Showing papers in "Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement in 2012"

Human Nature and Aristotelian Virtue Ethics

Abstract: Given that it relies on claims about human nature, has Aristotelian virtue ethics (henceforth AVE) been undermined by evolutionary biology? There are at least four objections which are offered in support of the claim that this is so, and I argue that they all fail. The first two (Part 1) maintain that contemporary AVE relies on a concept of human nature which evolutionary biology has undercut and I show this is not so. In Part 2, I try to make it clear that Foot's Aristotelian ethical naturalism, often construed as purporting to provide virtue ethics with a foundation, is not foundationalist and is not attempting to derive ethics from biology. In Part 3, I consider the other two objections. These do not make a misguided assumption about Aristotelian ethical naturalism's foundational aspirations, nor question AVE's use of the concept of human nature, but maintain that some of AVE's empirical assumptions about human nature may well be false, given the facts of our evolution. With respect to these, I argue that, as attempts to undermine AVE specifically, they fail, though they raise significant challenges to our ethical thought quite generally.

Science and Human Nature

Abstract: There is a puzzling tension in contemporary scientific attitudes towards human nature. On the one hand, evolutionary biologists correctly maintain that the traditional essentialist conception of human nature is untenable; and moreover that this is obviously so in the light of quite general and exceedingly well-known evolutionary considerations. On this view, talk of human nature is just an expression of pre-Darwinian superstition. On the other hand, talk of human nature abounds in certain regions of the sciences, especially in linguistics, psychology and cognitive science. Further, it is very frequently most common amongst those cognitive-behavioral scientists who should be most familiar with the sorts of facts that putatively undermine the very notion of human nature: sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, and more generally, theorists working on the evolution of mind and culture.

The Anthropological Difference: What Can Philosophers Do To Identify the Differences Between Human and Non-human Animals?

Abstract: This paper considers the question of whether there is a human-animal or ‘anthropological difference’. It starts with a historical introduction to the project of philosophical anthropology (sct. 1). Section 2 explains the philosophical quest for an anthropological difference. Sections 3–4 are methodological and explain how philosophical anthropology should be pursued in my view, namely as impure conceptual analysis. The following two sections discuss two fundamental objections to the very idea of such a difference, biological continuity (sct. 5) and Darwinist anti-essentialism (sct. 6). Section 7 discusses various possible responses to this second objection – potentiality, normality and typicality. It ends by abandoning the idea of an essence possessed by all and only individual human beings. Instead, anthropological differences are to be sought in the realm of capacities underlying specifically human societies (forms of communication and action). The final section argues that if there is such a thing as the anthropological difference, it is connected to language. But it favours a more modest line according to which there are several anthropological differences which jointly underlie the gap separating us from our animal cousins.

Can Evolutionary Biology do Without Aristotelian Essentialism

Abstract: It is usually maintained by biologists and philosophers alike that essentialism is incompatible with evolutionary biology, and that abandoning essentialism was a precondition of progress being made in the biological sciences. These claims pose a problem for anyone familiar with both evolutionary biology and current metaphysics. Very few current scientific theories enjoy the prestige of evolutionary biology. But essentialism – long in the bad books amongst both biologists and philosophers – has been enjoying a strong resurgence of late amongst analytical philosophers with a taste for metaphysics. Indeed, to impartial observers it is likely to appear that both evolutionary biology and essentialism are as well supported in their respective domains as could reasonably be expected. There is thus at least a prima facie tension here between evolutionary biology, metaphysics (of a reputable sort) and, as we shall see, pre-theoretical common sense.

The Sad and Sorry History of Consciousness: being, among other things, a Challenge to the ‘Consciousness-studies Community’

Abstract: The term ‘consciousness’ is a latecomer upon the stage of Western philosophy. The ancients had no such term. Sunoida, like its Latin equivalent conscio, meant the same as ‘I know together with’ or ‘I am privy, with another, to the knowledge that’. If the prefixes sun and cum functioned merely as intensifiers, then the verbs meant simply ‘I know well’ or ‘I am well aware that’. Although the ancients did indeed raise questions about the nature of our knowledge of our own perceptions and thought, and introduced the idea of an inner sense, they did not characterize the mind as the domain of consciousness. Aristotelians conceived of the mind as the array of powers that distinguish humanity from the rest of animate nature. The powers of self-movement, of perception and sensation, and of appetite, are shared with other animals. What is distinctive of humanity, and what characterizes the mind, are the powers of the intellect – of reason, and of the rational will. Knowledge of these powers is not obtained by consciousness or introspection, but by observation of their exercise in our engagement with the world around us. The mediaevals followed suit. They likewise lacked any term for consciousness, although they too indulged in reflections upon ‘inner senses’ – in the wake of Avicenna's distinguishing, arguably to excess, five such senses.

Human Nature and the Transcendent

Abstract: Let me start with the enigmatic dictum of Blaise Pascal: ‘l'homme passe l'homme’ – ‘man goes beyond himself’; ‘humanity transcends itself’. What does this mean? On one plausible interpretation, Pascal is adverting to that strange restlessness of the human spirit which so many philosophers have pondered on, from Augustine before him, to Kierkegaard and many subsequent writers since. To be human is to recognize that we are, in a certain sense, incomplete beings. We are on a journey to a horizon that always seems to recede from view. Unlike all the other animals, who need nothing further for their thriving and flourishing once the appropriate environmental conditions are provided, human beings, even when all their needs are catered for – physical, biological, social, cultural – and even when they enjoy a maximally secure and enriching environment, still have a certain resistance to resting content with existence defined within a given set of parameters. They still have the restless drive to reach forward to something more.

The Poetic Image

Abstract: The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers’ song After great cathedral gong; A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins. . . . . . . Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood, Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood, The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor Break bitter furies of complexity, Those images that yet Fresh images beget, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

For the Love of Art: Artistic Values and Appreciative Virtue

Abstract: It is argued that instrumentalizing the value of art does an injustice to artistic appreciation and provides a hostage to fortune. Whilst aestheticism offers an intellectual bulwark against such an approach, it focuses on what is distinctive of art at the expense of broader artistic values. It is argued that artistic appreciation and creativity involve not just skills but excellences of character. The nature of particular artistic or appreciative virtues and vices are briefly explored, such as snobbery, aestheticism and creativity, in order to motivate a virtue theoretic approach. Artistic virtues are intrinsically valuable excellences of character that enable us to create or appreciate all sorts of things from everyday recipes to the finest achievements of humankind. Such an approach offers a new way to resist the age old temptation to instrumentalize the values of art.

The Sceptical Beast in the Beastly Sceptic: Human Nature in Hume

Abstract: David Hume's most brilliant and ambitious work is entitled A Treatise of Human Nature, and it, together with his other writings, has left an indelible mark on philosophical conceptions of human nature. So it is not merely the title of Hume's work that makes discussion of it an appropriate inclusion to this volume, but the fact of its sheer influence. However, its pattern of influence – including, of course, the formulations of ideas consciously antithetical Hume's own – is an immensely complex one, subtle and incredibly difficult to decode. In all probability ‘Hume's’ presence in contemporary thinking of human nature is to likened to the end product of a historiographical game of Chinese whispers, whereby ‘Hume's’ view on x and y is now inflected with interpretations his work – or, more accurately, selected parts of it – that are in turn filtered by thinkers and traditions with different focuses and interest from Hume's own. I am not equipped even to begin to trace this line of influence, a lack compounded by my relative ignorance of the present state of the debate on human nature. Nevetheless various ‘humean’ doctrines still orient debate (even if they aren't labelled as such) and I guess these claims include the idea that causation is a matter of instantiating a universal regularity, that normativity can understood causally, that motivation is a matter of belief plus some independently intelligibly ‘attitude’, that a self is best conceived as a collection of independent states that (somehow) combine to yield a self and so on.

Popular Song as Moral Microcosm: Life Lessons from Jazz Standards

Abstract: In a recent paper devoted to my topic, music and morality, my fellow philosopher ofmusic PeterKivymakes a helpful tripartite distinction among ways in which music could be said to have moral force.1 The first is by embodying and conveying moral insight; Kivy labels that epistemic moral force. The second is by having a positive moral effect on behavior; Kivy labels that behavioral moral force. And the third is by impacting positively on character so as to make someone a better human being; Kivy labels that character-buildingmoral force. Kivy is decidedly skeptical about the prospects of pure instrumental music, or what he calls ‘music alone’, to possess the first or second sort ofmoral force, and only slightly less so for its prospects to possess the third sort. But he rightly points out that that third sort of moral force – what might alternatively be described as music’s power to shape for the better, albeit in subtle ways, what kind of person one is – is largely, if not wholly, independent of the first two sorts, the epistemic and the behavioral, and might be manifest where they are absent. Before returning to Kivy’s three sorts of moral force, however, I want to underline a fourth way in which music can be moral. This fourth way is through music’s having moral quality, whether or not it possesses, in consequence, moral force. What I mean by moral quality is a matter of the mind or spirit reflected in the music, and most particularly, in the nature of its expression, both what it expresses and how it expresses that.Moral quality inmusic is not a function simply of what emotions, attitudes, or states of mind are expressed, but of how they are expressed – with what fineness, subtlety, depth, honesty, originality and so on. Music can surely display moral quality whether it is optimistic – as for instance, the first movement of Dvorak’s ‘American’ Quartet – or pessimistic – as

The Problem of Perfect Fakes

Abstract: Fakes fall into two categories: copies and pastiches. The first is exemplified when someone paints a reproduction of Manet’s The Fifer with the intention of selling it to you as the original. The second is exemplified when someone paints a picture in the style of Manet – although not a reproduction of one of his actual works – with the intention of selling it to you as a picture by Manet. However, not all – or even most – copies and pastiches are fakes. There can be many reasons for painting a copy (you might want a token of this type on your wall); and the same applies to painting a pastiche (you might want to explore the original artist’s technique). Of course, both kinds of painting can be pressed into service as part of a fraud or hoax, but I shall assume that a painting is only a fake or forgery (two words I use interchangeably) if it is was created in order to deceive. There can be a number of motives for such deceptions: for fame, for revenge, to make money, to demonstrate the virtuosity of the faker, and so on. A copy or pastiche is not necessary of inferior aesthetic or monetary value to the original. Rembrandt’s copies of Pieter Lastman are more valuable in both senses than the works he copied; and Chatterton’s pastiches of fifteenth-century poetry are often of greater artistic interest than his stylistic models. It’s also quite common for an artist to paint a number of different copies of the same painting

Human Nature and Grammar

Abstract: Seeing human nature through the prism of grammar may seem rather unusual. I will argue that this is a symptom for a problem – in both discussions of human nature and grammar: Neither the theory of grammar has properly placed its subject matter within the context of an inquiry into human nature and speciation, nor have discussions of human nature properly assessed the significance of grammar.

Essentialism, Externalism, and Human Nature

Abstract: Psychological essentialism is a prominent view within contemporary developmental psychology and cognitive science according to which children have an innate commitment to essentialism. If this view is correct then a commitment to essentialism is an important aspect of human nature rather than a culturally specific commitment peculiar to those who have received a specific philosophical or scientific education. In this article my concern is to explore the philosophical significance of psychological essentialism with respect to the relationship between the content of our concepts and thoughts and the nature of the extra-cranial world. I will argue that, despite first appearances, psychological essentialism undermines a form of externalism that has become commonplace in the philosophy of mind and language.

Doubt and Human Nature in Descartes's Meditations

Abstract: Descartes is well known for his employment of the method of doubt. His most famous work, the Meditations, begins by exhorting us to doubt all our opinions, including our belief in the existence of the external world. But critics have charged that this universal doubt is impossible for us to achieve because it runs counter to human nature. If this is so, Descartes must be either misguided or hypocritical in proposing it. Hume writes: "There is a species of scepticism, antecedent to all study and philosophy, which is much inculcated by Des Cartes and others, as a sovereign preservative against error and precipitate judgement. It recommends an universal doubt, not only of all our former opinions and principles, but also of our very faculties… The Cartesian doubt, …were it ever possible to be attained by any human creature (as it plainly is not) would be entirely incurable; and no reasoning could ever bring us to a state of assurance and conviction upon any subject". (Enquiry 12.3; emphasis added).

Being Human: Religion and Superstition in a Psychoanalytic Philosophy of Religion

Abstract: At one place in his collection of essays The Crane Bag and Other Disputed Subjects, the novelist and mythographer Robert Graves makes the following claim that might sound rather shocking to the ears of an analytic philosopher:I find myself far more at home with mildly superstitious people – sailors and miners, for instance – than with stark rationalists. They have more humanity.

On Cinematic Genius: Ontology and Appreciation

Abstract: The word ‘genius’ is often associated with the idea that artistic creativity is entirely a matter of an involuntary sort of inspiration visited upon the individual artist.1My aim in referring to cinematic genius is not, however, to defend that dubious thesis, but to direct attention to the remarkable artistic achievements that some film-makers, working individually or in collaborative teams, have managed to bring about in their intentional and often painstaking creation of cinematic works. Genius, as I understand it, is the exceptional ability to do something difficult, such as the intentional making of an innovative and valuable work of art. My central claim in what follows is that our longstanding and legitimate interest in manifestations of this kind of skill has important implications for a number of interrelated issues in the philosophy of art, and in particular, for some of the questions taken up in the ever-expanding literature on the ontology of works of art. I begin by evoking some of the central questions in the ontology of art and recommend one approach to their solution. In the second section of the paper I discuss aspects of a particular case in some detail, namely, Mira Nair’s (2004) cinematic adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s (1848) Vanity Fair. One upshot of this discussion is that when we take into account what it means to appreciate a cinematic adaptation as such, we discover additional support for the recommended approach to the ontological questions. In the final section of the paper, I examine some implications for our understanding of the nature of cinematic works and conclude with remarks on the distinction between multiple and singular art forms.

Music, Metaphor and Society: Some Thoughts on Scruton

Abstract: Roger Scruton’s 530-page blockbuster The Aesthetics of Music was published by Oxford University Press in 1997.2 A paperback edition followed two years later. Neither received more than a handful of notices, a few appreciative, but some grudging and some actually hostile. As its quality has come to be recognized, and as the resentments it provoked have either died down or found newer targets, the book has gradually achieved a certain canonical, even classic, status. Students of the subject now seem to feel that, however unpalatable some of its conclusions may have been, it can no longer safely be ignored. The questions, it appears, are the right ones, even if we don’t care for Scruton’s answers. (Thus far the pop critic Simon Frith, who said as much from the start.)3 The book actually covers more than aesthetics, being nothing less than a complete philosophy of music. There are some major omissions: of non-Western music, for example. But they are justifiable, given that Scruton’s project is analytical rather than documentary. Some extra-aesthetic matter is inevitable, since it is scarcely possible to deal in isolation with any art form’s purely aesthetic element (assuming there really could be such a thing). But with music Scruton casts his net wider even than he did in his early The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979). In The Aesthetics of Music he extends his inquiry to virtually every aspect and ramification of the phenomenon in question. (His book Sexual Desire [1986] aspired to a similar comprehensiveness regarding matters still more elusive and even less tractable.) One reason for the present work’s greater scope is presumably that Scruton has not so far numbered the practice of architecture among

Paul Broca and the Evolutionary Genetics of Cerebral Asymmetry

Abstract: In 1873, within two years of the publication of The Descent of Man, Friedrich Max Mueller wrote: There is one difficulty which Mr Darwin has not sufficiently appreciated … There is between the whole animal kingdom on the one side, and man, even in his lowest state, on the other, a barrier which no animal has ever crossed, and that barrier is – Language … If anything has a right to the name of specific difference, it is language, as we find it in man, and in man only … If we removed the name of specific difference from our philosophic dictionaries, I should still hold that nothing deserves the name of man except what is able to speak … a speaking elephant or an elephantine speaker could never be called an elephant.' and (quoting Schleicher) ‘If a pig were ever to say to me, “I am a pig” it would ipso facto cease to be a pig’.

Is there still life in Still Life

Abstract: In his literary autobiography, Le vent Paraclet, Michel Tournier records how during his time at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly he and his fellow classmates found a source of great hilarity in their favourite bêtisier, a volume called Pensées de Pascal, in which one learns that painting is a frivolous exercise that consists in imperfectly reproducing objects that are themselves quite worthless. Fairness to Pascal – far from Tournier’s mind in those early days – demands that that offending pensée, which belongs in the sheaf of Vanités, be seen more as a summary of Saint Augustine’s views than as a record of Pascal’s own, and one that was rooted in a tradition stemming from Plato that deprecated all varieties of mimesis. Setting historical adjustment aside and reining back on the boys’ sophisticated amusement, onemay well wonder whether the view Pascal records does not contain a grain of truth. Are there not indeed kinds of painting that we prize, yet which are well chosen butts of this criticism? In particular, still life painting concerned to record the trivia of domestic life, pots and pans, fruits and meats, glasses and all sorts of everyday tableware looks to be sharply exposed to Pascalian scorn. If this Platonic or in Augustine’s case, neo-Platonic, attack on painting is to be warded off in general then it had best be done here where it appears at its most pressing. And if it cannot bewarded off here, then still life painting at least is moribund, probably lifeless, nature morte mort indeed. Here I propose to explore a line of thought that stems from Schopenhauer’s reflections about the nature and value of our experience of painting and ask whether there may not be something in his ideas fit to draw the sting of the contempt. What makes Schopenhauer a nice choice as still life’s champion is that what he aims to do is not just to confute Platonic or neo-Platonic doctrine, but to show that in the finest painting we are given irreplaceable access to what the true Platonist esteems above all else, to Forms or Ideas. If some version of that thought can be made plausible in regard of still life painting, the neo-Platonist of Augustinian stamp