Rethinking Human Nature: A Multidisciplinary Approach - Softcover

Jeeves, Malcolm

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802865577 ISBN 13: 9780802865571

Verlag: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2011

Inhaltsangabe

How do recent scientific discoveries challenge and complicate -- but also enrich and illuminate -- the traditional Christian portrait of human nature? In Rethinking Human Nature an international team of scientists, historians, philosophers, and theologians presents both the wisdom of the past and the cutting edge of current scientific research to explore answers to this question. Their discussions -- examining our brains, our genes, our ancestors, our societies, and more -- lead to a richer, more nuanced, and more complete understanding of what it really means to be h u m a n . < b r > Contributors: Evandro Agazzi R. J. Berry Alison S. Brooks Franco Chiereghin Felipe Fernández-Armesto Graeme Finlay Joel B. Green Malcolm Jeeves Jürgen Mittelstrass David G. Myers Janet Martin Soskice Fernando Vidal

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Malcolm Jeeves is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

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Rethinking Human Nature

A Multidisciplinary Approach

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2011 William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6557-1

Contents

CONTRIBUTORS...........................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction Malcolm Jeeves...........................................................................................................................1How to Be Human: A Historical Approach Felipe Fernández-Armesto..................................................................................11Human Persons and Human Brains: A Historical Perspective within the Christian Tradition Fernando Vidal................................................30Science and the Search for a New Anthropology Jürgen Mittelstrass................................................................................61The Scientific Images and the Global Knowledge of the Human Being Evandro Agazzi......................................................................70The Peculiarly Human Feature of the Aesthetic Experience: The Teaching of Kant and the Challenge of Neuroscience Franco Chiereghin.....................82The Emergence of Human Distinctiveness: The Genetic Story Graeme Finlay...............................................................................107Evolution of Homo sapiens R. J. Berry.................................................................................................................149The Emergence of Human Distinctiveness: The Story from Neuropsychology and Evolutionary Psychology Malcolm Jeeves.....................................176The Social Animal David G. Myers......................................................................................................................206What Is a Human? Archaeological Perspectives on the Origins of Humanness Alison S. Brooks.............................................................227Humanity—Created, Restored, Transformed, Embodied Joel Green....................................................................................271Imago Dei and Sexual Difference: Toward an Eschatological Anthropology Janet Martin Soskice...........................................................295On How Complementary Perspectives Produce Enriched Portraits Malcolm Jeeves...........................................................................309INDEX..................................................................................................................................................328

Chapter One

How to Be Human: A Historical Approach Felipe Fernández-Armesto

My wife — I sometimes fear — thinks I am a beast. My students may stare at me as if I were an alien. Usually, however, my fellow-humans have little difficulty in recognizing me as one of themselves. I find it easy to return what, for the present, I take as a compliment.

However unalike we look, and however great the chasms of culture that separate us, humans form a community of recognition, from which no member of the species need be excluded. This experience of acceptance is now so common that it is hard to believe that in historic terms it is a rare and recent innovation. For most people, in most societies, for most of the past, the limits of humankind were narrow. Humans did not normally recognize each other as such; and the idea of a moral community coterminous with our species would have seemed unconvincing or even unintelligible. Typically, members of one human group acknowledged no kinship with others. They felt, indeed, closer to some nonhuman animals, with whom they shared their lives or mythic ancestries, than to fellow-humans from elsewhere. Most languages had no word for "human" apart from whatever term designated the group. The outsider would be called by some other name, usually roughly translatable as "beast" or "demon" or "monster." Monsters proliferate in lore and legend not because people are imaginative but rather the very opposite: a failure of imagination is responsible, for humans have generally found it hard to conceive of strangers in the same terms as themselves. This is surprising, since one might expect mutual recognition by creatures of a single species to be innate, crafted by evolution to facilitate the selection of mates and the identification of rivals. In humans' case, however, the evidence suggests that this is not so, or, if there is a human recognition-instinct, that culture has occluded it.

So how did we get our present, relatively generous and inclusive notion of humankind? How did our moral community become species-specific? And are the stories of how these outcomes happened really over, or could we take them further and include more beings in our definition of humankind? Further or alternatively, could we stretch our moral community to reincorporate nonhumans?

I propose to approach answers to these questions by sketching briefly the historic outline of two stories: first, of the expansion of our notion of humankind, and second, of the exclusion of nonhuman animals from our moral community. I shall then look at the progress and consequences of some current and recent scientific or scholarly developments, which, I believe, make it impossible to hold the present line around our moral community. These developments have occurred principally in five fields: genetics, robotics, human rights theory, paleoanthropology, and primatology. Other contributors, in the pages that follow, deal with the implications of genetics and paleoanthropology. I shall concentrate on the lessons of primatology, which are perhaps the most challenging and potentially subversive. Between them, the developments I have in mind raise or reinforce a major dilemma for moral philosophy — what we might call the Peter Singer dilemma: How, in the light of present knowledge, can we continue to justify a species-based moral community? I hope to end by suggesting a new solution, or at least a new response.

The story of the expansion of the notion of humankind can be summarized readily. It is hardly surprising that most human groups have been introspective, because inward-looking communities of recognition were characteristic of the long phase of cultural divergence that occupied most of history, from our ancestors' first migrations out of east Africa something like a hundred thousand years ago. Cultures isolated by mutual incomprehension were unlikely to develop inclusive notions. But the dominant trend of global history for perhaps the last ten thousand years has been a form of reconvergence, in which, with increasing intensity, the peoples of the world have reestablished mutual contact. It is not surprising that humans' ability to enfold one another in mutual recognition has grown meanwhile and in consequence.

Documented first in the thought of Indian, Greek, Chinese, and southwest Asian sages of the first millennium BCE, the idea of a common human identity, transcending barriers of culture and differences of appearance, appealed to universalist empires and universalist religions and philosophies in the same period. Familiarity can breed respect as well as contempt, and the growing range of cultural exchange helped to break down barriers to mutual recognition between formerly sundered peoples. Monsters, however, continued to lurk beyond the frontier of each successive encounter. A capacious category, between what was acknowledged as human and what was known to be beastly, was always available, to which to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0802865577
• ISBN 13: 9780802865571
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland