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Maria Kronfeldner, "What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept" (MIT Press, 2018)
Maria Kronfeldner, "What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept" (MIT Press, 2018)
ratings:
Length:
71 minutes
Released:
Jan 15, 2019
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Much of the debate about the roles of nature vs. nurture in the development of individual people has settled into accepting that it's a bit of both, although what each contributes to a given trait or feature, how much, and they interact are still matters of dispute. In What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept(MIT Press, 2018), Maria Kronfeldner critically examines instead the 'nature' side of this dichotomy: what exactly is a human "nature"? Is it some kind of fixed human essence, a statistical norm, a normative ideal of how a human being ought to be? Kronfeldner, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Central European University in Budapest, argues against an essentialist view of nature, and replaces it with three concepts – descriptive, classificatory, and explanatory natures – that can do the various jobs that we want a "nature" concept to do without contributing to dehumanization, as the essentialist concept frequently has.
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Released:
Jan 15, 2019
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Paul Thagard, “The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change” (MIT Press, 2012): We’ve all heard about scientific revolutions, such as the change from the Ptolemaic geocentric universe to the Copernican heliocentric one. Such drastic changes are the meat-and-potatoes of historians of science and philosophers of science. by New Books in Science