scholarly journals Making Sense of What We Are: A Mythological Approach to Human Nature

Philosophy ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Hauskeller
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Human Animal

AbstractThe question what makes us human is often treated as a question of fact. However, the term ‘human’ is not primarily used to refer to a particular kind of entity, but as a ‘nomen dignitatis’ – a dignity-conferring name. It implies a particular moral status. That is what spawns endless debates about such issues as when human life begins and ends and whether human-animal chimeras are “partly human”. Definitions of the human are inevitably “persuasive”. They tell us about what is important and how we should live our lives as humans, and thus help us to make sense of what we are.

Herder and the Jewish Question

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick C. Beiser
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Language History ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

Herder brings the entire human being into focus by tracing its connections with the natural, cultural, and historical world. The first part of the volume examines the various dimensions of Herder’s philosophical understanding of human nature through which he sought methodologically to delineate a genuinely anthropological philosophy. This includes his critique of traditional metaphysics and its revision along anthropological lines; the metaphysical, epistemological, and physiological dimensions of his theory of the soul-body relationship; his conception of aesthetics as the study of the sensuous basis of knowledge; and the relationship between the human and natural sciences. The second part then examines further aspects of this understanding of human nature and what emerges from it: the human-animal distinction; how human life evolves over space and time on the basis of a natural order; the fundamentally hermeneutic dimension to human existence; and the interrelatedness of language, history, religion, and culture.

scholarly journals Rationality, Animality, and Human Nature: Reconsidering Kant’s View of the Human/Animal Relation

Konturen ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
David Craig
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Theory Of Human Nature

Kant is often criticized for his strict separation of humans and animals as categorically distinct entities. This separation hinges on the fact that, for Kant, humans are rational, while non-human animals are wholly irrational. This essay argues that a strict separation of rational humanity and irrational animality, prominent in many areas of Kant’s thinking, does not characterize his view of the human/animal relation overall. For, within Kant’s theory of human nature, rationality and animality are in fact entwined, with both contributing to the goodness and full realization of human life. Through engagement with a range of Kant’s writings on human nature, it is suggested that Kant’s view of the human/animal relation merits reconsideration by Kant scholars and animal-oriented philosophers alike.

scholarly journals The Enduring Greatness: The Mahāpuruşha Paradigm—An Indian Perspective

2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110008
Author(s):  
Maharaj K. Raina
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Spirit ◽  
Positive Direction ◽  
Indian Tradition ◽  
Indian Perspective ◽  
Relative Concept ◽  
The Way

Greatness, a relative concept, has been historically approached in different ways. Considering greatness of character as different from greatness of talents, some cultures have conceptualized greatness as an expression of human spirit leading to transcending existing patterns and awakening inner selves to new levels of consciousness, rising above times and circumstances, and to change the direction of human tide. Individuals characterized by such greatness working with higher selves, guided by moral and ethical imperatives, and possessing noble impulses of human nature are considered to be manifesting spiritual greatness. Examining such greatness is the goal of this article. Keeping Indian tradition in focus, this article has studied how greatness has been conceptualized in that particular tradition and the way in which life and times have shaped great individuals called Mahāpuruşha who exhibited extraordinary moral responsibility relentlessly in pursuit of their visions of addressing contemporary major issues and changing the direction of human life. Four Mahāpuruşha, who possessed such enduring greatness and excelled in their thoughts and actions to give a new positive direction to human life, have been profiled in this article. Suggestions have also been made for studies on moral and spiritual excellence to help realize our true human path and purpose.

Law and biomedicine

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima Comartova ◽  
Andrey Pomazanskiy ◽  
Elena Nikitina ◽  
Saria Nanba ◽  
Timur Mel'nik ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Social Orientation ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
Biomedical Technologies

The rapid development of modern biomedicine creates both hopes for solving global problems of humanity, and risks associated with the enormous potential of its impact on human nature. In this regard, the processes of development and application of biomedical technologies need timely and adequate legal regulation that defines the boundaries of biotechnological intervention in human life. This publication is devoted to the theoretical development of general legal approaches to the essence, content, social orientation and the main industry features of the regulation of relations in the field of biomedicine, which would allow to form a special legal regulation in this area. For researchers, teachers, postgraduates, students, practicing lawyers, employees of public authorities.

scholarly journals Environmental Ecology versus Human Ecology

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-22
Author(s):  
Szczepan Szpoton
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Ecology ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Gift

A collation of environmental ecology with human ecology was the essence of the article. The field of the research included the topics: blending the range of care for ecosystem with the responsibility for our own human nature; presenting a connection between sexuality and procreation concentrated on the gift of marital unity yet protecting the dignity of human procreation; pointing at the areas of human life where the “ecological conversion” takes place.

scholarly journals Bettering Our Stories about Stories about Nature

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-207
Author(s):  
Dolly Jørgensen
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Material Ecocriticism ◽  
Museum Displays ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Text Types

      Both environmental historians and ecocriticism scholars are in the business of simultaneously analysing the stories we tell about the human-nature relationship and creating those stories. Using the case of Kiki, an Aldabra giant tortoise on display in the Muséum national d’Historie naturelle in Paris, I present three potential text types in museum displays which lend themselves to new ecocritical readings: museum labels, biographical displays, and material remains. Ecocritical approaches to the genres of scientific texts and animal biographies and the developing field of material ecocriticism prove useful for making sense of the complex narratives of environmental history. Reaching out to ecocriticism approaches can make the stories I tell as an environmental historian better.

The Epicureans on Human Nature and its Social and Political Consequences

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jan Maximilian Robitzsch
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Contract Theory ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Contract Theory ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
The Social

Based on certain passages in Colotes, Hermarchus, and Horace, the Epicureans may be thought to defend a social contract theory that is roughly Hobbesian. According to such a view, human life without the social contract is solitary and brutish. This paper argues that such a reading is mistaken. It offers a systematic analysis of Lucretius’s culture story in On the Nature of Things v as well as the Epicurean passages that at first sight seem to contradict the Lucretian account. The conclusion of such an analysis is not only that all extant evidence is internally consistent, but also that Epicurean social contract theory relies on a ‘dynamic’ conception of human nature: On the Epicurean view, agents have very different psychological motivations when coming together to form societies and when coming together to form political and legal states.

Animals in Political Theory

2015 ◽  
pp. 42-64
Author(s):  
Sue Donaldson ◽  
Will Kymlicka
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Animal Ethics ◽  
Moral Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Animal Question ◽  
Blind Spots

Western political theorists have largely ignored the animal question, assuming that animals have no place in our theories of democracy, citizenship, membership, sovereignty, and the public good. Conversely, animal ethicists have largely ignored political theory, assuming that we can theorize the moral status and moral rights of animals without drawing on the categories and concepts of political theory. This chapter traces the history of this separation between animals and political theory, examines the resulting intellectual blind spots for animal ethics, and reviews recent attempts to bring the two together. Situating animal rights within political theory has the potential to identify new models of justice in human-animal relations, and to open up new areas of scholarship and research.

Human Nature

2018 ◽  
pp. 261-276
Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Great Apes ◽  
Primate Model ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Behavioral Norms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gendered Roles ◽  
Early Human

This chapter looks at the scientific revelations produced by Jane Goodall's studies on great apes and the effects these studies had on the contentious field of sociobiology. When Jane Goodall and David Hamburg argued for the biological similarities shared by humans and chimpanzees, they also articulated a vision of human nature. They based this vision on biological relatedness rather than on ecological sympathy and implicitly questioned the gendered roles and social hierarchies that characterized baboon behavior as the most appropriate primate model for reconstructing the social and behavioral norms that might have characterized early human life on the savannah. Goodall's early discoveries that chimpanzees manufactured tools, sticks with which to eat termites and masticated leaves with which to sponge up water, fit well with hypotheses that the origins of tool use lay in manufacturing aids for “gathering and processing food” rather than as weapons. But one of Hamburg's graduate students later recalled him warning her not to go overboard with sociobiology.

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