TY  - JOUR
AB  - Recent philosophical work on the concept of human nature disagrees on how to respond to the Darwinian challenge, according to which biological species do not have traditional essences. Three broad kinds of reactions can be distinguished: (1) conservative intrinsic essentialism, which defends essences in the traditional sense, (2) eliminativism, which suggests dropping the concept of human nature altogether, and (3) constructive approaches, which argue that revisions can generate sensible concepts of human nature beyond traditional essences. The different constructive approaches pick out one or two of the three epistemic roles that are fused in traditional essentialist conceptions of human nature: descriptive (descriptivism), explanatory (explanativism), definitional (taxonomic relationalism), or explanatory and definitional (property cluster essentialism). These turns towards diverging epistemic roles are best interpreted pluralistically: there is a plurality of concepts of human nature that have to be clearly distinguished, each with a legitimate role in respective scientific contexts.
DA  - 2014
DO  - 10.1111/phc3.12159
KW  - species
KW  - epistemic roles
KW  - essentialism
KW  - human nature
KW  - pluralism
LA  - eng
IS  - 9
M2  - 642
PY  - 2014
SN  - 1747-9991
SP  - 642-652
T2  - Philosophy Compass
TI  - Recent work on human nature: Beyond traditional essences
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-26773106
Y2  - 2024-11-22T01:43:21
ER  -