The Duality of Human Nature

1993 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trudi C. Miller

To update the view of human nature that undergirds eighteenth-century British/American political economy, this article reviews literature from diverse subfields of psychobiology. Findings on the structure, function, and evolution of the human brain confirm the duality between reason and passion that is at the core of the science of Hobbes. Contemporary findings across fields indicate that people become emotionally attached to objects, including verbal abstractions, through experiences with pleasure and pain. In contrast, human reasoning is essentially scientific. The duality between passionate motivation and humanity's unique capacity for reasoning makes political science important. By applying the scientific method to the subject of politics, people can design institutions that channel quasi-rational behavior toward outcomes that are mutually beneficial, rather than mutually destructive. Defining human nature correctly is the key to political science, and Smith's addition of the passion of sympathy to Hobbes's narrow definition of human motivation is essential.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Assia Mohdeb ◽  
Sofiane Mammeri

Identity, in one of its understanding, signifies a set of characteristics that make up a person’s ethical faithfulness to, identification with, and pride of one’s origin, tradition, and culture. Remaining true to one’s identity and being faithful to the core values of one’s culture is a complicated matter when it comes to a black living in white society like America, where color and racial identity are rudimentary prerequisites in self-definition and naming. Philip Roth’s novel entitled The Human Stain (2000) shows how some black figures undress their black identity to wear the prestigious white one to go onward with life as full selves, to have access to all the privileges the whites enjoy, and, above all, to live without the specter of race and the decisiveness of epidermal signs. The novel calls into question and revision such essentialist notions as other, class,andrace by describing the crises the subject or self undergoes in the light of racial prejudices, center-periphery relations, and class stereotypes. The present paper, then, addresses the act of self-abdication the protagonist, Silk Coleman, carries out to overstep the feeling of otherness and to dodge racial discrimination. The paper looks into the notions of selfhood and Otherness by negotiating the definition of the self and the distortion it undergoes in its encounter with the Other . The study aims at revealing, primarily, the effects of Black racial-passing, a common phenomenon in American society of the first half of the twentieth century, on familial relationships and cultural heritage. It also reveals the weight of gender and class discrimination in the individual’s identity formation and well-being.


Author(s):  
Kevin Gray ◽  
Susan Francis Gray

Titles in the Core Text series take the reader straight to the heart of the subject, providing focused, concise, and reliable guides for students at all levels. This chapter introduces a number of concepts that are fundamental to an understanding of the contemporary law of land in England and Wales. It discusses: definition of ‘land’ as physical reality; the notion of abstract ‘estates’ in land as the medium of ownership; the relationship between law and equity; the meaning of ‘property’ in land; the impact of human rights on property concepts; the ambivalence of common law perspectives on ‘land’; the statutory organisation of proprietary rights in land; and the underlying policy motivations that drive the contemporary law of land.


2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 23-48
Author(s):  
Lisa Lowe ◽  
Kris Manjapra

The core concept of ‘the human’ that anchors so many humanities disciplines – history, literature, art history, philosophy, religion, anthropology, political theory, and others – issues from a very particular modern European definition of Man ‘over-represented’ as the human. The history of modernity and of modern disciplinary knowledge formations are, in this sense, a history of modern European forms monopolizing the definition of the human and placing other variations at a distance from the human. This article is an interdisciplinary research that decenters Man-as-human as the subject/object of inquiry, and proposes a relational analytic that reframes established orthodoxies of area, geography, history and temporality. It also involves new readings of traditional archives, finding alternative repositories and practices of knowledge and collection to radically redistribute our ways of understanding the meaning of the human.


1963 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-96
Author(s):  
R. S. Milne

This article is intended as a ‘footnote’, written from the political science point of view, to more comprehensive accounts of the subject. Its main concern is to underline some respects in which Philippine nationalism is atypical in Southeast Asia. It is not proposed to define nationalism. Many definitions seem to fall into one of two groups, the unsatisfyingly general or the (still unsatisfying)determinedly specific. An example of the former is that nationalism consists in “on one side the love of a common soil, race, language or historical culture…” This immediately prompts the question, “which soil, which race etc.”? The latter group is exemplified by the definition of Karl W. Deutsch, which is based on the existence of “complementary habits and facilities of communication.”


2004 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-28
Author(s):  
Mahendra Bhushan Thapa

The world is guided by power politics. The power politics is the core process for regulating human behaviour activised in the society. The society is regulated and maintained with the provision of law and order sanctioned by power politics. Everybody has strong willingness for gaining power for the fulfilment of the self-interest and also for the betterment of the society. But from the view point of human nature, self-interest is more stronger than the interest in the society. The objective of this article is to analyze power politics for the fulfilment of human interest based on the struggle for power. Journal of Political Science Vol.7(1) 2004 20-28


Author(s):  
Boothby William H

This chapter explains the grave humanitarian concerns that cluster munitions have aroused and traces the processes that culminated in legal action taken to address this concern. Cluster munitions are the subject of the most recent arms control treaty, the Cluster Munitions Convention (CMC) adopted in Dublin on 30 May 2008. The process that led to the adoption of this Convention and the parallel and ultimately fruitless discussions of the same topic under the auspices of the CCW provides an important case study that illustrates how modern weapons law is, in practice, made. The complex CMC definition of cluster munitions is explained, the core obligations provided for in the treaty are related and the important provisions of article 21 dealing with interoperability issues are examined.


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald C. Langevoort

AbstractIn this brief essay, I want to call something Lynn Stout was passionate about: building a better account (both theoretical and empirical) of human nature and motivation. This was the subject of a book that extended well beyond the corporate world (Cultivating Conscience [2011]) and was implicit in her most complete set of thoughts about corporate governance, The Shareholder Value Myth (2012). Lynn understood that such a behavioral account was needed to support her theory of corporate purpose. The other CONVIVIUM contributions say little about this aspect of her work, so I am bringing her thoughts about human motivation frontstage.


2018 ◽  
pp. 8-19
Author(s):  
Fedir Kyryliuk ◽  
Viktor Melnyk

The critical analis of the centennial stage of the institutionalization of political science makes it possible to draw a paradoxical conclusion — political science is the science of debate and about debate. This is explained not only by the complexity of the methodological use of political science principles or by its poor integration in the subject area of other social (or behavioral) sciences. The main problems of political science are terminological uncertainty and methodological Abstraction. Each new approach in political science really can completely change the essence of its theoretical construction. By introducing the term “Civil Political Science” into broad terms, the authors hope to make a step towards the structural determinacy of political science and give it a solid foundation — the problem of a person as a citizen. Civic political science is intended to improve political science, to arrive from the destructive influence of etatism, which is only masked by ideological stamps and reduces the very idea of the state (as an organism at the same time social, legal, created by a citizen-man for a citizen-man). Applying for the new principles of civil political science, the authors hope to begin the process of “deetatization” of political science in order to serve the true interests of the state — the interests of citizenship. It should not be forgotten that only citizens determine and produce statehood by the fact of their existence. Man as a citizen was formed in the process of human transition from the wild stage of existence to settled life. The struggle of instincts of physical against moral feelings was accompanied by the whole process of political evolution of communities — from the primitive order to the present day. It did not pass the institute of citizenship, which was largely intended to reconcile the instinctive nature of man as a biosocial being (let us recall the patriarchal definition of Roman law). Consequently, the reconciliation of morality and physical nature within a person should be recognized as the prevailing tendency of civil political science.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (0) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Christopher Maidment

This paper discusses a case small in scale, but which raises questions around how different conceptions of what is in the public interest are reconciled in the English regulatory planning system. The case in question is the proposed redevelopment of three 1850s shops in Sheffield’s Devonshire Quarter, traditionally home to independent retailers. The article illustrates how a small-scale planning application can generate national attention, through a range of misunderstandings, conflicting interests and a narrow definition of what constitutes knowledge in English planning. Particular attention is paid to how a different approach to decision making might have facilitated a compromise solution, through thinking about what is in the public interest at different scales. The core argument is around the need to address how public participation in planning processes can be based on more equitable use of knowledge. This leads to conclusions around how the system can better reconcile multiple interests.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Sosteric ◽  
Gina Ratkovic

In 1943, Abraham Maslow presented a now widely accepted theory of human motivation. This theory was shortly represented by a now iconic Pyramid of Needs. Building upon the work of Abraham Maslow, this article rejects the pyramid of needs as an ideologically rooted, sanitized, and stripped-down version of Maslow’s nascent Eupsychian Theory. Instead, the article proposes a Circle of Seven Essential needs as the core of a sophisticated and integrative humanistic/transpersonal Euspychian theory of human development and human potential, a theory that Maslow was in the process of developing before his untimely death. As argued in the article, the Circle of Seven Essential Needs encourages us to develop a broad, holistic, and integrative view of human nature, human development and the role of human society more in line with Maslow’s thinking on human development and human potential.


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