Is there a Wittgensteinian Legacy on Habit?

Political Utopias: Contemporary Debates

The article problematizes the concept of human nature in three related fields of knowledge: theology, history, and philosophy. The main problem with "human nature" as a theological concept is that it was based on ancient anthropology, primarily Aristotle. However, modern intellectual culture is separated from antiquity by the "anthropological revolution" that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century thanks to Freud, Heidegger, Lorenz, and others. As a result, a different idea of human nature has emerged, in which, for example, sexuality, mortality, and aggressiveness are understood not as defects of human nature, but as constitutive factors of human personality. From the perspective of modern anthropology, the concept of human nature as a tool of dogmatic theology needs to be rethought. However, this conclusion itself requires historical verification, and meaningful transformations of the concept of human nature require scrupulous historical research. In turn, the historical study of semantic transformations of the concept of human nature is complicated by the uncertainty of its boundaries and content. There are at least five ways of understanding human nature, dating back to ancient philosophy: nature as the antonym of art (technē), nature as a "scheme" of a thing, setting the direction of its transformations, nature as the goal of movement, nature as a measure of perfection, norm, and nature as an ensemble of typologizing signs. In contemporary debates, the validity of the concept of human nature is called into question. Constructivist criticism of essentialism is based on anthropological data, which testify to the diversity of ideas about man and, accordingly, reinforce the thesis that "human nature" is a cultural construct that does not have an ontological status. However, over the past few decades, evolutionary biologists have sought to give stable and "objective" content to the concept of human nature. However, the possibility of using the data of modern biology, which reveals the evolutionarily established species characteristics of a person (including those that are still considered cultural), to identify a cultural norm remains in question.

In the contemporary debate over whether mindfulness-based programs need to incorporate explicit ethics or if there are already implicit ethics that obviate this obligation, rhetorical arguments present these two positions as polar extremes. What is generally missing from this discourse is awareness of how these two positions on human nature and ethical cultivation rehash historical debates with analogous positions within Buddhist contexts. I add a new comparison to the contemporary debates with historical Confucian debates on human nature and ethical cultivation that move beyond the two opposite views of innate human ethical goodness versus innate ethical blindness. I overview the positions of nine Chinese thinkers to show how the conversation on human nature and ethical cultivation can move beyond two positions along the axis of innate ethics and incorporate an axis of intellectual versus practical grasp of ethical cultivation. I argue that awareness of the broader historical debates concerning this issue can help illuminate contemporary positions. Finally, I suggest turning attention away from arguments about human nature and toward a more fruitful examination regarding if, and how, mindfulness-based programs may lead to ethical change.

The primary aim of this research is to analyze The Platform (2019) as an allegorical critique of capitalism and human nature, using critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the methodological framework. This study employs Van Dijk's framework of macro and microstructures to analyze how the film portrays systemic inequalities rooted in capitalist societies. Additionally, it investigates the moral dilemmas individuals navigate within these systems. At the macro level, the film's critique centers on class inequalities, symbolized by the vertical prison structure, where food distribution mirrors capitalist hierarchies. At the micro level, the characters' behavior, which ranges from selfishness to solidarity, highlights the complexity of human nature when confronted with scarcity and competition. In this context, the article argues that The Platform critiques both the capitalist system, which sustains inequality, and human nature, which aggravates these inequalities through individualistic tendencies. However, the film fails to address capitalism's role in fostering these behaviors. The findings indicate that while the film emphasizes human nature as the root cause of scarcity and inequality, it overlooks how the platform (as an allegorical representation of capitalism) shapes and amplifies these behaviors. The article engages with contemporary debates on capitalism, drawing on the work of scholars such as Piketty and Fraser. It assesses The Platform as a production that reflects ongoing ideological discussions about social justice, inequality, and human behavior in capitalist societies. However, it argues that the film overlooks a critical analysis of capitalism as the root cause of conflict within its narrative and in the broader capitalist system. In this framework, the tension between capitalism's impact on human nature and individual responsibility is essential to understanding the ideological aspects of the film.

In the recent literature there has been a spate of essays, articles and books discussing the question of whether Christ had a ‘fallen’ human nature. This article offers a new argument for the conclusion that Christ had a fallen but not sinful human nature that was ‘healed’ of its fallenness at the moment of assumption by the Word – what we shall call, the vicarious humanity of Christ view. This account concedes to the defender of Christ's ‘fallen’ humanity that his human nature is generated in a fallen state (and immediately cleansed of fallenness in the act of assumption). And it concedes to the defender of Christ's sinlessness the claim that Christ is without sin from the first moment of incarnation. This represents an important via media in the contemporary debate about this vexed christological topic.

Natural relativism in lieu of moral absolutism

The humanization of nursing care is a relevant aspect in the context of public health policy and involves the responsibility of health institutions and the formation of professionals in this area. Within this perspective, we intended to develop this study aiming to understand the experience of the nursing graduate regarding the learning of humanized care; to verify their knowledge of this area; and to describe the practical situations that favor or hinder the learning of humanized care assistance. This is a qualitative approach research, accomplished with graduating nursing students from a public university in the state of Goias. The data was collected by semi-structured interviews and submitted to the thematic analysis of content. The categories generated from this process were: “personalizing humanized care”, “living and feeling humanized care” and “humanizing care in practice”. The data reveals that students recognize the importance of learning humanizing care assistance in their training and they value this aspect, signaling enabling and hindering factors in that process. The understanding of the challenged graduating nursing students face in those experiences is fundamental to the orientation of pedagogic practices that value and stimulate the ethical dimension of care.

Distributive justice, equality and the enhancement of human cognition: A commentary on fairness and ‘cognitive doping’

In contemporary debates around human nature and its relation to technology and to other animals, the philosophical approaches of early 20th-century philosophical anthropology and personalism are often dismissed as embracing a problematic traditional stance, including on issues such as anthropocentrism or a binary perception of the human world. This chapter argues that these objections can be effectively overcome since philosophical anthropology can be grounded on phenomenology and is closely involved with both the natural and the social sciences (especially biology, but also psychology and sociology), and as such offers a promising basis for exploring questions on human nature and personhood. Loosely drawing on the thought of Max Scheler, this chapter shows that the Schelerian Philosophical Anthropology and personalism can help remove the strong dichotomies between the human and other animals, without losing what is distinctly human in the process. Likewise, the chapter argues that an extended concept of personhood is one key to dismantling problematic divisions, to (re)integrating humans with other forms of life and the individual with the social, and to overcoming the biologist bias with respect to gender and the use of technology, all the while underscoring the importance of aliveness in the investigations of human nature.

Humanisme views human as the free subject to determine his life. Humans are fully responsible for his own life and also for the people. Humanistic education theory in the 1970s refered to three philosophical theories namely pragmatism, progressivism and eksistensisalisme. According to humanistic theory, the purpose of learning is to humanize humans. Learning process is considered successful if the students understand their environment and themselves. Humanistic education emphasizes meaning personal of the child's existence. Learners are free to determine the purpose of education according to the needs and interest. In Islam, the meaning of humanism is to humanize humans according to the role as a vicegerent of God on earth. In this man mentions, the Qur'an uses four terms that have different meanings according to the context of the Qur'an meant, among other things: al-Basyar, Al-Nās, Banī Adam, Al-Insān.

What does human evolutionary theory reveal about the origins of human nature and the constraints it imposes on human cognition, behavior, and society? ‘‘The whole field of human evolution is pregnant with philosophical questions of great interest’’, Michael Ruse concludes in the final passage of The Philosophy of Human Evolution. This engaging and eminently readable romp through the philosophical landscape of human evolution fills a significant niche in the existing literature. There are numerous scientific texts surveying historical and contemporary problems in the field of human evolution, and there are many philosophical texts exploring conceptual and methodological problems in evolutionary theory. Ruse interweaves scientific and philosophical work on human evolution with the latest work in biological theory to produce a unique and timely book, one that addresses a range of important topics that rarely find their way into works of this genre. With a relentless lucidity and charming, folksy familiarity, Ruse guides a general readership through the thicket of historical, scientific, philosophical, social, and religious issues arising out of human evolutionary theory, navigating both well-worn and under-explored philosophical territory alike in eight chapters of seamless, page-turning pros. Ruse makes adept use of quotations from eminent evolutionists wherever the original words have greater resonance than any encapsulated rendering the author could provide. A careful attention to history is perhaps the greatest strength of the book. Ruse’s general rhetorical strategy is highly effective: He introduces contemporary philosophical debates in human evolution by first considering Darwin’s perennially prescient thoughts on the topic at hand, some of which, as the reader comes to see, have been vindicated, some modified, and some rebuked. Equally effective is Ruse’s use of clear, instructive figures illustrating key points in biogeography, comparative anatomy, taxonomy, development, genetics, and

The primary thesis of this work is that many views on sex, abortion, and euthanasia entail that a person is not identical to her/his body, a position the authors regard as untenable. Lee and George begin with the belief that metaphysical views on the nature of humanity have vast, and often unobserved, influence on debates in modern ethics and politics. Therefore, it is worthwhile to examine metaphysical assumptions in order to determine whether they are leading us to false ethical conclusions. The authors take it as their task to demonstrate first the errors of body–self dualism, a view rampant in contemporary debate, and then by extension the ethical positions that view supports. Following Aristotle and Aquinas, Lee and George argue for a notion of humanity focusing on our corporeal nature. Human beings are fundamentally animals, albeit of a unique sort, different from other animals. Self-awareness is not a capacity of a nonphysical mind, but bodily. This view is explicitly contrary to notions of personhood based on consciousness to which others often appeal. Positions such as this one posit a nonidentity between body and self. Consequently, in ethical debates, proponents of this sort of dualism do not respect people's bodies. Body–self dualism is implicit in the hedonism of drug-taking. Advocates of euthanasia and the pro-choice position rely on it to make their cases. Lee and George, believing they have refuted this metaphysical view, regard these ethical positions as discredited since they entail a flawed metaphysics. The authors continue to argue against drug-taking, abortion, euthanasia, and sex outside of marriage.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the plausibility of the claim that the alteration of human nature through cutting-edge technology will result in the desecrating moral values including human dignity. For this, I first clarify the meanings of human nature and then inquire how human nature is related to the realm of ethical values including human dignity. I distinguishes 3 different ways in which human nature can be involved in the ethical discourses. Human nature can be thought of as conditions of practical rationality and moral agency (HN1), as a feasibility constraint on morality (HN2), and as a constraint on the good for humans (HN3). I argue that there are partially good reasons to object to human enhancement that are deducible from each of (HN1)-(HN3). However, none of them can offer a sufficiently good reason to object to human enhancement in general.

‘By Ordinance of Nature’: Marriage, Religion and the Modern English State Lisa O’Connell (bio) I: Introduction Marriage holds a foundational status within modern conceptions of the state. It does so, in part, because it is so readily understood to order the intersection of the natural and the social. As the sanctioned interface between reproductive sexuality and social life, marriage is where ‘nature’ dramatically encounters ‘culture’, as Claude Lévi-Strauss famously remarked.1 Yet, as we might expect, axiomatic constructions of marriage’s relation to nature, and, indeed, to the nation-state, have their own history. Rooted in Protestantism and influentially promulgated within early modern theories of natural law, they have enjoyed a recent resurgence in the contexts of structural anthropology and, most strikingly, contemporary debates about same-sex marriage. My interest, however, is less to trace the lineaments of this history, than to rethink the terms through which we understand one of its key moments: marriage’s establishment as a feature of the modern English state. The nexus of marriage and the modern nation-state is commonly viewed as an aspect of a larger historical process of secularization. Old-style Whiggish histories of English marriage, for instance, typically unfold in stadial terms whereby Roman Catholic sacramental concepts of marriage give way to Protestant re-evaluations of marriage’s social centrality, which, in turn, form the foundations of the state-regulated marriage contract.2 To be sure, much recent historiography seeks to revise progressivism of this kind; John Witte, for instance, has spoken of the trajectory of Western marriage less as one of ‘incremental secularization’ than of ‘intermittent resacralization’.3 Nonetheless, much literary and cultural commentary continues to view [End Page 149] English marriage in the eighteenth century as belonging simply to civil society.4 It does so, I would argue, because it so often relies upon paradigms of modern liberal contractarianism or Marxist–feminist critique that habitually view the nexus of marriage and the state in narrowly secular terms. This essay argues, by contrast, that English state formation and the modes of sexual regulation associated with it were more closely entwined with religion, and with models of divine authority, than narratives of enlightened secularization typically acknowledge. It takes as its focus the post-scholastic theories of natural law that were central to legitimating the secular sovereign state in England and its new civil marriage code, as established by the Marriage Act of 1753. My aim is to demonstrate that marriage became an instrument of the English state not through the erasure or mere toleration of religion, but through a vigorous appropriation and reanimation of Anglicanism as an Established faith. In this context, theories of natural law lent themselves to rival and overlapping claims about the relationship between marriage and the sacred inside the modern English state.5 II. Natural Law I shall start by briefly examining the narrative of secularization that has shaped our understanding of the history of natural law itself in the early modern period. In the wake of Augustine, scholasticism, as articulated by thinkers such as Aquinas and Suarez, figured natural law as, to cite Knud Haakonssen, ‘simply the way in which [God’s] eternal law applies to human moral nature’.6 Here, obedience to natural law is obligatory upon ‘creatures of reason and free will’ so that human rationality and moral nature are expressed in relation [End Page 150] to this obligation. Yet, although natural law is universal, different peoples live within different political and social structures. This means that God’s eternal law will take different positive shapes in different communities. Responding to both Cartesian skepticism and the Reformation, Hugo Grotius made an important break in this framework. For him, individuals have a primary need for self-preservation, which is not fundamentally religious. This need founds rights, since without the capacity – the right – to preserve oneself, human beings cannot have a moral life under any imaginable collective existence. So natural law (or natural justice as Grotius more often put it) is what mandates us to live peaceably with others, only under circumstances where our own self-preservation is not in question. In effect, Grotius situates natural law in the primarily secular domain of...

"Arguing About Human Nature: Contemporary Debates," ed. Stephen M. Downes and Edouard Machery