figures from teh life sciences, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology present new essays exploring these questions.
Author: Jason T. Eberl
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268107750
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 545
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Book Description
Is there a shared nature common to all human beings? What essential qualities might define this nature? These questions are among the most widely discussed topics in the history of philosophy and remain subjects of perennial interest and controversy. The Nature of Human Persons offers a metaphysical investigation of the composition of the human essence. For a human being to exist, does it require an immaterial mind, a physical body, a functioning brain, a soul? Jason Eberl also considers the criterion of identity for a developing human being—that is, what is required for a human being to continue existing as a person despite undergoing physical and psychological changes over time? Eberl's investigation presents and defends a theoretical perspective from the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas. Advancing beyond descriptive historical analysis, this book places Aquinas’s account of human nature into direct comparison with several prominent contemporary theories: substance dualism, emergentism, animalism, constitutionalism, four-dimensionalism, and embodied mind theory. These theories inform various conclusions regarding when human beings first come into existence—at conception, during gestation, or after birth—and how we ought to define death for human beings. Finally, each of these viewpoints offers a distinctive rationale as to whether, and if so how, human beings may survive death. Ultimately, Eberl argues that the Thomistic account of human nature addresses the matters of human nature and survival in a much more holistic and desirable way than the other theories and offers a cohesive portrait of one’s continued existence from conception through life to death and beyond.
Author: Mike Hulme
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107268893
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
Climate change is not 'a problem' waiting for 'a solution'. It is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon which is re-shaping the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity's place on Earth. Drawing upon twenty-five years of professional work as an international climate change scientist and public commentator, Mike Hulme provides a unique insider's account of the emergence of this phenomenon and the diverse ways in which it is understood. He uses different standpoints from science, economics, faith, psychology, communication, sociology, politics and development to explain why we disagree about climate change. In this way he shows that climate change, far from being simply an 'issue' or a 'threat', can act as a catalyst to revise our perception of our place in the world. Why We Disagree About Climate Change is an important contribution to the ongoing debate over climate change and its likely impact on our lives.
Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1595586571
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
In this historic 1971 debate, two of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers discuss whether there is such a thing as innate human nature. In 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War and at a time of great political and social instability, two of the world’s leading intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, were invited by Dutch philosopher Fons Elders to debate an age-old question: Is there such a thing as “innate” human nature independent of our experiences and external influences? The resulting dialogue is one of the most original, provocative, and spontaneous exchanges to have occurred between contemporary philosophers. Above all, their discussion serves as a concise introduction to their two opposing theories. What begins as a philosophical argument rooted in linguistics (Chomsky) and the theory of knowledge (Foucault), soon evolves into a broader discussion encompassing a wide range of topics, from science, history, and behaviorism to creativity, freedom, and the struggle for justice in the realm of politics. In addition to the debate itself, this volume features a newly written introduction by noted Foucault scholar John Rajchman and includes substantial additional texts by Chomsky and Foucault. “[Chomsky is] arguably the most important intellectual alive.” —The New York Times “Foucault . . . leaves no reader untouched or unchanged.” —Edward Said
Author: John Dupré
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199248060
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Dupré warns that our understanding of human nature is being distorted by two faulty and harmful forms of pseudo-scientific thinking. He claims it is important to resist scientism - an exaggerated conception of what science can be expected to do.
Author: Justin Garson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000547280
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
For some, biology explains all there is to know about the mind. Yet many big questions remain: Is the mind shaped by genes or the environment? If mental traits are the result of adaptations built up over thousands of years, as evolutionary psychologists claim, how can such claims be tested? If the mind is a machine, as biologists argue, how does it allow for something as complex as human thought? Revised and updated to take account of new developments in the field, The Biological Mind: A Philosophical Introduction explores these questions and more, using the philosophy of biology to introduce and assess the nature of the mind. Justin Garson addresses the following key topics: moral psychology, altruism, and levels of selection; evolutionary psychology and the adaptationism debate; genes, environment, and the nature–nurture debate; natural selection and mental representation; psychiatric classification and the maladapted mind. This second edition includes three new chapters on race, sex, and human nature as well as new sections on group and kin selection, psychological altruism, and cultural evolution. Including chapter summaries, annotated further readings, a glossary of terms, and examples and case studies throughout, this is an indispensable introduction for those teaching philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of biology. It will also be an excellent resource for those in related fields such as biology.
Author: Phil Macnaghten
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761953135
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Demonstrating that all notions of nature are inextricably entangled in different forms of social life, the text elaborates the many ways in which the apparently natural world has been produced from within particular social practices. These are analyzed in terms of different senses, different times and the production of distinct spaces, including the local, the national and the global. The authors emphasize the importance of cultural understandings of the physical world, highlighting the ways in which these have been routinely misunderstood by academic and policy discourses. They show that popular conceptions of, and attitudes to, nature are often contradictory and that there are no simple ways of prevailing upon people to `
Author: Karolina Hübner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190876379
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 465
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Book Description
This volume investigates what it means to be human. Is there something that makes us distinct from computers, other great apes, Martians, and gods? And what are the ethical and political consequences of how we answer this question? How have our views on this changed from the times of the ancient Greek and Chinese philosophers? What do contemporary evolutionary biologists and advocates of uploading human consciousness onto computers think about it? This volume collects new essays from leading scholars in philosophy, history, and other disciplines to explore these and numerous other questions.
Author: Maria Kronfeldner
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262347970
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
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.
Author: Paul Dragos Aligica
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135968535
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development demonstrates the importance of one of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics winners Elinor Ostrom's research program. The Bloomington School has become one of the most dynamic, well recognized and productive centers of the New Institutional Theory movement. Its ascendancy is considered to be the result of a unique and extremely successful combination of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches and hard-nosed empiricism. This book demonstrates that the well-known interdisciplinary and empirical agenda of the Bloomington Research Program is the result of a less-known but very bold proposition: an attempt to revitalize and extend into the new millennium a traditional mode of analysis illustrated by authors like Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, Hamilton, Madison and Tocqueville. As such, the School tries to synthesize the traditional perspectives with the contemporary developments in social sciences and thus to re-ignite the old approach in the new intellectual and political context of the twentieth century. The book presents an outline and a systematic analysis of the vision behind the Bloomington Research Program in Institutional Analysis and Development, explaining its basic assumptions and its main themes as well as the foundational philosophy that frames its research questions and theoretical and methodological approaches. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of social science, especially those in the fields of economics, political sciences, sociology and public administration.
