Who Was The Pioneer Of Naturalistic School Of Philosophy?

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Who Was The Pioneer Of Naturalistic School Of Philosophy
Father of Naturalism is Free 10 Questions 40 Marks 10 Mins Concept: Naturalism:

Naturalism is a philosophical theory. That links the scientific method to philosophy by claiming that everything in the universe is natural. Regardless of its constituent parts. In light of this, all knowledge of the universe is subject to scientific inquiry.

Explanation: Rousseau:

The philosopher, author, and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau were from Geneva. It was Rousseau who first popularised the naturalism movement, that’s why he is called the father of naturalism, The three most crucial components of Rousseau’s “naturalist” philosophy are the state of nature, natural man, and natural civilization. He declares, “Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man,” completely rejecting the conventional approach to education. His ideas envisage a society based on freedom and equal laws and opportunities for all.

Thus, the f ather of Naturalism is Rousseau. Additional Information Plato:

The philosopher Plato was from Greece. The Republic, the most well-known piece of writing by Plato, describes a wise society ruled by a philosopher.

John Dewey:

An American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer knew by name of John Dewey. He was a founder of the pragmatist school of thought. Dewey was regarded as the founding figure of progressive education.

Aristotle:

Aristotle was the first real scientist in history as well as one of the greatest philosophers to have ever lived. He asserts in his metaphysics that there must be a distinct, unchanging being that serves as the foundation for all other beings.

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Who is the founder of naturalism philosophy?

Naturalism was first proposed and formulated by Emile Zola, the French writer and theorist, who is universally labeled as the founder of literary naturalism.
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Who is the pioneer and founder of naturalism in education?

Theodore Dreiser, Pioneer of Naturalism.
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What is the naturalist school of philosophy?

Naturalism is a philosophy that rejects the existence of pre-conceived and pre- determined life values. Man determines the values of life through his interactions with reality and its demands. This philosophy emphasises the importance of the person.
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Who is the founder of school philosophy?

Ethics, Integrity & Aptitude –

29 Jun 2020 8 min read

Philosophy arose in India as an enquiry into the mystery of life and existence. Indian Philosophy refers to several traditions of philosophical thought that originated in the Indian subcontinent. Over centuries, India’s intellectual exploration of truth has come to be represented by six systems of philosophy. These are known as Vaishesika, Nyaya, Samkhya, Yoga, Purva Mimansa and Vedanta or Uttara Mimansa.

These six systems of philosophy are said to have been founded by sages Konada, Gotama, Kapila, Patanjali, Jaimini and Vyasa, respectively. These philosophies still guide scholarly discourse in the country.

The six systems of philosophy were developed over many generations with contributions made by individual thinkers. However, today, we find an underlying harmony in their understanding of truth, although they seem distinct from each other.

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Who are the major philosophers of naturalism?

naturalism, in philosophy, a theory that relates scientific method to philosophy by affirming that all beings and events in the universe (whatever their inherent character may be) are natural. Consequently, all knowledge of the universe falls within the pale of scientific investigation.

  • Although naturalism denies the existence of truly supernatural realities, it makes allowance for the supernatural, provided that knowledge of it can be had indirectly—that is, that natural objects be influenced by the so-called supernatural entities in a detectable way.
  • Naturalism presumes that nature is in principle completely knowable.

There is in nature a regularity, unity, and wholeness that implies objective laws, without which the pursuit of scientific knowledge would be absurd. Man’s endless search for concrete proofs of his beliefs is seen as a confirmation of naturalistic methodology, Who Was The Pioneer Of Naturalistic School Of Philosophy More From Britannica pedagogy: Naturalistic theories While naturalism has often been equated with materialism, it is much broader in scope. Materialism is indeed naturalistic, but the converse is not necessarily true. Strictly speaking, naturalism has no ontological preference; i.e.

, no bias toward any particular set of categories of reality: dualism and monism, atheism and theism, idealism and materialism are all per se compatible with it. So long as all of reality is natural, no other limitations are imposed. Naturalists have in fact expressed a wide variety of views, even to the point of developing a theistic naturalism.

Only rarely do naturalists give attention to metaphysics (which they deride), and they make no philosophical attempts to establish their position. Naturalists simply assert that nature is reality, the whole of it. There is nothing beyond, nothing “other than,” no “other world” of being.
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Who is the most famous naturalist?

Charles Darwin : history’s most famous naturalist.
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Who was the first naturalist philosopher?

History. The ideas and assumptions of philosophical naturalism were first seen in the works of the Ionian pre-Socratic philosophers. Thales, often regarded as the founder of science, was the first to give explanations of natural events without resorting to supernatural causes such as the actions of the Greek gods.
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Who are the pioneers of learning theory?

Here, we take a closer look at Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, two of the most influential figures in the history of early childhood education whose influence is still felt today. Key points

Piaget believed that children experienced four developmental stages. Consider the similarities and differences between Piaget and Vygotsky – they were both constructivist in their theories about how children learn. Collaboration between learners and being able to learn cooperatively with others is at the centre of Vygotsky’s approach to children’s learning and successful development.

Note: This article was first published in the December 2007 edition of eye In the third of this series on early years pioneers, we look at the work and influence of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, two psychologists whose work has had far reaching influence around the world.

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Jean Piaget was born, lived and studied in Neuchatel, in Switzerland. During his educational career, Piaget graduated as a scientist and gained a doctorate. During this time he was a prolific writer and published many academic papers and articles that disseminated his research ideas and findings.

Piaget was a biologist who was interested in epistemology – the study of knowledge; essentially studying how human beings construct their knowledge and ‘knowing’. He also studied psychology, which clearly influenced his research and future writing about child development.

  1. Piaget understood that acquiring knowledge, especially for young children involved the processes of learning and development.
  2. His interests led him to observe his three children and to systematically (through observation) record the behaviours, tendencies and patterns of learning the children demonstrated as they lived, worked and played.

Working alongside Alfred Binet in Paris, observing the intelligence testing of young children and talking to them about their own ideas and concepts, enabled Piaget to gain many insights into children’s learning. At that time intelligence was seen as something that could be measured; a person’s overall mental operations/capacity could be tested.

However, intelligence is more complex than these early tests suggested and involves a whole range of processes, such as listening, speaking, reasoning, problem solving, thinking, remembering and learning. Piaget was interested by the ways in which children would find incorrect, but also different answers, to the questions they were asked and this inspired him to formulate his theory of cognitive development.

After working in Paris, he moved to Geneva where he conducted further research. The importance of Piaget’s work continues to influence developmental psychology, early childhood education and care throughout the world. His contribution has been essential to our understanding of how young children learn and develop, particularly in Western culture.

His research, and its application to early years practice, underpins, rather than dominates, modern early childhood education; other researchers and practitioners have progressed the ideas and theories of cognitive/intellectual development over time, and some, such as Lev Vygotsky and Jerome Bruner also appear in this series.

Important contemporaries, such as Chris Athey (schema theory) and Barbara Rogoff (guided participation/apprenticeship model) are also using Piaget’s research as the basis for their own current theories. Practical activities that reflect Piaget’s approach:

Understanding the World: In character Understanding the World: Swirl by Swirl

The constructivist approach Piaget was fascinated by the ways in which children constructed their knowledge, and through his research into cognitive development, which involved a series of experiments and interviews with children, Piaget established his theory about the progress and sequence of learning in young children to adulthood.

Piaget’s theory was constructivist – he saw children as actively constructing their understanding of the world, for themselves, and as being active seekers of solutions to problems. Early childhood professionals recognise the importance of child-initiated activity as being essential for meaningful learning and development.

is ‘learning through experience’ is often called ‘discovery learning’. Therefore, new concepts, knowledge and understanding are integrated into existing concepts, which become more complex and sophisticated. This can be considered a ‘stage theory’ because it outlined a pre-determined set of stages that children pass through towards mature intellectual development.

Piaget believed that children’s thinking emerged through infancy and that each new experience or challenge assisted in the process as part of the interplay between nature (genes) and nurture (environmental influences, such as experience, materials and opportunities). However, Piaget believed that children had to have reached a certain stage in their development before they could build towards the next set of ideas or concepts.

Each stage grows out of an earlier one and involves a reconstruction, or transformation, of earlier knowledge. This leads to the child having a novel perspective on their world and the possibilities in it. Piaget believed that children pass through the following four stages in the same order:

Sensorimotor stage (birth to two-years-old). Pre-operational stage (two to seven-years-old). Concrete operational stage (seven to 11-years-old). Formal operations stage (11-years to adulthood).

In short, they represent children’s capacities in cognitive skills and learning at different points in their developmental journey. The progress that each child makes through each stage will be dependent on their ability, and the mutual interaction between people and the environment.

Critics of Piaget’s approach suggest that there is not enough emphasis on social interactions and the emotional aspects of thought in relation to play. Additionally, the idea of developmental stages can be misleading because development is usually described as being fluid, and influenced by both cultural and environmental change.

His research methodologies have also come under scrutiny in recent years given the advancement in research techniques and in our understanding of child development. Play is a key tenet of Piaget’s cognitive development approach. This reinforces the importance of stimulating play environments that allow children to follow their own interests.

Being allowed to experiment and explore through play provides children with the opportunities to construct knowledge. It also creates situations where meaningful interactions between peers and adults can take place. Piaget knew that practitioners who were adept at using observation could analyse children’s responses to their learning experiences, which, in turn, would give them an insight into the child’s perspective of the world.

Ultimately, Piaget’s work was inspired by his interest in, and desire to discover, how children learn and how they think about the world. Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist who established one of the major theories of cognitive development and has influenced contemporary educational thinking, both in the United Kingdom and across the world.

  • Vygotsky wrote many papers and books, although his writings and ideas were only translated into English in the latter part of the last century.
  • E scope extends from the development of language and thought to the social and cultural processes in children’s learning – including those with disabilities – to his findings regarding teaching approaches.

His influence is felt today in the fields of developmental psychology, education, health and social care. There are similarities between the approaches of Piaget and Vygotsky – they are both constructivists. Piaget focused on the child as an individual, constructing their knowledge and understanding in a personal way.

Vygotsky also saw development as being rooted in social relationships that provide a framework for learning through dialogue and instruction. Key to his theory is the role of language and instruction, and of cognitive development. Piaget neglected the role of language, although he did acknowledge its relationship to thought and for expressing the concepts that were being developed.

For Vygotsky, intelligence is the capacity to learn through instruction – the role of culture is important in this process. This has implications for early years educators, whether you are teaching children in the foundation stage, in a reception class, or with younger children in nursery, because practitioners can consider how the communication between adults and children influences development.

The social and cultural influence of the environment are central to children’s cognitive development because the social context is an ongoing stimulus for learning. These can be interactions with carers, parents, extended families and significant others in the community, but also other children, like siblings and peers.

This theory can be mirrored in Bronfennbrenner’s ecological theory (1979) where social and cultural systems are also seen as a key mechanism for child development. Children actively construct meaning through the social and cultural activities taking place within the nursery/school or community.

  • This process occurs, therefore, in context rather than in isolation.
  • The zone of proximal development Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development includes the key concept of internalisation.
  • He argued that children internalise knowledge as part of a gradual process, essentially through the social interactions with others, and particularly between adults and children.

For Vygotsky, the ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD) describes the gap between what the child can achieve alone and what they can accomplish with the help of a more able adult or child. This theory supported his belief that the ability to learn through instruction is essential for cognitive growth and is located at the core of human intelligence.

  1. Vygotsky believed that everyone has both an actual level of developmental and a ‘zone of proximal development’.
  2. In contrast, Piaget saw the child as being at a particular point in a stage to learn.
  3. Children as learners, in the broadest sense, are able to develop through shared social experience because learning itself is a social activity.

Early childhood professionals will recognise the benefits of peer play and group work where ‘more able’ children can share their ideas and instruct the less experienced child. The more experienced child can also benefit in this process – by expressing something publicly (externalising) they clarify, and add depth to, their knowledge.

  1. Is also increases children’s social and language skills.
  2. For Vygotsky, the child’s ability to learn from others was more important to their development rather than how much knowledge is acquired.
  3. Vygotsky stressed the importance of language in the development of thinking and abstract thought – this includes the labelling process attached to emerging concepts.

Language provides a way of constructing the world, it is not just about the labels we apply to it because our individual constructions are saturated with personal meaning. Language can enable fuller expression of ideas and feelings. Practical activities that reflect Vygotsky’s approach:

Communication and Language: Listen to this! Communication and Language: A question of taste

Language acquisition underpins the development of thinking and learning in social relationships with others. Children learn to interpret, become aware of, and ‘make sense’ of situations – problem solving – through speech and actions. Children are exposed to different ways of thinking about the world through talking with their peers, and also with interested adults who can guide or scaffold their emerging potential.

Matching play and learning tasks to children’s interests and current development, and planning a child-centred curriculum. Using observation to identify the ZPD for a child and respond with interactions that scaffold children’s learning. Assisting children in their emerging view of the world they inhabit. Observing the potential development and current needs of children.

Reading list Athey C (1990) Extending thought in Young Children, Paul Chapman Publishing: London Mooney C G (2000) Theories of childhood: an introduction to Dewey, Montessori, Erickson, Piaget and Vygotsky, Redleaf Press: St Paul, Minnesota, USA Pound L (2005) How children learn,
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What is naturalism philosophy by Rousseau?

Home JEAN- JACQUES ROUSSEAU’S NATUR.

Research Article Educational Academic Research 2007; 1: 103-122 Read: 2834 Downloads: 271 Published: 04 December 2010 Naturalism, fonned by Jean- Jacques Rousseau through natural freedom in the enlightenment period of 18’h century, is a philosophical thought which argues that the naturalone is free at the same time and there is no source of goodness other than nature.

  • His thoughts on education form an important part of his philosophy.
  • In this regard, naturally, his thought of education is determined by a tendeney to naturalism, freedom and maintenance of consciousness of citizenship, which has a meaning with freedam.
  • Generally, Rousseau gives importance to freedom very much, and as he thinks that freedam exists in the nature, he claims that education should be natural and free, and there is a need to educate citizens who are naturally free.

The aim of this study is to deal with Rousseau’s naturalist thought ofeducation and to explain its effects. Files
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Is Nietzsche a naturalist?

Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century Christian J. Emden, an intellectual historian at Rice University, has written an informative if sometimes frustrating book about Nietzsche’s engagement with both neo-Kantian philosophers (especially the “first-generation” neo-Kantians like Helmholtz and Lange who wanted to “naturalize” Kant ) and the life sciences from the 1840s.

Emden documents the preceding with an eye to shedding light not only on Nietzsche’s naturalism, on “what does it mean to ‘translate humanity back into nature'” as Nietzsche put it in Beyond Good and Evil (1), but also on what Emden calls “the problem of normativity” (1), variously stated as how to “obtain an understanding of the sources of normativity without appealing to normativity as a standard separate from the agency, affects, conceptual commitments, and also cells and organs, that make us natural beings” (1), or how to account for “the emergence of normative order” (15), or as the question “where does the binding force of such normative commitments originate?” (15).

As these quotes suggest, the book is also philosophically ambitious, though not, I shall argue, generally successful in realizing those ambitions; confusions and unclarity about philosophical claims and concepts are often the source of frustration for the philosophically-minded reader.

Despite that, the volume provides much useful material for such readers and is a helpful addition to the scholarly literature on Nietzsche’s intellectual context and influences. Before turning to some of the ambitious philosophical theses Emden advances, let me begin by noting four important points Emden’s scholarship establishes which deserve particular notice.

First, Emden provides overwhelming evidence (complementing, e.g., Moore 2002) that Nietzsche had a deep and abiding interest in the nineteenth-century sciences and that he took himself to be extending scientific modes of understanding. No one who reads this book can doubt that Nietzsche is, in some sense, a philosophical naturalist, deeply influenced and inspired by the sciences of his day.

  1. Second, Emden shows, convincingly to my mind, that “Nietzsche’s position,
  2. Is not anti-Darwinian, but,
  3. Is highly critical of popular Darwinism, in particular its social and political conclusions” (43; cf.163-164) and that his main objection was to “the strong teleological program that seemed to be part of the German reception of Darwin” as in Spencer and Haeckel (41; cf.96).

At the same time, Emden usefully notes that “it would be wrong to assume that, by the 1880s, all biological questions were answered by reference to natural selection and adaptation” (8), a fact of which Nietzsche was aware. Emden’s discussion should, one hopes, put an end to the idea that Nietzsche was really an opponent of Darwin.

  1. Third, Nietzsche was remarkably widely read in the nineteenth-century life sciences in particular.
  2. He was, for example, “an avid reader of the Textbook of Physiology by the Cambridge physiologist Michael Foster, published in German translation in 1881” (53) but also of such diverse figures and publications as the Jena physiologist William T.

Preyer and the German zoologist Karl Semper (78), Georg Heinrich Schneider’s 1880 “book on volition among animals” (138), the journal Kosmos, with articles “on heredity, on the reproductive cycles of algae and the evolution of sense organs as well as a long account of German Naturphilosophie and Lamarck as precursors to Darwin” (148), and the anatomist Wilhelm His’s work on the development of embryos (189-190).

Fourth, while some writers have noted affinities between Hume and Nietzsche (cf. Leiter 2002: 4-5; Kail 2009), Emden shows this was not mere historical coincidence. Thanks to the now forgotten Maximilian Drossbach’s “radically Humean account of causality,” which Nietzsche read and which “has many marginal notes and underlinings throughout” (108 and n.30), and the histories of philosophy by Kuno Fischer and Friedrich Ueberweg (which Nietzsche read carefully) in which “Hume represented the crucial step from early modern metaphysics to Kant’s critical project” (109), it should be less surprising that Nietzsche’s views, including about causality, have Humean echoes.

Emden’s interesting historical details and erudition are enlisted on behalf of some strong philosophical and interpretive hypotheses, about which I have more reservations. The two central ones pertain first to the alleged grip of a certain neo-Kantian problematic on Nietzsche’s mature corpus and second to Nietzsche’s alleged interest in a particular problem of normativity.

These interpretive claims both inform and are informed by Emden’s treatment of Nietzsche’s naturalism; we must first consider this treatment before turning to Emden’s other interpretive hypotheses. Naturalism, Method, and the Life Sciences Emden says a variety of things about “naturalism,” but I take it this early formulation comes closest to his central meaning: Naturalism,

at its very core, generally holds, first of all, that human beings are no special case vis-à-vis the rest of nature and, second, that the way we think philosophically about our position in the world should entertain a close relationship to the natural sciences broadly conceived (6; cf.186).

  1. This tracks fairly closely my distinction between Substantive Naturalism (“the (ontological) view that the only things that exist are natural,” so, e.g., there are no supernatural entities ) and Methodological Naturalism (“philosophical inquiry,
  2. Should be continuous with empirical inquiry in the sciences,” though not only the “natural” sciences ).
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And indeed, Emden uses my distinction as the starting point (60 ff.) for Chapter 5, his most extended discussion of naturalism. But in that chapter, he makes two claims about naturalism that seem unmotivated, both textually and philosophically. First, he asserts that “substantive versions of naturalism,

entail a kind of physicalist reductionism with regard to both the natural world and human cognition” (60); second, he asserts that methodological naturalism is committed to there being uniform scientific methods, yet “there no unity of method among the nineteenth-century life sciences” (7), something Nietzsche understood on Emden’s account.

Let us take these up in turn. Emden claims that “naturalism, by its very definition, should tend toward physicalism” (62) and asserts that “the methodological naturalism Leiter ascribes to Nietzsche’s mature philosophical thought also bears the traces of a more substantive variety of naturalism” (62-63).

The first claim is obviously false except by stipulative “definition.” Certainly some naturalists are physicalists, but if, as most naturalists do (and as I think Emden does), one treats methodological naturalism – allegiance, in some sense, to the methods and results of the sciences – as primary, then it is an open question what belongs in one’s ontology, a question settled by whatever it is successful sciences need to do their explanatory and predictive work.

Tyler Burge makes this point against reductionists quite effectively in his recent Origins of Objectivity : Promoters of ‘naturalizing’ projects are often driven, I think, by misconceptions of science. These misconceptions breed misconceptions of mind.

  1. The notion of representation – of reference or attribution that can be correct or incorrect and that helps type-individuate kinds of psychological states – is entrenched not only in common-sense explanation but in scientific explanation in psychology.
  2. There is nothing unnatural or supernatural about such explanation.

Some of the relevant psychology is well-supported, mathematically rigorous, mature science. There is no basis, even a prima facie one, to the worry that psychological notions are invitations to mystery or miracle. Even if there were such basis, the role that these notions play in powerful empirical science would undermine it.

  • I know of no good ground for thinking that.
  • Explanatory claims must be twisted into the mold of biological or information-theoretic explanation, or any other explanation in the natural sciences, in order to be explanatorily successful.
  • 2010: 296 – 7) That is the sound Quinean posture if we take successful science to be the arbiter of the real and the knowable (and it should be distinguished from Quine’s own dogmatic and un-Quinean commitment to physicalism and behaviorism long after the demise of both as successful research programs).

But Nietzsche does not need to be a Quinean to clearly be on board with this point: his primary explanatory idiom is psychological, and his primary objection to German Materialism, for example, is that it tries to eliminate psychological idioms. Even if methodological naturalism does not require physicalism, is Emden right that the version I ascribe to Nietzsche is “of the substantive ilk” (63)? His evidence for this assertion is puzzling.

He points to work I have done with Joshua Knobe (Knobe and Leiter 2007) to argue that, as Emden glosses it, Nietzsche’s “account of the emergence and function of moral norms, can be verified by the substantive results of cognitive science” (63). But showing that Nietzsche’s naturalistic speculations about the nature of agency and moral motivation win support from recent work in cognitive science and behavioral genetics does not involve any commitment to physicalism or reductionism.

That there are natural causal mechanisms that explain aspects of human thought and behavior does not commit a naturalist to physicalism or any other kind of reductionism. Emden also complains that I attribute to Nietzsche a “methodological form of naturalism based on the assumption of a continuity of Nietzsche’s philosophical project with the uniform methods of the natural sciences” (62, emphasis added), thus “operating with a fairly unreflected notion of what constitutes ‘science’ that implicitly stipulates a unity of method across all scientific disciplines” (63-64).

In reality, I was quite explicit (Leiter 2002: 4 n.7) that methodological naturalism does not presuppose the methodological unity of the various sciences – i.e., that all sciences employ the same methods – only that successful sciences have some methodological uniqueness, i.e., there are distinctive scientific methods, even if those methods differ across the sciences.

Emden insists on the methodological plurality of the sciences – which no one defending a naturalist reading of Nietzsche denies, as far as I know – for two very particular reasons. One has to do with his interpretation of how Nietzsche thinks about causation, to which we will return in considering his reading of the Kantian strand in Nietzsche’s thinking in the next section.

  • The other has to do with his primary theme, namely, the alleged primacy of the contemporaneous life sciences, which were methodologically diverse, in Nietzsche’s thought.
  • While Emden is convincing and interesting in documenting Nietzsche’s engagement with the life sciences in the nineteenth century, he is rarely able to show concretely how they influenced Nietzsche philosophically except by reference to Nachlass notes – the latter notable especially because Nietzsche chose not to publish them.

Emden’s two best, but rather modest, examples, from Nietzsche’s published corpus concern (1) first, the influence on Nietzsche’s idea of genealogy of Schneider and Haeckel’s idea that “Path-dependent development showed that evolution was not completely random, but, nevertheless remained marked by contingency” (138 ff.), and second, his repeated claim that “Nietzsche sought to situate his own philosophical project in close proximity to the discourse of animal morphology” (40), which he supports partly with Nachlass material but also, here and elsewhere (cf.167), with section 23 of Beyond Good and Evil, which mentions “morphology.” Emden glosses the latter passage as follows: When Nietzsche,

thus claimed that, “from now on psychology is again the path to the fundamental problems,” what he had in mind was a “genuine physio-psychology,” that is, a morphology of mental forms and intellectual configurations, which is always already linked to the material world since it is embedded in the body (40).

And he again adduces this same section of Beyond Good and Evil to argue against “a predominantly psychological reading of Nietzsche’s naturalism” (50) since Nietzsche refers in passing to “physio-psychology” and since, according to Emden, “Biology,

  • Is more than merely a framework of the natural preconditions for human agency and moral psychology that are otherwise detached from biology” (50).
  • Indeed, Emden declares that it is “a fatal mistake to read Nietzsche’s emphasis on psychological phenomena – such as moral feeling, will, and the self – as proposing a conception of psychology without biology” (51).

Why is it a “fatal” mistake? That is unclear since, of course, Nietzsche has no original contributions to make to biology, in contrast to his considerable power as a psychologist. This obvious point goes unnoticed by Emden, as does the fact that Chapter 1 of Beyond Good and Evil, of which section 23 is the concluding section, is devoted overwhelmingly to the deployment of psychological hypotheses about philosophers.

Nietzsche clearly believed that physiology and biology were explanatorily important – in this respect, Emden’s is a useful, additional counterweight to the silly and now discredited “French” misreadings of Nietzsche – but, equally clearly, he had absolutely nothing to contribute to speculative physiology and biology, whereas he was a psychologist of the first rank.

Emden concludes his discussion of naturalism by raising two genuine points of interpretive dispute. First, how can Nietzsche’s naturalism, on a rendering like mine, be reconciled with his alleged “neo-Kantian stance” (64) and his purported “epistemological and moral skepticism” (65)? We shall turn to that issue momentarily.

Second, Emden asks what are we to make of Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power on a naturalistic reading (65)? Here again Emden oversimplifies, claiming that my kind of naturalistic reading “discount one of the central figures of thought” in Nietzsche, whereas I only argue against interpreting it as a metaphysical doctrine in favor of a psychological interpretation defended by many other interpreters.

Emden briefly notes the considerations raised in favor of the psychological readings of will to power by various interpreters (cf.168-169) but never explains in Chapter 13 (“Living things and the will to power”) why those considerations are not decisive.

Instead, with heavy reliance on Nachlass fragments and references to nineteenth-century “cell theory,” Emden claims that to a considerable extent Nietzsche’s “second-hand knowledge of cell theory shaped his attempt to see the will to power not merely as a metaphysical principle, but as grounded in biology” (177).

No published text of Nietzsche’s is cited in support of this extravagant claim. Indeed, the only published text he identifies as relevant in this chapter (at 169) is section 36 of Beyond Good and Evil, which Emden cites, remarkably, without even addressing Clark’s incisive analysis twenty-five years ago showing that this putative argument for a metaphysical doctrine of will to power cannot be one Nietzsche actually accepts since it depends on premises he explicitly rejects (Clark 1990: 212-227).

  • The Neo-Kantian Problematic The allegedly pervasive influence of Kant on Nietzsche, and especially neo-Kantians like Lange and Helmholz, is a central theme of Emden’s account; Nietzsche, he claims, never gave up the “neo-Kantian framework” (25).
  • What Emden has in mind is a question concerning “the relationship among mind, normativity, and nature” (24), exemplified by these remarks of Lange’s: (1) The world of sensory perception is a product of our organization.

(2) Our visible (bodily) organs are, like all other parts of the world of apperances, merely images of an unknown object. (3) Our true organization is therefore as unknown to us as is external reality. In all cases, we are merely faced with the product of their interaction.

Quoted in Emden, 24) The relationship between mind and nature is certainly center stage in this passage, and there is one passage in the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil (section 15) that seems to reflect an interest in this question; other textual evidence is a bit thin and, again, mostly confined to Nachlass material.

Did Nietzsche have anything philosophically interesting to say about this issue? Emden does not, alas, make a case for an affirmative answer. This is symptomatic of his unhappy tendency to proclaim “bold” interpretations for which there is little evidence.

Based on notebook entries about Kant and the problem of teleology in science from the 1860s, for example, Emden claims that, “No serious discussion of Nietzsche’s philosophical naturalism is able to ignore these notes” (84) even though the topic is largely neglected in Nietzsche’s published corpus – except to repudiate teleology, as Emden ultimately acknowledges (100).

On certain aspects of the Kant/Nietzsche relationship as mediated through the neo-Kantians, Emden is quite good. In discussing Kant and Nietzsche on causation, Emden aptly observes that, “Nietzsche naturalizes whatever Kant regards as a priori, and the consequences of this move,

  • Bring him closer to Hume” (121), and he observes that for Nietzsche, “causality is neither a natural kind nor an a priori rule of the understanding” (119).
  • Both pithy summaries strike this reader of Nietzsche as accurate.
  • Yet Emden also disputes that Nietzsche “retained a fairly strong, straightforward, and uncomplicated understanding of causation” (101), supposing, I guess, that a Humean understanding of causation is not sufficiently “strong, straightforward, and uncomplicated,” though I am not sure why.

Emden tries to associate “causation” with the discredited notion of “teleology,” though the argument, if there is one, is opaque. Citing section 9 of the Third Essay of the Genealogy, Emden says Nietzsche is speaking derisively of “some alleged spider of purpose,

which is lurking behind the great spider’s web of causality” and thus was rejecting teleology by “casting doubt on a reified notion of causality” (103). But what Nietzsche actually says is that “our attitude towards God as some alleged spider of purpose and morality behind the great captious web of causality” is a case of modern hubris,

Much doubt is cast on God and teleology here, none on causation. The Problem of Normativity The extent to which Emden’s philosophical reach exceeds his grasp becomes particularly problematic in his attempt to grapple with what he calls the problem of normativity, which sometimes seems to be the problem of how any norms could be genuinely binding and sometimes seems to be only the banal problem of what naturalistic explanation we can give of human normative practices.

Part of the difficulty is that Emden uses philosophical terms and concepts so loosely and idiosyncratically that it is sometimes impossible to follow what he is saying. For example, he declares that “scientific realism, raises the question as to whether it remains reasonable, even possible, to distinguish between facts and values, between the world of nature and the intellectual world” (26).

It is unclear what Emden means by “scientific realism” (it is certainly not what any philosopher in the last century or two has meant), and it is equally unclear how the fact/value distinction is supposed to be parallel to the natural/intellectual distinction.

A bit later, he writes that, “Epistemic and moral claims, that is, the normative claims with which we tend to describe our actions and environment, can only become normative because they are, quite literally, embodied” (44). But normative claims, epistemic or moral, do not describe our actions or environment (they evaluate them, for example, by setting a standard by which either the correct description, or the action or belief described, should be assessed).

The idea that such claims “become normative because they are, quite literally, embodied,” is nonsense, obscured by the misuse of the word “literally.” These are, alas, just two examples; my copy of the book is now annotated with several dozen big question marks in the margins next to similarly puzzling passages.

The problem is particularly acute in Chapters 14 and 15, which are centrally concerned with normativity, but here is my best reconstruction of what Emden is trying to say. All naturalistic readers of Nietzsche can agree that, “Nietzsche must be able to explain the emergence of normativity naturalistically” (66).

Sometimes what Emden means is utterly banal, e.g., that we must “follow the historical development of, the values we hold” (186), a project Nietzsche is obviously engaged in. Emden’s real thesis, however, is much more ambitious. He ultimately endorses the view defended by Katsafanas (2013) according to which “overcoming resistance is constitutive of all human agency” and thus power “gains normative force and emerges as a standard against which to measure whether our actions contribute to life” (182; cf.200, 204).

The descriptive claim on which this is based is preposterous on its face – am I “overcoming resistance” when I answer the phone when it rings? – but anyone interested in the prospects of such a view should read Katsafanas, not Emden. Emden goes on to explain that moral realists (of which Nietzsche is one, according to Emden!) believe that “moral properties supervene upon natural properties to which they can be reduced” (209-210), apparently not realizing that supervenience and reduction are competing metaphysical relationships and, ironically, committing Nietzsche to a kind of substantive naturalism about value after all! He goes on to conflate metaphysical and semantic questions in ways that philosophical readers will find confusing.

Scholars in other parts of the humanities sometimes dismiss “analytic” philosophy as irrelevant “logic-chopping,” and they aren’t wholly wrong: analytic philosophy is often guilty not simply of missing the forest for the trees, but of missing the trees for the twigs.

If most contemporary work in analytic metaphysics and epistemology vanished from the face of the academy, almost nothing of any value or significance to the life of the mind, or humanity, would be lost. But one thing “boring” analytic philosophy does teach is how to think clearly, to draw distinctions, to understand your concepts and their entailments: perhaps alone among the liberal arts, it really teaches discursive reasoning and thinking.

Other parts of the humanities are sometimes woefully deficient in these basic intellectual skills. The deficiencies of the work under consideration are illustrative examples. The impressive historical research and knowledge in this volume is easy to miss due to a morass of conceptual and dialectical confusions, which is a genuine shame.

  • REFERENCES Burge, Tyler.2010.
  • Origins of Objectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
  • Clark, Maudemarie.1990.
  • Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
  • Ail, Peter.2009.
  • Nietzsche and Hume: Naturalism and Explanation,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 37:5-22.
  • Atsafanas, Paul.2013.

Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constituvism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Knobe, Joshua and Brian Leiter.2007. “The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology,” in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Leiter, Brian.2002. Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge). – – -.2015. “Normativity for Naturalists,” Philosophical Issues: A Supplement to Nous 25 (forthcominig). Moore, Gregory.2002. Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). I discuss various permutations and nuances of these positions in Leiter (2002:3-6).

Emden makes other claims in Chapter 5 that I find simply mysterious. He says, for example, that substantive naturalism is “hard pressed to explain why scientific explanation about the world should be normatively binding in the first place” (60) without explaining why substantive naturalism has to explain any such thing.

Continuing in this vein, he says that for Quine, as for Nietzsche, “the appeal to the normative force of science is in many ways an appeal to conceptual contextualization, since any direct access to the things that surround us, if such access were remotely possible, would not tell us very much” (61).

It is true that both Quine and Nietzsche deny that perceptual evidence is ever theoretically unmediated, but what this has to do with the putative “normative force of science” is unclear. Sometimes Emden seems to be wondering why such an epistemic posture is itself normatively “binding,” though I take it for naturalists it is not, a possibility Emden does not consider.

Cf. Leiter (2015). Emden notes, interestingly, that Nietzsche had read the Danish philosopher Harald Høffding, for whom “psychology only made sense if it was able to look beyond mere introspection, drawing on physiology as much as on the new social sciences” (51). Unnoted by Emden is that denying, as Nietzsche does, that psychology should be “a field of knowledge concerned with introspection or self-observation” (52) does not require that biology and physiology are the only alternatives—as the development of the cognitive sciences over the last fifty years makes clear.

In the end, it turns out Emden thinks Nietzsche is a kind of moral realist, making this earlier claim a bit perplexing! Emden raises a third purported concern, claiming that I “exclude the creative and normative dimension of Nietzsche’s genealogy—that is, the question as to how different, or new, normative commitments can be made to emerge” (65).

As support, Emden cites Leiter (2002: 11), which claims only that Nietzsche thinks genuine philosophers create values. Later he says that for Nietzsche “instead of the well-ordered universe of causal laws, there is something akin to a continuum of dynamic forces. Causal explanations merely refer to distinct events, or time periods, with which we seek to order this continuum to render life and knowledge possible” (161), which seems to me a “fairly straightforward” Humean way of thinking about causation.

It is not only philosophical terms that Emden uses oddly. He complains, for example, that “There is no coherent reason for arguingthat thecreative dimension of Nietzsche’s philosophical thought falls outside naturalism” (200 n.48) when what he means is that he does not accept the textual evidence and associated philosophical argument for this reading.
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How many philosophers are naturalists?

Among philosophers who specialized in philosophy of religion, 72% identified themselves as ‘theists’ and just 20% identified themselves as ‘naturalists’.
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What are the 4 types of naturalism?

2.3 An Extreme Naturalism (Svabhāvavāda) – Svabhāvavāda, which is the strongest form of ontological naturalism in Indian scenario, literally means ‘the view of individual nature/essences’ (Bhattacharya, R.2002). The hard-core naturalists, Cārvākas, admit four types of basic material elements—earth, water, fire and air.

They reject atomism, however, since they refuse to admit any imperceptible thing in their ontology, including God, Soul, ākāśa and all kinds of non-natural forces. The material elements are said to possess some qualities naturally. Multifarious objects of this world including living and conscious beings are produced out of the combination of material elements.

It is generally held that the nature of any effect is determined by the nature of its cause.The reductionist Cārvākas and the nihilist Ājīvika-s, however, deny any causal connection between the material elements and the compounds arising out of them.

The Cārvākas, however, deny any causal connection between the material elements and the compounds arising out of them. Just as fire is naturally hot and water is naturally cold, similarly, they hold, sugarcane is naturally sweet, margosa leaves are naturally bitter and thorns are naturally sharp. They think that further componential or causal analysis is completely redundant.

The distinguishing feature of this kind of extreme naturalism is a belief in a fortuitous generation of events (ākasmikatāvāda). Causal relations are supposed to involve necessity, but necessity is not perceptible and whatever is not perceptible cannot be inferred or established by any other means.

  • Udayana argues, in an elaborate critique of this view (Nyāyakusumāñjali I, 4–5), that every event must have a cause because every event without exception has ‘conditional’ (sāpekṣa) existence, because it has ‘occasional’ (kādācitka) existence, i.e., it occurs at a certain time.
  • An eternal entity is always existent and a fictitious entity does not exist at any time: as these are not characterized by occasional existence, these are not caused.
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The only counter-instance to this rule is prior absence, which has occasional existence but being beginningless has no cause. Cārvākas affirm, however, that an event need not originate from a cause; it may come into being fortuitously. Even the occasional origination of an event is due to the nature of the event and has got nothing to do with its cause.

  1. An effect does not originate from a cause.
  2. An effect does not arise at all.
  3. An effect is self-caused; it is not determined by any external condition.
  4. An effect is generated by an unreal cause.
  5. The occurrence of an effect is not determined by its cause but by its own nature (svabhāva).

Udayana objects to all these formulations. If an effect were not dependent on its cause for its existence, then it could have occurred at any time, in fact at all times, and thus would lose its occasional nature. In fact, every effect has a temporal limit fixed by its cause, prior to which it cannot exist.

The second formulation runs contrary to our perception of the occurrence of an event at a particular spatio-temporal location. The third formulation is unacceptable because the same thing cannot be both a cause and an effect at the same time in respect of the same set of conditions, and because it is not possible for anything to exist before its origination.

The fourth formulation is rejected outright for no unreal thing can ever enter into a causal process. The fifth formulation leaves us totally mystified because the proponents of the fortuitous generation thesis have nowhere specified what this nature is by virtue of which an effect can occur without its cause.

  1. So we wonder, is this nature different from or the same as the effect? On the first alternative the principle of causality is re-established while the second alternative is unintelligible.
  2. If the nature of an effect is the same as the effect and a thing can never be separated from its nature, then it would follow that an existent entity would go on causing its own existence over and over again.

This is surely absurd. Philosophically these arguments appear to be pretty convincing, but Cārvāka naturalists may find an ally in quantum physical talk about spontaneous decay of a radioactive element, quantum jumps, and so forth.
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Who is the father of philosophical school?

GROTIUS (1583-1645) Hugo Grotius was a Dutch national and a Republican philosopher. He is regarded as the father of philosophic al school of jurisprudence.
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Who is the father of Academy philosophy?

What was Plato’s family like? – Plato, (born 428/427 bce, Athens, Greece—died 348/347, Athens), ancient Greek philosopher, student of Socrates (c.470–399 bce ), teacher of Aristotle (384–322 bce ), and founder of the Academy, best known as the author of philosophical works of unparalleled influence.

Building on the demonstration by Socrates that those regarded as experts in ethical matters did not have the understanding necessary for a good human life, Plato introduced the idea that their mistakes were due to their not engaging properly with a class of entities he called forms, chief examples of which were Justice, Beauty, and Equality.

Whereas other thinkers—and Plato himself in certain passages—used the term without any precise technical force, Plato in the course of his career came to devote specialized attention to these entities. As he conceived them, they were accessible not to the senses but to the mind alone, and they were the most important constituents of reality, underlying the existence of the sensible world and giving it what intelligibility it has.

In metaphysics Plato envisioned a systematic, rational treatment of the forms and their interrelations, starting with the most fundamental among them ( the Good, or the One); in ethics and moral psychology he developed the view that the good life requires not just a certain kind of knowledge (as Socrates had suggested) but also habituation to healthy emotional responses and therefore harmony between the three parts of the soul (according to Plato, reason, spirit, and appetite).

His works also contain discussions in aesthetics, political philosophy, theology, cosmology, epistemology, and the philosophy of language, His school fostered research not just in philosophy narrowly conceived but in a wide range of endeavours that today would be called mathematical or scientific.
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Did Aristotle believe in naturalism?

Moral Virtue and Nature: A Defense of Ethical Naturalism Virtue ethics such as Aristotle’s are naturalistic in the sense that the values they uncover are the virtues supplied by nature itself; morality is understood to be built into our very biology by way of our telos, an end set by nature which sets the shape and point of moral life.

  • Naturalism of this sort has the appeal of providing a ready connection between fact and value, the non-normative and the normative, giving it resources to address important meta-ethical problems.
  • But the post-Aristotelian metaphysics of naturalism and teleology are not obviously compatible, and so it is also not obvious that a virtue ethic can be naturalistic as naturalism is understood today.

Can a post-Darwinian view of science and the evolution of human beings accommodate virtue ethics, or is an ethics of character simply at odds with a view of persons as governed by biological forces aimed at genetic replication? This is the question Stephen R.

Brown sets himself, arguing for a neo-Darwinian virtue ethic that “amounts to” a purely descriptive, evolutionary ethic, according to which individual humans can be morally evaluated in terms of how well they realize the human function or way of life, even while our “ultimate end” is genotypic continuation.

Brown, building on the work of Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse, claims that virtue ethics has not been made sufficiently naturalistic and aims to make it so, while preserving our intuitions about which traits are virtues and what makes good persons good.

  1. This is a worthwhile philosophical investigation but at times a frustrating read, as the motivation for the evolutionary ethic Brown advances is only made clear in the final pages of the book.
  2. Unfortunately Brown’s argumentative strategy doesn’t well serve the purpose of defending virtue ethics, although it may pique the interest of evolutionary ethicists who wonder whether virtue ethics is viable.

It simply isn’t clear, in the end, how the virtues can be understood as forms of human excellence grounded in the natural end of genotypic continuation, or how this ground shapes moral life in a way that the virtue ethicist can embrace. Still, Brown raises pressing problems both for virtue ethics and arguably for cognitivist naturalistic ethics, offers an interesting discussion of Aristotle’s function argument and his view of justice as the cardinal virtue, and brings into view a conception of how we might make moral sense of human lives given what we know of the scientific facts.

  1. In Chapter One, Brown defines ethical naturalism as a cognitivist position according to which ethical norms are grounded in natural facts.
  2. He suggests that cognitivism is required because it entails that there are ethical facts and that moral discourse is not systematically misleading (5), but given that naturalism happily co-exists with non-cognitivism, an argument for cognitivism is needed.

More troubling yet is that in the final paragraph of the book Brown concludes that because the human end is reproductive success and this natural good is not obviously a moral good, it may be that morality’s authority is illusory. He closes by gesturing at error theory, according to which moral discourse is systematically misleading and there are no moral facts.

This leaves the reader in doubt about just what Brown takes himself to have shown in his defense of naturalized virtue ethics. The naturalized virtue ethics advanced by Brown is a goods-based view according to which the goodness of the virtues derives from the goodness of our ultimate end. So virtues, while not theoretically fundamental, are ethically fundamental; they are the marks for which we look when evaluating individual human beings as good instances of the kind human being (14).

Judgements of character are thus prior to judgements of right action. Nonetheless, the evaluation of actions need not make reference to the character of the actor. For example, if our end were eudaimonia, some acts could be evaluated with only reference to that (species specific) end.

  • In a footnote, Brown notes a potential problem: by divorcing good acts from good character in this way it is possible to bypass the virtues altogether, and thereby undermine virtue theory.
  • He suggests that the problem can be resolved by showing that the virtues are at least partially constitutive of our ends, but it is not clear that Brown ever shows this.

Virtues are, on his view, proximate ends to our ultimate end of successful reproduction and so are practically necessary for the ultimate end, but not necessarily constitutive of it. For Brown, the connection between virtue and biology lies in the fact that: “the logical structure of our ethical evaluations of human beings is identical to the logical structure of our non-ethical evaluations of non-human living organisms” (15).

  • Beyond making a few claims about particular virtues, such as the claim that the natural end of a good mother is to raise good offspring (58), there is little discussion of just how the ultimate end, reproductive success, maps onto or informs any plausible virtue ethic.
  • For example, why isn’t the function of a good mother to raise many offspring? This lack of clarity leaves the reader at times uncertain of what is being claimed as the argument progresses.

Brown’s defense of natural teleology in Chapter Two includes an interesting discussion of Aristotle’s function argument. Brown argues that Aristotle merely assumes that a human has a function qua human being and goes on to plausibly suggest that we discard Aristotle’s strategy of attempting to determine a thing’s function by asking what it alone does better than any other thing, replacing it with a more contemporary way of determining function.

  • Brown argues that biological accounts of function (a thing’s function is what it was selected to do, or the goal-directed role it plays in a continuing system) fail to pick out a human function and so humans do not have a biological function in the technical sense of the term.
  • Brown concludes that we should, following Terence Irwin, think of Aristotelian function as work: “the human ergon is what we do, our way of life, the characteristic processes and behaviors we exemplify and in which we engage” (38).

The human ergon is characteristic human activity and the connection between function and virtue is made by preserving Aristotle’s insight that a good instance of a kind is one that actualizes that kind’s ergon well. I had hoped that this chapter, entitled “Natural Teleology”, would explain exactly how teleology is compatible with naturalism, and in such a way as to support an ethic focussed on excellences of character.

Brown writes that nature is whatever the best science of the day tells us it is (2), and this, I would have thought, would support a biological view: from the standpoint of science, humans are designed to replicate their own DNA. But Brown considers and rejects this Darwinian version of the human function, noting that in order to explain normative notions like a good mother or good father, “we need a more robust theoretical structure than a facile ‘Darwinism’ that sees total genetic proliferation as the human function.

But see Chapter 5 below.” (35) In that fifth (and last) chapter, Brown argues that the natural teleonomic end of reproductive success is also our teleological end: “from a naturalistic perspective, reproductive success appears to be the only reasonable natural end.

  • Thus as teleological ethical naturalists, it is our only choice” (120), which leaves one wondering why the Darwinian account of function didn’t win the day 85 pages sooner.
  • Brown holds that naturalized virtue ethics makes room for both intentional and non-intentional teleology, but his own commitment to teleology is somewhat puzzling.

He concludes that it ought at least to be taken seriously as an explanatory strategy and that it could be supported by a transcendental argument or a “useful fiction” (45). At the end of the chapter on natural teleology it wasn’t clear to me what distinguished teleological from non-teleological views of nature, and Brown’s claim that some philosophers believe neo-Darwinian theory shows that there is teleology in nature while others do not, did not help to clarify.

In Chapter Three, “Good Human Beings”, Brown asks what makes human beings morally good human beings? Crucial in Brown’s analysis is the claim that “We evaluate ourselves and one another along the same lines as we do specimens of any species of living thing” (54). The evaluative strategy is: find the species’ function, establish a norm and then apply the norm to individual members of the species.

The logical structure of evaluation is framed by reference to the way of life of a species by which individual members are seen to be good or defective qua thing of their kind; ethical evaluations have this teleological framework. Here Brown adopts four human ends, advanced by Rosalind Hursthouse: the ends of individual survival, the continuation of the species, a thing’s characteristic freedom from pain and characteristic means of enjoyment, and its good functioning in a social group (53).

  1. A particular character trait can be known to be a virtue if it enables a person to realize one or more of these four ends.
  2. Brown’s theoretical support for adopting these characteristic ends is not supplied (he indicates that critical discussion of these issues will occur in Chapter Five, where he claims that the ends must be justified by an ultimate end) and those who do not find it intuitive that the continuation of the species is one such end are left wondering whether non-breeders (gay and straight) will be counted defective on Brown’s version of naturalized virtue ethics.

The is/ought gap looms large for ethical naturalism and in Chapter Four, Brown discusses five standard forms of the problem with a view to showing that the is/ought gap is not insurmountable. The chapter would be stronger if the objections targeted the view Brown ultimately advances.

For example, the discussion of the version of the problem concerned with the motivational difference between values and facts (values are motivational, facts are not) is addressed by simply granting that all moral imperatives are, in a special sense, hypothetical imperatives but adding that they are in a sense unconditional: “Since everyone desires happiness, the moral norms turn out to be hypothetical in form.

However, the norms are not hypothetical in Kant’s sense, because it is not up to you to want happiness or not. By nature we all want happiness.” (98) We want to avoid the misery of getting caught telling lies and so the imperative ‘avoid misery by not telling lies’ constrains us.

When, in the final chapter, we discover that the real end of our nature is successful reproduction and that this end serves as the foundation for all other ends, we are likely to want the motivational problem to be put, paraphrasing Korsgaard, in a slightly different way: “how could the fact of my design as a replicator for DNA give me a moral reason to do anything?” So why does Brown suppose a naturalistic virtue ethic is fated to become an evolutionary ethic? Apparently the need for a unified teleological theory makes it so.

In the fifth and final chapter, Brown asks how the four ends he adopted from Hursthouse in Chapter Three can be plausibly claimed to be human ends. With a manifold of ends the theory will be either vacuous (our ends are whatever we seek) or far too open-ended, Brown claims, so without a unifying final end we will be unable to justify these ends (unlike Hursthouse, he does not believe that educated observation or ethology will inform us of our ends).

Once we see that several of the ends on Hursthouse’s list are proximate ends serving the end of the continuation of the species, or more precisely, the continuation of a genotype or evolved trait, we have the needed unification: “Neo-Darwinism can explain, in principle, why the other supposed ends are our ends: they are our proximate ends because their presence served the ultimate end” (117).

But even if this were true, more is required to show that our ends are justified than that they serve, or are causally related to, a final end. To give him his due, Brown goes on to pose and respond to the hard question: If our natural end isn’t good, why suppose that its supporting ends are good? According to Brown, the goodness resides in its being ours, as our end makes us what we are and do and, as a result, is good.

He writes: 1. Reproductive success is our natural (ultimate) end.2. Our end is rightly called good.3. Therefore, reproductive success is good. (121) Unfortunately, Brown’s commitment to his own argument is not entirely clear. He goes on to remark, truthfully enough, that a naturalist need not be a neo-Darwinian and might even reject naturalized virtue ethics.

He adds that one might reasonably reject neo-Darwinism as having a place in ethics and reject his claim that a theoretically unifying human end is needed. He writes that intentional creatures like us are likely to find a view like Hursthouse’s very sensible, adding that there may even be some truth to it.

He concludes: In seeking a natural ground for our moral judgements of others, we have ended with something else than we might have wished for: something natural, but not clearly good, except that it is our natural end. It might be the case that, for morality to do its job, so to speak, it must be held to be objectively grounded – even if it is not.

A transcendent sort of grounding might seem to provide a deeper grounding than one immanent in transitory and contingent human nature. But this is all the naturalist has. (122) This is a somewhat strange note on which to end the book. Many virtue ethicists will reasonably enough balk at the claim that the real human end is what geneticists tell us it is, and will wonder how the human ergon or way of life is to be reconciled with this scientific view of the human end.

Still, in Moral Virtue and Nature, Brown tackles an interesting and important issue and his book is likely to stoke interest in the question of whether, and to what extent, a neo-Darwinian view of human nature can be made compatible with a teleological virtue ethic. Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1999), p.202.

See Christine Korsgaard’s discussion of the normative question as it applies to evolutionary ethics in her The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.15. : Moral Virtue and Nature: A Defense of Ethical Naturalism
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Who was the supporter of naturalism in philosophy?

J.J Rousseau was supporter of naturalism philosophy in education. Naturalism means to follow nature.
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Who are the three natural philosophers?

History – Humankind’s mental engagement with nature certainly predates civilization and the record of history. Philosophical, and specifically non-religious thought about the natural world, goes back to ancient Greece. These lines of thought began before Socrates, who turned from his philosophical studies from speculations about nature to a consideration of man, viz., political philosophy.

  • The thought of early philosophers such as Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Democritus centered on the natural world.
  • In addition, three Presocratic philosophers who lived in the Ionian town of Miletus (hence the Milesian School of philosophy), Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, attempted to explain natural phenomena without recourse to creation myths involving the Greek gods,

They were called the physikoi (“natural philosophers”) or, as Aristotle referred to them, the physiologoi, Plato followed Socrates in concentrating on man. It was Plato’s student, Aristotle, who, in basing his thought on the natural world, returned empiricism to its primary place, while leaving room in the world for man.

Martin Heidegger observes that Aristotle was the originator of conception of nature that prevailed in the Middle Ages into the modern era: The Physics is a lecture in which he seeks to determine beings that arise on their own, τὰ φύσει ὄντα, with regard to their being, Aristotelian “physics” is different from what we mean today by this word, not only to the extent that it belongs to antiquity whereas the modern physical sciences belong to modernity, rather above all it is different by virtue of the fact that Aristotle’s “physics” is philosophy, whereas modern physics is a positive science that presupposes a philosophy,

This book determines the warp and woof of the whole of Western thinking, even at that place where it, as modern thinking, appears to think at odds with ancient thinking. But opposition is invariably comprised of a decisive, and often even perilous, dependence.

  • Without Aristotle’s Physics there would have been no Galileo.
  • Aristotle surveyed the thought of his predecessors and conceived of nature in a way that charted a middle course between their excesses.
  • Plato’s world of eternal and unchanging Forms, imperfectly represented in matter by a divine Artisan, contrasts sharply with the various mechanistic Weltanschauungen, of which atomism was, by the fourth century at least, the most prominent This debate was to persist throughout the ancient world.

Atomistic mechanism got a shot in the arm from Epicurus while the Stoics adopted a divine teleology The choice seems simple: either show how a structured, regular world could arise out of undirected processes, or inject intelligence into the system. This was how Aristotle when still a young acolyte of Plato, saw matters.

  • Cicero preserves Aristotle’s own cave-image : if troglodytes were brought on a sudden into the upper world, they would immediately suppose it to have been intelligently arranged.
  • But Aristotle grew to abandon this view; although he believes in a divine being, the Prime Mover is not the efficient cause of action in the Universe, and plays no part in constructing or arranging it.

But, although he rejects the divine Artificer, Aristotle does not resort to a pure mechanism of random forces. Instead he seeks to find a middle way between the two positions, one which relies heavily on the notion of Nature, or phusis, “The world we inhabit is an orderly one, in which things generally behave in predictable ways, Aristotle argued, because every natural object has a “nature”—an attribute (associated primarily with form) that makes the object behave in its customary fashion.” Aristotle recommended four causes as appropriate for the business of the natural philosopher, or physicist, “and if he refers his problems back to all of them, he will assign the ‘why’ in the way proper to his science—the matter, the form, the mover, ‘that for the sake of which'”.

  • While the vagaries of the material cause are subject to circumstance, the formal, efficient and final cause often coincide because in natural kinds, the mature form and final cause are one and the same.
  • The capacity to mature into a specimen of one’s kind is directly acquired from “the primary source of motion”, i.e., from one’s father, whose seed ( sperma ) conveys the essential nature (common to the species), as a hypothetical ratio,
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Material cause An object’s motion will behave in different ways depending on the from which it is made. (Compare clay, steel, etc.) Formal cause An object’s motion will behave in different ways depending on its material arrangement. (Compare a clay sphere, clay block, etc.) Efficient cause That which caused the object to come into being; an “agent of change” or an “agent of movement”.

  1. Final cause The reason that caused the object to be brought into existence.
  2. From the late Middle Ages into the modern era, the tendency has been to narrow “science” to the consideration of efficient or agency-based causes of a particular kind: The action of an efficient cause may sometimes, but not always, be described in terms of quantitative force.

The action of an artist on a block of clay, for instance, can be described in terms of how many pounds of pressure per square inch is exerted on it. The efficient causality of the teacher in directing the activity of the artist, however, cannot be so described The final cause acts on the agent to influence or induce her to act.
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Who are the 5 famous naturalists?

Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History Ended May 5, 2019 The exhibit profiles the lives of great naturalists who collected, described, and classified living things through their own observations and discoveries in nature. These naturalists were important figures in the early years of natural history as it changed from a mainly amateur pursuit in the 1600s to today’s specialized scientific profession.

Modern natural science was built on the work of those who went before, and the Great Naturalists’ portraits are shown with original engravings and lithographs from the, Some of the naturalists were gifted artists while others commissioned illustrations for publication. Some names will be familiar—Linnaeus, Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt, and Maria Sybilla Merian.

Others, like Rumphius, the Comte du Buffon, Alcide and Charles d’Orbigny, and John Ray were famous in their time but are less well known today. Of local interest are two naturalists who lived in Santa Barbara and built sizable natural history collections.

  • Lorenzo Gordin Yates was a founder of the Santa Barbara Society of Natural History organized in 1876.
  • He was a specialist in botany, conchology, mineralogy, and paleontology.
  • Today, his collections reside at the UCSB Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration, Stanford University, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

Museum’s founder, William Leon Dawson was drawn to the study of birds as his life’s work. He established the Museum of Comparative Oology, the study of bird’s eggs, in 1916. Initially housed in two small buildings on Dawson’s property, the collections were moved to the Museum’s present location in 1923 and he became its first director.
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Who is the champion of naturalism?

 Rousseau in the 18th century is considered the champion of naturalism.
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Who is the father of realism and naturalism?

Portrait of Henrik Ibsen Henrik Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright in the 19th century who became well-known throughout the world for his significant influence on decades of authors and playwrights after him. Considered the father of realism, he holds a place in history as a founder of modernism in theatrical works.

  • His plays, often considered quite controversial when published in the morally stringent 19th century, were and continue to be widely discussed beyond just an academic setting.
  • The Lady from the Sea was written in 1888, inspired by the Danish ballad Agnete og Havmanden,
  • In the ballad, a young woman named Agnete meets a merman who rises from the sea and promptly offers a marriage between them.

She goes with him, embarking on a domestic journey underneath the waves as she and her husband make a new family of seven children. However, one day she hears the church bells from above the water and decides to revisit her homeland. Upon returning, she decides to leave her underwater family forever and once again live on land.

  1. The tale is so famous that underwater artwork depicting Agnete’s abandoned family was installed in Denmark,
  2. Although Ibsen drew inspiration from it, the tale of Ellida Wangel is significantly different, yet just as enduring for its powerful motifs and a marked departure from Ibsen’s typical characterization.

Motifs of free will, marriage, and the necessity of reconciling dreams with reality permeate the play and their presence ensures it remains startlingly relevant no matter the time period. Scene from a 1901 production of THE LADY FROM THE SEA in Berlin. Ibsen is a figure who led a remarkable life himself. The man who would go on to produce works that are often only outperformed by Shakespeare was born in the Norwegian town of Skien to an opulent household, though this material prosperity disappeared so that the rest of his childhood and part of his adult life was spent in poverty.

  1. His natural talent burgeoned in the face of his responses to the social and political occurrences of the time.
  2. Events of his own life, such as his political activism, his eventual self-imposed exile, his affairs with younger women, and his eventual marriage to another woman all influenced his plays.
  3. The beauty of the Norwegian landscape and local tales also captivated him.

His mystique even captured the imagination of artist Edvard Munch, whose paintings hosted subject matter that was markedly influenced by Ibsen’s characters. Upon its release, The Lady from the Sea was considered less shocking in comparison to Ibsen’s other plays.

However, as Ibsen was notable for doing, the play still challenged the state of Norwegian society at the time, focusing on themes other playwrights overlooked, such as marital unfulfillment, the life of an artist, and grappling with stifling social expectations when trying to formulate one’s individual identity.

In the modern-day, Ibsen fanatics and the newly-initiated can all recognize Lady as a moving and powerful testament to theatre’s ability to critique and change social norms. The Lady from the Sea hits Court’s stage February 25, 2022. Learn more and save your seats → Posted on February 19, 2020 in Productions
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What is naturalism philosophy by Rousseau?

Home JEAN- JACQUES ROUSSEAU’S NATUR.

Research Article Educational Academic Research 2007; 1: 103-122 Read: 2836 Downloads: 271 Published: 04 December 2010 Naturalism, fonned by Jean- Jacques Rousseau through natural freedom in the enlightenment period of 18’h century, is a philosophical thought which argues that the naturalone is free at the same time and there is no source of goodness other than nature.

His thoughts on education form an important part of his philosophy. In this regard, naturally, his thought of education is determined by a tendeney to naturalism, freedom and maintenance of consciousness of citizenship, which has a meaning with freedam. Generally, Rousseau gives importance to freedom very much, and as he thinks that freedam exists in the nature, he claims that education should be natural and free, and there is a need to educate citizens who are naturally free.

The aim of this study is to deal with Rousseau’s naturalist thought ofeducation and to explain its effects. Files
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How many philosophers are naturalists?

Among philosophers who specialized in philosophy of religion, 72% identified themselves as ‘theists’ and just 20% identified themselves as ‘naturalists’.
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Did Aristotle believe in naturalism?

Moral Virtue and Nature: A Defense of Ethical Naturalism Virtue ethics such as Aristotle’s are naturalistic in the sense that the values they uncover are the virtues supplied by nature itself; morality is understood to be built into our very biology by way of our telos, an end set by nature which sets the shape and point of moral life.

Naturalism of this sort has the appeal of providing a ready connection between fact and value, the non-normative and the normative, giving it resources to address important meta-ethical problems. But the post-Aristotelian metaphysics of naturalism and teleology are not obviously compatible, and so it is also not obvious that a virtue ethic can be naturalistic as naturalism is understood today.

Can a post-Darwinian view of science and the evolution of human beings accommodate virtue ethics, or is an ethics of character simply at odds with a view of persons as governed by biological forces aimed at genetic replication? This is the question Stephen R.

Brown sets himself, arguing for a neo-Darwinian virtue ethic that “amounts to” a purely descriptive, evolutionary ethic, according to which individual humans can be morally evaluated in terms of how well they realize the human function or way of life, even while our “ultimate end” is genotypic continuation.

Brown, building on the work of Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse, claims that virtue ethics has not been made sufficiently naturalistic and aims to make it so, while preserving our intuitions about which traits are virtues and what makes good persons good.

This is a worthwhile philosophical investigation but at times a frustrating read, as the motivation for the evolutionary ethic Brown advances is only made clear in the final pages of the book. Unfortunately Brown’s argumentative strategy doesn’t well serve the purpose of defending virtue ethics, although it may pique the interest of evolutionary ethicists who wonder whether virtue ethics is viable.

It simply isn’t clear, in the end, how the virtues can be understood as forms of human excellence grounded in the natural end of genotypic continuation, or how this ground shapes moral life in a way that the virtue ethicist can embrace. Still, Brown raises pressing problems both for virtue ethics and arguably for cognitivist naturalistic ethics, offers an interesting discussion of Aristotle’s function argument and his view of justice as the cardinal virtue, and brings into view a conception of how we might make moral sense of human lives given what we know of the scientific facts.

In Chapter One, Brown defines ethical naturalism as a cognitivist position according to which ethical norms are grounded in natural facts. He suggests that cognitivism is required because it entails that there are ethical facts and that moral discourse is not systematically misleading (5), but given that naturalism happily co-exists with non-cognitivism, an argument for cognitivism is needed.

More troubling yet is that in the final paragraph of the book Brown concludes that because the human end is reproductive success and this natural good is not obviously a moral good, it may be that morality’s authority is illusory. He closes by gesturing at error theory, according to which moral discourse is systematically misleading and there are no moral facts.

  1. This leaves the reader in doubt about just what Brown takes himself to have shown in his defense of naturalized virtue ethics.
  2. The naturalized virtue ethics advanced by Brown is a goods-based view according to which the goodness of the virtues derives from the goodness of our ultimate end.
  3. So virtues, while not theoretically fundamental, are ethically fundamental; they are the marks for which we look when evaluating individual human beings as good instances of the kind human being (14).

Judgements of character are thus prior to judgements of right action. Nonetheless, the evaluation of actions need not make reference to the character of the actor. For example, if our end were eudaimonia, some acts could be evaluated with only reference to that (species specific) end.

In a footnote, Brown notes a potential problem: by divorcing good acts from good character in this way it is possible to bypass the virtues altogether, and thereby undermine virtue theory. He suggests that the problem can be resolved by showing that the virtues are at least partially constitutive of our ends, but it is not clear that Brown ever shows this.

Virtues are, on his view, proximate ends to our ultimate end of successful reproduction and so are practically necessary for the ultimate end, but not necessarily constitutive of it. For Brown, the connection between virtue and biology lies in the fact that: “the logical structure of our ethical evaluations of human beings is identical to the logical structure of our non-ethical evaluations of non-human living organisms” (15).

Beyond making a few claims about particular virtues, such as the claim that the natural end of a good mother is to raise good offspring (58), there is little discussion of just how the ultimate end, reproductive success, maps onto or informs any plausible virtue ethic. For example, why isn’t the function of a good mother to raise many offspring? This lack of clarity leaves the reader at times uncertain of what is being claimed as the argument progresses.

Brown’s defense of natural teleology in Chapter Two includes an interesting discussion of Aristotle’s function argument. Brown argues that Aristotle merely assumes that a human has a function qua human being and goes on to plausibly suggest that we discard Aristotle’s strategy of attempting to determine a thing’s function by asking what it alone does better than any other thing, replacing it with a more contemporary way of determining function.

  1. Brown argues that biological accounts of function (a thing’s function is what it was selected to do, or the goal-directed role it plays in a continuing system) fail to pick out a human function and so humans do not have a biological function in the technical sense of the term.
  2. Brown concludes that we should, following Terence Irwin, think of Aristotelian function as work: “the human ergon is what we do, our way of life, the characteristic processes and behaviors we exemplify and in which we engage” (38).

The human ergon is characteristic human activity and the connection between function and virtue is made by preserving Aristotle’s insight that a good instance of a kind is one that actualizes that kind’s ergon well. I had hoped that this chapter, entitled “Natural Teleology”, would explain exactly how teleology is compatible with naturalism, and in such a way as to support an ethic focussed on excellences of character.

Brown writes that nature is whatever the best science of the day tells us it is (2), and this, I would have thought, would support a biological view: from the standpoint of science, humans are designed to replicate their own DNA. But Brown considers and rejects this Darwinian version of the human function, noting that in order to explain normative notions like a good mother or good father, “we need a more robust theoretical structure than a facile ‘Darwinism’ that sees total genetic proliferation as the human function.

But see Chapter 5 below.” (35) In that fifth (and last) chapter, Brown argues that the natural teleonomic end of reproductive success is also our teleological end: “from a naturalistic perspective, reproductive success appears to be the only reasonable natural end.

Thus as teleological ethical naturalists, it is our only choice” (120), which leaves one wondering why the Darwinian account of function didn’t win the day 85 pages sooner. Brown holds that naturalized virtue ethics makes room for both intentional and non-intentional teleology, but his own commitment to teleology is somewhat puzzling.

He concludes that it ought at least to be taken seriously as an explanatory strategy and that it could be supported by a transcendental argument or a “useful fiction” (45). At the end of the chapter on natural teleology it wasn’t clear to me what distinguished teleological from non-teleological views of nature, and Brown’s claim that some philosophers believe neo-Darwinian theory shows that there is teleology in nature while others do not, did not help to clarify.

  • In Chapter Three, “Good Human Beings”, Brown asks what makes human beings morally good human beings? Crucial in Brown’s analysis is the claim that “We evaluate ourselves and one another along the same lines as we do specimens of any species of living thing” (54).
  • The evaluative strategy is: find the species’ function, establish a norm and then apply the norm to individual members of the species.

The logical structure of evaluation is framed by reference to the way of life of a species by which individual members are seen to be good or defective qua thing of their kind; ethical evaluations have this teleological framework. Here Brown adopts four human ends, advanced by Rosalind Hursthouse: the ends of individual survival, the continuation of the species, a thing’s characteristic freedom from pain and characteristic means of enjoyment, and its good functioning in a social group (53).

  1. A particular character trait can be known to be a virtue if it enables a person to realize one or more of these four ends.
  2. Brown’s theoretical support for adopting these characteristic ends is not supplied (he indicates that critical discussion of these issues will occur in Chapter Five, where he claims that the ends must be justified by an ultimate end) and those who do not find it intuitive that the continuation of the species is one such end are left wondering whether non-breeders (gay and straight) will be counted defective on Brown’s version of naturalized virtue ethics.

The is/ought gap looms large for ethical naturalism and in Chapter Four, Brown discusses five standard forms of the problem with a view to showing that the is/ought gap is not insurmountable. The chapter would be stronger if the objections targeted the view Brown ultimately advances.

For example, the discussion of the version of the problem concerned with the motivational difference between values and facts (values are motivational, facts are not) is addressed by simply granting that all moral imperatives are, in a special sense, hypothetical imperatives but adding that they are in a sense unconditional: “Since everyone desires happiness, the moral norms turn out to be hypothetical in form.

However, the norms are not hypothetical in Kant’s sense, because it is not up to you to want happiness or not. By nature we all want happiness.” (98) We want to avoid the misery of getting caught telling lies and so the imperative ‘avoid misery by not telling lies’ constrains us.

When, in the final chapter, we discover that the real end of our nature is successful reproduction and that this end serves as the foundation for all other ends, we are likely to want the motivational problem to be put, paraphrasing Korsgaard, in a slightly different way: “how could the fact of my design as a replicator for DNA give me a moral reason to do anything?” So why does Brown suppose a naturalistic virtue ethic is fated to become an evolutionary ethic? Apparently the need for a unified teleological theory makes it so.

In the fifth and final chapter, Brown asks how the four ends he adopted from Hursthouse in Chapter Three can be plausibly claimed to be human ends. With a manifold of ends the theory will be either vacuous (our ends are whatever we seek) or far too open-ended, Brown claims, so without a unifying final end we will be unable to justify these ends (unlike Hursthouse, he does not believe that educated observation or ethology will inform us of our ends).

Once we see that several of the ends on Hursthouse’s list are proximate ends serving the end of the continuation of the species, or more precisely, the continuation of a genotype or evolved trait, we have the needed unification: “Neo-Darwinism can explain, in principle, why the other supposed ends are our ends: they are our proximate ends because their presence served the ultimate end” (117).

But even if this were true, more is required to show that our ends are justified than that they serve, or are causally related to, a final end. To give him his due, Brown goes on to pose and respond to the hard question: If our natural end isn’t good, why suppose that its supporting ends are good? According to Brown, the goodness resides in its being ours, as our end makes us what we are and do and, as a result, is good.

He writes: 1. Reproductive success is our natural (ultimate) end.2. Our end is rightly called good.3. Therefore, reproductive success is good. (121) Unfortunately, Brown’s commitment to his own argument is not entirely clear. He goes on to remark, truthfully enough, that a naturalist need not be a neo-Darwinian and might even reject naturalized virtue ethics.

He adds that one might reasonably reject neo-Darwinism as having a place in ethics and reject his claim that a theoretically unifying human end is needed. He writes that intentional creatures like us are likely to find a view like Hursthouse’s very sensible, adding that there may even be some truth to it.

  • He concludes: In seeking a natural ground for our moral judgements of others, we have ended with something else than we might have wished for: something natural, but not clearly good, except that it is our natural end.
  • It might be the case that, for morality to do its job, so to speak, it must be held to be objectively grounded – even if it is not.

A transcendent sort of grounding might seem to provide a deeper grounding than one immanent in transitory and contingent human nature. But this is all the naturalist has. (122) This is a somewhat strange note on which to end the book. Many virtue ethicists will reasonably enough balk at the claim that the real human end is what geneticists tell us it is, and will wonder how the human ergon or way of life is to be reconciled with this scientific view of the human end.

Still, in Moral Virtue and Nature, Brown tackles an interesting and important issue and his book is likely to stoke interest in the question of whether, and to what extent, a neo-Darwinian view of human nature can be made compatible with a teleological virtue ethic. Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1999), p.202.

See Christine Korsgaard’s discussion of the normative question as it applies to evolutionary ethics in her The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.15. : Moral Virtue and Nature: A Defense of Ethical Naturalism
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