The Debate on the Concept of the Person in Bioethics

This article endeavours to sketch the debate about the concept of a person in the realm of bioethics. Initially, it sets out three understandings of the issue, namely the concept of a person in naturalistic philosophy, in the current of communitarianism and in one of the humanistic positions. The analysis of these approaches lead to the conclusion that a human person is perceived either as an empirical and psychological entity or as a free subjectivity creating him/herself. This thesis provides stimulation for further research. In order to avoid a kind of dualism in the perception of a person stemming from the stances outlined above, the personalistic approach is developed. This points out that a human being should be depicted as one indivisible entity unifying in itself more strictly its self, a subjective aspect of the person, with nature-body aspect which is an objective facet of being human. Given this personalistic perspective, a person comes out as an embodied subjectivity formed by the unique personal act of existence. In this article, such a concept of a person is argued as a vital support in the complex field of bioethical dilemmas.

Naturalism’s maxims and its methods. Is naturalistic philosophy like science?

This paper argues that naturalistic philosophy does not meet its own empiricist mandate. It argues from an empiricist perspective. Naturalists either claim that philosophy is like science in significant ways, or they claim that philosophy ought to be like science. This paper, being chiefly focused on the former claim, argues that naturalistic philosophy is nothing like science. Using Papineau’s markers for the similarities between naturalistic philosophy and science, I argue, counter Papineau, that the method employed in naturalistic philosophy is not a posteriori and its claims are certainly not synthetic in the same way as that of science. This methodological distinction between science and philosophy is one made by Carnap. To show how the methods are distinct I compare two papers; I compare the method employed by Andy Clark in his philosophical paper on the brain as a prediction error minimisation machine with that employed by Rees and Haynes in their neuroscientific paper on mental content.

Ardigò, Roberto (1828–1920)

Roberto Ardigò was the most prominent Italian philosopher of the nineteenth century. A priest and an academic, he was subjected to an ecclesiastical trial for his naturalistic philosophy and dismissed from the priesthood. Ardigò symbolized secularism and the conflict between the liberal state and the Roman Church, which marked Italian politics and culture from the Risorgimento to the end of the century. A positivist philosopher, he advocated an empirical and materialistic explanation of all phenomena and revived Renaissance humanism and naturalism.

Naturalistic philosophy in Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth”

The article is dedicated to the issue of naturalistic philosophy in Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth”. The influence of heredity and environment on the protagonists’ development and behaviour has been stated. Edith Wharton emphasizes the heredity of two characters — Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden. She portrays how the qualities inherited from the parents and further intensified by upbringing affect their future welfare. The protagonists are under total control of their environment — the New York leisure-class society. It determines their motives and actions, as well as has overwhelming effect on their personal lives, ensured by means of gossip and public censure. Edith Wharton has been proved to use repetition of the same actions and habits in order to achieve the effect of stuckness in one place. Incessant social events of the American elite, held in accordance with a strict protocol, lead to thingification of people. The society itself turns into a fetish. As a result, the typical naturalistic notions of “life as suffering” and “life as a prison” are achieved. After a thorough investigation, it has been summarized that Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth” should be considered as a representative of the optimistic and idealistic stream of American naturalism.

Towards a Naturalistic Philosophy

This paper is an invitation to reflect on the advisability of analysing philosophy from a naturalistic perspective. That is, from a perspective that considers philosophy as if it was one more cultural object, which can be studied using the tools that we have available to us today and that are provided by disciplines such as evolutionary psychology or anthropology oriented by a distinctly cognitivist approach. A central concept in the analysis is that of “intuitive ontology” – closely linked to intuitive (or folk-) philosophy or the spontaneous, naïve (natural) way of thinking that is associated with common sense – which is a result of the evolutionary process and a source of metaphysical prejudices such as dualism. A metaphilosophical reflection, such as that proposed here, identifies the “natural” character of a transcendent metaphysics that is still too close to intuitive philosophy, and the interest of constituting a naturalistic philosophy that is fully conscious of its “unnatural” or “counterintuitive” character.