Aristotelian Naturalism Research Articles

Making Tangible the Long-Term Harm Linked to the Chilling Effects of AI-enabled Surveillance: Can Human Flourishing Inform Human Rights?

AbstractAI-enabled State surveillance capabilities are likely to exert chilling effects whereby individuals modify their behavior due to a fear of the potential consequences if that behavior is observed. The risk is that chilling effects drive individuals towards the mainstream, slowly reducing the space for personal and political development. This could prove devastating for individuals’ ability to freely develop their identity and, ultimately, for the evolution and vibrancy of democratic society. As it stands, human rights law cannot effectively conceptualize this cumulative, longer-term, harm, and so cannot accurately evaluate the cost/benefit of AI tools, risking irreparable harm. As chilling effects impact individuals’ ability to live a good, self-determined life, the concept of human flourishing is relevant. This article engages with Aristotelian naturalism, the life-satisfaction approach, and the capabilities approach to determine which best resonates with the concept of identity as relevant to chilling effects and human rights law. It concludes that the capabilities approach may overcome some of the problems associated with the human rights law approach and may provide a framework capable of capturing both the intricate processes of free identity development and of conceptualizing the harm linked to AI surveillance. The challenge, however, is to ‘operationalize’ this approach.

Are life forms real? Aristotelian naturalism and biological science

Aristotelian naturalism (AN) holds that the norms governing the human will are special instances of a broader type of normativity that is also found in other living things: natural goodness and natural defect. Both critics and defenders of AN have tended to focus on the thorny issues that are specific to human beings. But some philosophers claim that AN faces other difficulties, arguing that its broader conception of natural normativity is incompatible with current biological science. This paper has three aims. First, we consider a distinctive and nuanced critique of AN’s general understanding of natural normativity put forward by Tim Lewens. Second, after giving a defense of AN, we explore and evaluate Lewens’ proposed alternative view—Kantian projectivism about life forms. We present a problem for Kantian projectivism and suggest reasons for thinking that AN is, after all, the superior position. Finally, we clarify and explain how AN’s claims about life forms and our knowledge of them, relate to empirical observation and to contemporary biological science.

Aristotelian Naturalism and the Imperfect Project of Normalizing Ethics

Aristotelian Naturalism and the Imperfect Project of Normalizing Ethics

Atheist Therapy: Radical Embodiment in Early Modern Medical Materialism

Materialism as a doctrine is, of course, a part of the history of philosophy, even if it was often a polemical construct, and it took until the 18th century for philosophers to be willing to call themselves materialists. Difficulties also have been pointed out in terms of “continuity,” i.e., does what Democritus, Lucretius, Hobbes and Diderot have to say about matter, the body and the soul all belong in one discursive and conceptual frame? Interestingly, materialism is also a classic figure in the history of medicine, often intersecting with philosophical considerations. Notably, the question of body-soul relations. This is apparent in Galen’s treatise on body and soul and then much more massively in the early modern period (with reference to Galen, but also Lucretius, and Aristotelian naturalism). In the following essay I reflect on the exact nature of early modern medical materialism, its philosophical status and contribution.

Heidegger's fundamental ontology and the human good in Aristotelian ethics

AbstractNeo‐Aristotelian ethical naturalists take the concept “human” to be central to practical philosophy. According to this view, practical philosophy aims at a distinctive human good that defines its subject matter. Hence, practical philosophy can survive neither the elimination of the concept nor its subsumption under a more general concept, such as that of the rational agent. The challenge central to properly formulating Aristotelian naturalism is: How can the concept of the human be specified in a way that captures the distinctive role that it is supposed to play in practical philosophy? For the view to be sustained, the concept “human” as it figures in practical philosophy must not designate rationality plus a set of facts that we learn empirically about ourselves and then consider from a detached standpoint of reason. Heidegger's existential analytic offers an approach to addressing the challenge to neo‐Aristotelian naturalism and, therefore, a way of capturing the sui generis human good. I aim to show that concepts of the existential analytic in Being and Time have their origin or parallels in readings of Aristotle and that they capture the distinctive character of the being that we are, exclusively, completely, and as a unity. I argue that fundamental ontology offers a way to grasp the integral unity and irreplaceability of the human that lies at the heart of the neo‐Aristotelian project.

Target Centred Virtue Ethics

<i>Target Centred Virtue Ethics</i>

Autonomie und menschliche Lebensform

AbstractIn 2020, M. Summa developed a promising approach to understanding the concept of illness. This approach combines a theory of organisms with Responsive Phenomenology to gain a concept of illness. Following on from this, the present article shows that the normative presuppositions can be further explicated and justified by drawing on the theoretical resources of Aristotelian naturalism as propounded by Michael Thompson. Aristotelian naturalism does provide a theoretical option to grasp the normative foundations of human life. However, this article argues that Aristotelian naturalism requires another criterion besides human nature to make the concept of illness intelligible. Following John McDowell’s critique of Aristotelian naturalism, it will be shown that this criterion consists in the capacity for autonomy. From this a concept of (mental) illness is developed which describes an impairment of the self-regulated and autonomous realisation of the human form of life.

Alienation and action in the young Marx, Aristotle, and Arendt

Alienation and action in the young Marx, Aristotle, and Arendt

Is Aristotelian Naturalism Safe From the Moral Outsider?

Is Aristotelian Naturalism Safe From the Moral Outsider?

Trinitarian charity: Aquinas and Lombard on charity and the Holy Spirit

AbstractThis paper examines Aquinas’ reception of Peter Lombard's disputed thesis that the charity with which we love God and neighbour is not a virtue, but rather the Holy Spirit himself. Through a close reading of the four passages where Aquinas engages directly with the thesis, I show how this reception evolved over the course of his career, such that he gradually came to incorporate the trinitarian insight underlying Lombard's thesis into his doctrine of created charity. Although this doctrine is often viewed as an outright rejection of Lombard's thesis, I argue that it is in fact a substantial development of it that was made possible by Aquinas’ assimilation of Aristotelian naturalism.

Echoes of the Ius Commune

Abstract Professor Nicholas (Nick) Barber’s learned and intelligent book on The Principles of Constitutionalism is best understood as an exercise in Aristotelian naturalism and moral and constitutional realism, of a sort much more characteristic of the classical law than of modern positivism. In view of the book’s implicitly classical approach, it would have benefited, at a number of key junctures, from drawing upon the rich and enduring tradition of the ius commune. Barber often speaks in the register of the classical law, perhaps without knowing it. Doing so more often, and more explicitly, would have improved an already impressive work.

Socio-Political Naturalism and the History of Republican Thought: Cicero contra Aristotle

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship on republicanism often looks back to Aristotle as the Greco-Roman epitome of the history of republican theory. This article contends that Aristotle offers a poor model in comparison with the premiere political philosopher of the Roman Republic, Marcus Tullius Cicero. The argument concentrates on the implications of the respective conceptions of Aristotle and Cicero of the origins of social and political association rooted in human nature. Cicero’s theory of the natural foundations of society has generally been ignored or trivialized by scholars who presume it to be merely a weak imitation of Aristotle’s. This article demonstrates that the Ciceronian account of the naturalistic grounding of human social engagement differs from Aristotelian naturalism in a way that brings into question major approaches to the history of republicanism and also has implications for contemporary republican theory.

Virtues as Perfections of Human Powers: On the Metaphysics of Goodness in Aristotelian Naturalism

AbstractThe central idea of Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness is that moral judgments belong to the same logical kind of judgments as those that attribute natural goodness and defect to plants and animals. But moral judgments focus on a subset of human powers that play a special role in our lives as rational animals, namely, reason, will, and desire. These powers play a central role in properly human actions: those actions in which we go for something that we see and understand as good. Many readers of Foot resolutely ignore what she says about the human good being sui generis and obstinately continue to read her as advocating a version of naturalism grounded in empirical study of human nature. One might wonder how else it could count as a naturalistic view unless we could square the view with nature as studied by the empirical sciences. In this paper, I propose a metaphysical response to this question: help can come from turning to recent defenses of Aristotelian essentialism. Foot’s naturalism can square with nature as interpreted through the lens of Aristotelian essentialism. On such a view, the virtues are perfections of human powers including reason, will, and desire.

Dramatização de contos filosóficos na formação do educador

Resumo No presente artigo o foco é a utilização da dramatização de contos filosóficos com mitema iniciático no cultivo de mestria na formação inicial de educadores. A pesquisadora colocou em prática suas propostas na condução de vivências curriculares entre 2012 a 2016 com estudantes de Pedagogia e licenciandos. O âmbito de uma educação de sensibilidade – que nem por isso exclui a racionalidade, mas não se restringe à racionalidade ocidental de caráter aristotélico, cartesiano, iluminista e protestante – tem possibilitado uma leitura mais crítica (contra ideológica), reflexiva (constructos) e sensível (perceptos) dos participantes, levando-os a ter, como opção pessoal, a tarefa de assumir como projeto profissional e existencial a busca mais coerente de modulações do ser.

ARISTOTELIAN NATURALISM VS. MUTANTS, ALIENS, AND THE GREAT RED DRAGON

Abstract In this paper I present a new objection to the Aristotelian Naturalism (AN) defended by Philippa Foot. I describe this objection as a membership objection because it reveals the fact that AN invites counterexamples when pressed to identify the individuals bound by its normative claims. I present three examples of agents for whom the norms generated by AN are not obviously authoritative: mutants, aliens, and the Great Red Dragon. Those who continue to advocate for Foot’s view can give compelling replies to the first two of these examples, but their replies drive the view into an unwelcome result when it faces the last example. I conclude that the concept of being human, on which AN crucially depends, is not as straightforward as Foot’s advocates presume.

RICHARD HOOKER AS POLITICAL NATURALIST

AbstractRichard Hooker's understanding of political society has engendered significant debate. Does he hold that society is natural, in keeping with his commitment to aspects of Aristotelianism? Or does he believe that society is conventional, leading somehow to a social contractarian conception of society? My contention is that he is a political naturalist, though his naturalism is tempered by his Augustinian theological anthropology. Hooker emphasizes human sin in his account of the nature and purpose of civil government, and gives humankind agency in the establishment of society. But, ultimately, he considers political life to be natural to the human condition. In this way, Hooker navigates avia mediabetween Aristotelian naturalism and conventionalism.

Demonic Possession and the Practice of Exorcism: An exploration of the Franciscan legacy

Demonic Possession and the Practice of Exorcism:An exploration of the Franciscan legacy1 Bert Roest (bio) Early 2018, while trying to address one of the many deficiencies in the Franciscan Authors internet catalogue,2 my attention was drawn towards a peculiar English study and source translation of the Flagellum daemonum, a treatise written by the sixteenth-century Observant Franciscan Girolamo Menghi.3 Almost immediately afterwards, I came across a German translation of and commentary on both the Flagellum daemonum and the Fustis daemonum by the same author.4 According to the makers of these modern translations, they aim to make the works of one of Europe's most famous sixteenth-century exorcists and possibly the most successful writer of exorcism manuals who ever existed, available for a wider scholarly audience. Looking for corroboration of this verdict in a number of modern studies on demonic possession and exorcism, it quickly became apparent that Girolamo Menghi figures prominently in the present-day scholarly discourse on the development of exorcism and demonology during the late medieval, renaissance and early modern period.5 Moreover, alongside [End Page 301] of Menghi, in this discourse figure several other Franciscan demonologists and exorcists active in different periods, who together produced a significant body of texts devoted to exorcisms and related issues. Trying to put these matters into perspective, I came across a recent doctoral thesis, which was issued as a book early 2018, namely Jean-Baptiste Golfier's Tactiques du diable et délivrances. Dieu faitil concourir les demons au salut des hommes?.6 This book seems to make a modern theological case for the presence of the devil as an instigator of evil, and for the creation of a diagnostic theology of diabolical action. Yet it also contains a historical analysis of theological demonological thought, as well as an evaluation of existing spiritual and ecclesiastical remedies against diabolical activities, with recourse to the Catholic theological tradition. Both the historical analysis and the evaluation of existing spiritual and ecclesiastical remedies concentrate heavily, as is so often the case, on the writings of Thomas Aquinas, which Golfier presents as the pinnacle of mature scholastic theological reflection on this particular topic, and uses as the background to his own theological demonological reflections. However, Golfier's book at the same time contains specific statements with regard to the role of Franciscan theological thought in the development of Catholic demonology and therewith in the transformation of the art of exorcism, and of the persecution of witchcraft as a form of alliance with diabolic power in the late medieval and early modern period. [End Page 302] Following the lead of the French intellectual historian Alain Boureau,7 Golfier suggests that the 1277 condemnations of theological positions of Thomas Aquinas would in due course have meant a revival of Franciscan voluntarist theological thought, which curbed Aristotelian naturalism, and emphasized both God's freedom and the contingent status of creation. And in this process, the Thomist 'verrous spéculatifs' that would have bound demonic agency would have sprung, opening up pathways to a far more fear-ridden world view, in which the devil and his underlings were thought to have much more power to wreak havoc on mankind: La paranoïa collective, que la chrétienté allait vivre peu après, n'aurait plus disposé du gardefou thomasien, équilibre manifestant la puissance du démon tout autant que sa place mineure et soumise dans le gouvernement divin.8 Hence, a less-reasonable and less-equilibrated scholastic demonology would have emerged as the long-term effect of Franciscan theological thought, connected with the opposition to Thomistic positions in the writings of Guillaume de la Mare, Pietro of Giovanni Olivi, Pierre d'Aureole, John Duns Scotus, Durand of Saint-Pourçain, William of Ockham and Enrico of Carretto (known for his advice to Pope John XXII with regard to inquisitorial jurisdiction in matters of sorcery). Over time, this would have bolstered the witch craze of the renaissance, the ubiquitous presence of the devil, demoniacs, and hence the concomitant need for exorcism, as well as an active persecution of witchcraft and sorcery. Both Golfier and Boureau, in particular, single out Olivi's nine questions on demons...

Must realists be skeptics? An Aristotelian reply to a Darwinian Dilemma

In a series of influential essays, Sharon Street has argued, on the basis of Darwinian considerations, that normative realism leads to skepticism about moral knowledge. I argue that if we begin with the account of moral knowledge provided by Aristotelian naturalism, then we can offer a satisfactory realist response to Street’s argument, and that Aristotelian naturalism can avoid challenges facing other realist responses. I first explain Street’s evolutionary argument and three of the most prominent realist responses, and I identify challenges to each of those responses. I then develop an Aristotelian response to Street. My core claim is this: Given Aristotelian naturalism’s account of moral truth and our knowledge of it, we can accept the influence of evolutionary processes on our moral beliefs, while also providing a principled, non-question-begging reason for thinking that those basic evaluative tendencies that evolution has left us with will push us toward, rather than away from, realist moral truths, so that our reliably getting things right does not require an unexplained and implausible coincidence.

Anscombe on the Sources of Normativity

Anscombe is usually seen as a critic of “Modern Moral Philosophy.” I attempt a systematic reconstruction and a defense of Anscombe’s positive theory. Anscombe’s metaethics is a hybrid of social constructivism and Aristotelian naturalism. Her three main claims are the following: (1) We cannot trace all duties back to one moral principle; there is more than one source of normativity. (2) Whether I have a certain duty will often be determined by the social practices of my community. For instance, duties imposed by other people’s rights are socially constructed. (3) Whether something constitutes a good, however, will often be determined by human nature—which is not socially constructed.

Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England. Mary Thomas Crane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. ix+227.

<i>Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England</i>. Mary Thomas Crane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. ix+227.