theories of human nature essay

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Human Nature

Talk of human nature is a common feature of moral and political discourse among people on the street and among philosophers, political scientists and sociologists. This is largely due to the widespread assumption that true descriptive or explanatory claims making use of the concept of human nature have, or would have, considerable normative significance. Some think that human nature excludes the possibility of certain forms of social organisation—for example, that it excludes any broadly egalitarian society. Others make the stronger claim that a true normative ethical theory has to be built on prior knowledge of human nature. Still others believe that there are specific moral prohibitions concerning the alteration of, or interference in, the set of properties that make up human nature. Finally, there are those who argue that the normative significance derives from the fact that merely deploying the concept is typically, or even necessarily, pernicious.

Alongside such varying and frequently conflicting normative uses of the expression “human nature”, there are serious disagreements concerning the concept’s content and explanatory significance—the starkest being whether the expression “human nature” refers to anything at all. Some reasons given for saying there is no human nature are anthropological, grounded in views concerning the relationship between natural and cultural features of human life. Other reasons given are biological, deriving from the character of the human species as, like other species, an essentially historical product of evolution. Whether these reasons justify the claim that there is no human nature depends, at least in part, on what it is exactly that the expression is supposed to be picking out. Many contemporary proposals differ significantly in their answers to this question.

Understanding the debates around the philosophical use of the expression “human nature” requires clarity on the reasons both for (1) adopting specific adequacy conditions for the term’s use and for (2) accepting particular substantial claims made within the framework thus adopted. One obstacle to such clarity is historical: we have inherited from the beginnings of Western philosophy, via its Medieval reception, the idea that talk of human nature brings into play a number of different, but related claims. One such set of claims derives from different meanings of the Greek equivalents of the term “nature”. This bundle of claims, which can be labelled the traditional package , is a set of adequacy conditions for any substantial claim that uses the expression “human nature”. The beginnings of Western philosophy have also handed down to us a number of such substantial claims . Examples are that humans are “rational animals” or “political animals”. We can call these claims the traditional slogans . The traditional package is a set of specifications of how claims along the lines of the traditional slogans are to be understood, i.e., what it means to claim that it is “human nature” to be, for example, a rational animal.

Various developments in Western thought have cast doubt both on the coherence of the traditional package and on the possibility that the adequacy conditions for the individual claims can be fulfilled. Foremost among these developments are the Enlightenment rejection of teleological metaphysics, the Historicist emphasis on the significance of culture for understanding human action and the Darwinian introduction of history into biological kinds. This entry aims to help clarify the adequacy conditions for claims about human nature, the satisfiability of such conditions and the reasons why the truth of claims with the relevant conditions might seem important. It proceeds in five steps. Section 1 unpacks the traditional package, paying particular attention to the importance of Aristotelian themes and to the distinction between the scientific and participant perspectives from which human nature claims can be raised. Section 2 explains why evolutionary biology raises serious problems both for the coherence of this package and for the truth of its individual component claims. Sections 3 and 4 then focus on attempts to secure scientific conceptions of human nature in the face of the challenge from evolutionary biology. The entry concludes with a discussion of accounts of human nature developed from a participant perspective, in particular accounts that, in spite of the evolutionary challenge, are taken to have normative consequences.

1.1 “Humans”

1.2 unpacking the traditional package, 1.3 essentialisms, 1.4 on the status of the traditional slogan, 2.1 the nature of the species taxon, 2.2 the nature of species specimens as species specimens, 2.3 responding to the evolutionary verdict on classificatory essences, 3.1 privileging properties, 3.2 statistical normality or robust causality, 4.1 genetically based psychological adaptations, 4.2 abandoning intrinsicality, 4.3 secondary altriciality as a game-changer, 5.1. human nature from a participant perspective, 5.2.1. sidestepping the darwinian challenge, 5.2.2. human flourishing, 5.3. reason as the unique structural property, other internet resources, related entries, 1. “humans”, slogans and the traditional package.

Before we begin unpacking, it should be noted that the adjective “human” is polysemous, a fact that often goes unnoticed in discussions of human nature, but makes a big difference to both the methodological tractability and truth of claims that employ the expression. The natural assumption may appear to be that we are talking about specimens of the biological species Homo sapiens , that is, organisms belonging to the taxon that split from the rest of the hominin lineage an estimated 150,000 years ago. However, certain claims seem to be best understood as at least potentially referring to organisms belonging to various older species within the subtribe Homo , with whom specimens of Homo sapiens share properties that have often been deemed significant (Sterelny 2018: 114).

On the other hand, the “nature” that is of interest often appears to be that of organisms belonging to a more restricted group. There may have been a significant time lag between the speciation of anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) and the evolution of behaviourally modern humans, i.e., human populations whose life forms involved symbol use, complex tool making, coordinated hunting and increased geographic range. Behavioural modernity’s development is often believed only to have been completed by 50,000 years ago. If, as is sometimes claimed, behavioural modernity requires psychological capacities for planning, abstract thought, innovativeness and symbolism (McBrearty & Brooks 2000: 492) and if these were not yet widely or sufficiently present for several tens of thousands of years after speciation, then it may well be behaviourally, rather than anatomically modern humans whose “nature” is of interest to many theories. Perhaps the restriction might be drawn even tighter to include only contemporary humans, that is, those specimens of the species who, since the introduction of agriculture around 12,000 years ago, evolved the skills and capacities necessary for life in large sedentary, impersonal and hierarchical groups (Kappeler, Fichtel, & van Schaik 2019: 68).

It was, after all, a Greek living less than two and a half millennia ago within such a sedentary, hierarchically organised population structure, who could have had no conception of the prehistory of the beings he called anthrôpoi , whose thoughts on their “nature” have been decisive for the history of philosophical reflection on the subject. It seems highly likely that, without the influence of Aristotle, discussions of “human nature” would not be structured as they are until today.

We can usefully distinguish four types of claim that have been traditionally made using the expression “human nature”. As a result of a particular feature of Aristotle’s philosophy, to which we will come in a moment, these four claims are associated with five different uses of the expression. Uses of the first type seem to have their origin in Plato; uses of the second, third and fourth type are Aristotelian; and, although uses of the fifth type have historically been associated with Aristotle, this association seems to derive from a misreading in the context of the religiously motivated Mediaeval reception of his philosophy.

A first , thin, contrastive use of the expression “human nature” is provided by the application of a thin, generic concept of nature to humans. In this minimal variant, nature is understood in purely contrastive or negative terms. Phusis is contrasted in Plato and Aristotle with technē , where the latter is the product of intention and a corresponding intervention of agency. If the entire cosmos is taken to be the product of divine agency, then, as Plato argued (Nadaf 2005: 1ff.), conceptualisations of the cosmos as natural in this sense are mistaken. Absent divine agency, the types of agents whose intentions are relevant for the status of anything as natural are human agents. Applied to humans, then, this concept of nature picks out human features that are not the results of human intentional action. Thus understood, human nature is the set of human features or processes that remain after subtraction of those picked out by concepts of the non-natural, concepts such as “culture”, “nurture”, or “socialisation”.

A second component in the package supplies the thin concept with substantial content that confers on it explanatory power. According to Aristotle, natural entities are those that contain in themselves the principle of their own production or development, in the way that acorns contain a blueprint for their own realisation as oak trees ( Physics 192b; Metaphysics 1014b). The “nature” of natural entities thus conceptualised is a subset of the features that make up their nature in the first sense. The human specification of this explanatory concept of nature aims to pick out human features that similarly function as blueprints for something like a fully realised form. According to Aristotle, for all animals that blueprint is “the soul”, that is, the integrated functional capacities that characterise the fully developed entity. The blueprint is realised when matter, i.e., the body, has attained the level of organisation required to instantiate the animal’s living functions (Charles 2000: 320ff.; Lennox 2009: 356).

A terminological complication is introduced here by the fact that the fully developed form of an entity is itself also frequently designated as its “nature” (Aristotle, Physics 193b; Politics 1252b). In Aristotle’s teleological metaphysics, this is the entity’s end, “that for the sake of which a thing is” ( Metaphysics 1050a; Charles 2000: 259). Thus, a human’s “nature”, like that of any other being, may be either the features in virtue of which it is disposed to develop to a certain mature form or, thirdly , the form to which it is disposed to develop.

Importantly, the particularly prominent focus on the idea of a fully developed form in Aristotle’s discussions of humans derives from its dual role. It is not only the form to the realisation of which human neonates are disposed; it is also the form that mature members of the species ought to realise ( Politics 1253a). This normative specification is the fourth component of the traditional package. The second, third and fourth uses of “nature” are all in the original package firmly anchored in a teleological metaphysics. One question for systematic claims about human nature is whether any of these components remain plausible if we reject a teleology firmly anchored in theology (Sedley 2010: 5ff.).

A fifth and last component of the package that has traditionally been taken to have been handed down from antiquity is classificatory. Here, the property or set of properties named by the expression “human nature” is that property or property set in virtue of the possession of which particular organisms belong to a particular biological taxon: what we now identify as the species taxon Homo sapiens . This is human nature typologically understood.

This, then, is the traditional package:

The sort of properties that have traditionally been taken to support the classificatory practices relevant to TP5 are intrinsic to the individual organisms in question. Moreover, they have been taken to be able to fulfil this role in virtue of being necessary and sufficient for the organism’s membership of the species, i.e., “essential” in one meaning of the term. This view of species membership, and the associated view of species themselves, has been influentially dubbed “typological thinking” (Mayr 1959 [1976: 27f.]; cf. Mayr 1982: 260) and “essentialism” (Hull 1965: 314ff.; cf. Mayr 1968 [1976: 428f.]). The former characterisation involves an epistemological focus on the classificatory procedure, the latter a metaphysical focus on the properties thus singled out. Ernst Mayr claimed that the classificatory approach originates in Plato’s theory of forms, and, as a result, involves the further assumption that the properties are unchanging. According to David Hull, its root cause is the attempt to fit the ontology of species taxa to an Aristotelian theory of definition.

The theory of definition developed in Aristotle’s logical works assigns entities to a genus and distinguishes them from other members of the genus, i.e., from other “species”, by their differentiae ( Topics 103b). The procedure is descended from the “method of division” of Plato, who provides a crude example as applied to humans, when he has the Eleatic Stranger in the Statesman characterise them as featherless bipeds (266e). Hull and many scholars in his wake (Dupré 2001: 102f.) have claimed that this simple schema for picking out essential conditions for species membership had a seriously deleterious effect on biological taxonomy until Darwin (cf. Winsor 2006).

However, there is now widespread agreement that Aristotle was no taxonomic essentialist (Balme 1980: 5ff.; Mayr 1982: 150ff.; Balme 1987: 72ff.; Ereshefsky 2001: 20f; Richards 2010: 21ff.; Wilkins 2018: 9ff.). First, the distinction between genus and differentiae was for Aristotle relative to the task at hand, so that a “species” picked out in this manner could then count as the genus for further differentiation. Second, the Latin term “species”, a translation of the Greek eidos , was a logical category with no privileged relationship to biological entities; a prime example in the Topics is the species justice, distinguished within the genus virtue (143a). Third, in a key methodological passage, Parts of Animals , I.2–3 (642b–644b), Aristotle explicitly rejects the method of “dichotomous division”, which assigns entities to a genus and then seeks a single differentia, as inappropriate to the individuation of animal kinds. Instead, he claims, a multiplicity of differentiae should be brought to bear. He emphasises this point in relation to humans (644a).

According to Pierre Pellegrin and David Balme, Aristotle did not seek to establish a taxonomic system in his biological works (Pellegrin 1982 [1986: 113ff.]; Balme 1987, 72). Rather, he simply accepted the everyday common sense partitioning of the animal world (Pellegrin 1982 [1986: 120]; Richards 2010: 24; but cf. Charles 2000: 343ff.). If this is correct, Aristotle didn’t even ask after the conditions for belonging to the species Homo sapiens . So he wasn’t proposing any particular answer, and specifically not the “essentialist” answer advanced by TP5. In as far as such an answer has been employed in biological taxonomy (cf. Winsor 2003), its roots appear to lie in Neoplatonic, Catholic misinterpretations of Aristotle (Richards 2010: 34ff.; Wilkins 2018: 22ff.). Be that as it may, the fifth use of “human nature” transported by tradition—to pick out essential conditions for an organism’s belonging to the species—is of eminent interest. The systematic concern behind Mayr and Hull’s historical claims is that accounts of the form of TP5 are incompatible with evolutionary theory. We shall look at this concern in section 2 of this entry.

Because the term “essentialism” recurs with different meanings in discussions of human nature and because some of the theoretical claims thus summarised are assumed to be Aristotelian in origin, it is worth spending a moment here to register what claims can be singled out by the expression. The first , purely classificatory conception just discussed should be distinguished from a second view that is also frequently labelled “essentialist” and which goes back to Locke’s concept of “real essence” (1689: III, iii, 15). According to essentialism thus understood, an essence is the intrinsic feature or features of an entity that fulfils or fulfil a dual role: firstly, of being that in virtue of which something belongs to a kind and, secondly, of explaining why things of that kind typically have a particular set of observable features. Thus conceived, “essence” has both a classificatory and an explanatory function and is the core of a highly influential, “essentialist” theory of natural kinds, developed in the wake of Kripke’s and Putnam’s theories of reference.

An account of human nature that is essentialist in this sense would take the nature of the human natural kind to be a set of microstructural properties that have two roles: first, they constitute an organism’s membership of the species Homo sapiens . Second, they are causally responsible for the organism manifesting morphological and behavioural properties typical of species members. Paradigms of entities with such natures or essences are chemical elements. An example is the element with the atomic number 79, the microstructural feature that accounts for surface properties of gold such as yellowness. Applied to organisms, it seems that the relevant explanatory relationship will be developmental, the microstructures providing something like a blueprint for the properties of the mature individual. Kripke assumed that some such blueprint is the “internal structure” responsible for the typical development of tigers as striped, carnivorous quadrupeds (Kripke 1972 [1980: 120f.]).

As the first, pseudo-Aristotelian version of essentialism illustrates, the classificatory and explanatory components of what we might call “Kripkean essentialism” can be taken apart. Thus, “human nature” can also be understood in exclusively explanatory terms, viz. as the set of microstructural properties responsible for typical human morphological and behavioural features. In such an account, the ability to pick out the relevant organisms is simply presupposed. As we shall see in section 4 of this entry, accounts of this kind have been popular in the contemporary debate. The subtraction of the classificatory function of the properties in these conceptions has generally seemed to warrant withholding from them the label “essentialist”. However, because some authors have still seen the term as applicable (Dupré 2001: 162), we might think of such accounts as constituting a third , weak or deflationary variant of essentialism.

Such purely explanatory accounts are descendants of the second use of “human nature” in the traditional package, the difference being that they don’t usually presuppose some notion of the fully developed human form. However, where some such presupposition is made, there are stronger grounds for talking of an “essentialist” account. Elliott Sober has argued that the key to essentialism is not classification in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but the postulation of some “privileged state”, to the realisation of which specimens of a species tend, as long as no extrinsic factors “interfere” (Sober 1980: 358ff.). Such a dispositional-teleological conception, dissociated from classificatory ambitions, would be a fourth form of essentialism. Sober rightly associates such an account with Aristotle, citing Aristotle’s claims in his zoological writings that interfering forces are responsible for deviations, i.e., morphological differences, both within and between species. A contemporary account of human nature with this structure will be discussed in section 4 .

A fifth and final form of essentialism is even more clearly Aristotelian. Here, an explicitly normative status is conferred on the set of properties to the development of which human organisms tend. For normative essentialism, “the human essence” or “human nature” is a normative standard for the evaluation of organisms belonging to the species. Where the first, third and fourth uses of the expression have tended to be made with critical intent (for defensive exceptions, see Charles 2000: 348ff.; Walsh 2006; Devitt 2008; Boulter 2012), this fifth use is more often a self-ascription (e.g., Nussbaum 1992). It is intended to emphasise metaethical claims of a specific type. According to such claims, an organism’s belonging to the human species entails or in some way involves the applicability to the organism of moral norms that ground in the value of the fully developed human form. According to one version of this thought, humans ought be, or ought to be enabled to be, rational because rationality is a key feature of the fully developed human form. Such normative-teleological accounts of human nature will be the focus of section 5.2 .

We can summarise the variants of essentialism and their relationship to the components of the traditional package as follows:

Section 2 and section 5 of this entry deal with the purely classificatory and the normative teleological conceptions of human nature respectively, and with the associated types of essentialism. Section 3 discusses attempts to downgrade TP5, moving from essential to merely characteristic properties. Section 4 focuses on accounts of an explanatory human nature, both on attempts to provide a modernized version of the teleological blueprint model ( §4.1 ) and on explanatory conceptions with deflationary intent relative to the claims of TP2 and TP3 ( §4.2 and §4.3 ).

The traditional package specifies a set of conditions some or all of which substantial claims about “human nature” are supposed to meet. Before we turn to the systematic arguments central to contemporary debates on whether such conditions can be met, it will be helpful to spend a moment considering one highly influential substantial claim. Aristotle’s writings prominently contain two such claims that have been handed down in slogan form. The first is that the human being (more accurately: “man”) is an animal that is in some important sense social (“zoon politikon”, History of Animals 487b; Politics 1253a; Nicomachean Ethics 1169b). According to the second, “he” is a rational animal ( Politics 1253a, where Aristotle doesn’t actually use the traditionally ascribed slogan, “zoon logon echon”).

Aristotle makes both claims in very different theoretical contexts, on the one hand, in his zoological writings and, on the other, in his ethical and political works. This fact, together with the fact that Aristotle’s philosophy of nature and his practical philosophy are united by a teleological metaphysics, may make it appear obvious that the slogans are biological claims that provide a foundation for normative claims in ethics and politics. The slogans do indeed function as foundations in the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics respectively (on the latter, see section 5 of this entry). It is, however, unclear whether they are to be understood as biological claims. Let us focus on the slogan that has traditionally dominated discussions of human nature in Western philosophy, that humans are “rational animals”.

First, if Pellegrin and Balme are right that Aristotelian zoology is uninterested in classifying species, then ascribing the capacity for “rationality” cannot have the function of naming a biological trait that distinguishes humans from other animals. This is supported by two further sets of considerations. To begin with, Aristotle’s explicit assertion that a series of differentiae would be needed to “define” humans ( Parts of Animals 644a) is cashed out in the long list of features he takes to be their distinguishing marks, such as speech, having hair on both eyelids, blinking, having hands, upright posture, breasts in front, the largest and moistest brain, fleshy legs and buttocks (Lloyd 1983: 29ff.). Furthermore, there is in Aristotle no capacity for reason that is both exclusive to, and universal among anthropoi . One part or kind of reason, “practical intelligence” ( phronesis ), is, Aristotle claims, found in both humans and other animals, being merely superior in the former ( Parts of Animals , 687a). Now, there are other forms of reasoning of which this is not true, forms whose presence are sufficient for being human: humans are the only animals capable of deliberation ( History of Animals 488b) and reasoning ( to noein ), in as far as this extends to mathematics and first philosophy. Nevertheless, these forms of reasoning are unnecessary: slaves, who Aristotle includes among humans ( Politics 1255a), are said to have no deliberative faculty ( to bouleutikon ) at all ( Politics 1260a; cf. Richter 2011: 42ff.). Presumably, they will also be without the capacities necessary for first philosophy.

Second, these Aristotelian claims raise the question as to whether the ascription of rationality is even intended as an ascription to an individual in as far as she or he belongs to a biological kind. The answer might appear to be obviously affirmative. Aristotle uses the claim that a higher level of reason is characteristic of humans to teleologically explain other morphological features, in particular upright gait and the morphology of the hands ( Parts of Animals 686a, 687a). However, the kind of reason at issue here is practical intelligence, the kind humans and animals share, not the capacity for mathematics and metaphysics, which among animals is exercised exclusively by humans. In as far as humans are able to exercise this latter capacity in contemplation, Aristotle claims that they “partake of the divine” ( Parts of Animals 656a), a claim of which he makes extensive use when grounding his ethics in human rationality ( Nicomachean Ethics 1177b–1178b). When, in a passage to which James Lennox has drawn attention (Lennox 1999), Aristotle declares that the rational part of the soul cannot be the object of natural science ( Parts of Animals 645a), it seems to be the contemplative part of the soul that is thus excluded from biological investigation, precisely the feature that is named in the influential slogan. If it is the “something divine … present in” humans that is decisively distinctive of their kind, it seems unclear whether the relevant kind is biological.

It is not the aim of this entry to decide questions of Aristotle interpretation. What is important is that the relationship of the question of “human nature” to biology is, from the beginning of the concept’s career, not as unequivocal as is often assumed (e.g., Hull 1986: 7; Richards 2010: 217f.). This is particularly true of the slogan according to which humans are rational animals. In the history of philosophy, this slogan has frequently been detached from any attempt to provide criteria for biological classification or characterisation. When Aquinas picks up the slogan, he is concerned to emphasise that human nature involves a material, corporeal aspect. This aspect is, however, not thought of in biological terms. Humans are decisively “rational substances”, i.e., persons. As such they also belong to a kind whose members also number angels and God (three times) (Eberl 2004). Similarly, Kant is primarily, indeed almost exclusively, interested in human beings as examples of “rational nature”, “human nature” being only one way in which rational nature can be instantiated (Kant 1785, 64, 76, 85). For this reason, Kant generally talks of “rational beings”, rather than of “rational animals” (1785, 45, 95).

There is, then, a perspective on humans that is plausibly present in Aristotle, stronger in Aquinas and dominant in Kant and that involves seeing them as instances of a kind other than the “human kind”, i.e., seeing the human animal “as a rational being” (Kant 1785 [1996: 45]). According to this view, the “nature” of humans that is most worthy of philosophical interest is the one they possess not insofar as they are human, but insofar as they are rational. Where this is the relevant use of the concept of human nature, being a specimen of the biological species is unnecessary for possessing the corresponding property. Specimens of other species, as well as non-biological entities may also belong to the relevant kind. It is also insufficient, as not all humans will have the properties necessary for membership in that kind.

As both a biologist and ethicist, Aristotle is at once a detached scientist and a participant in forms of interpersonal and political interaction only available to contemporary humans living in large, sedentary subpopulations. It seems plausible that a participant perspective may have suggested a different take on what it is to be human, perhaps even a different take on the sense in which humans might be rational animals, to that of biological science. We will return to this difference in section 5 of the entry.

2. The Nature of the Evolutionary Unit Homo sapiens and its Specimens

Detailing the features in virtue of which an organism is a specimen of the species Homo sapiens is a purely biological task. Whether such specification is achievable and, if so how, is controversial. It is controversial for the same reasons for which it is controversial what conditions need to be met for an organism to be a specimen of any species. These reasons derive from the theory of evolution.

A first step to understanding these reasons involves noting a further ambiguity in the use of the expression “human nature”, this time an ambiguity specific to taxonomy. The term can be used to pick out a set of properties as an answer to two different questions. The first concerns the properties of some organism which make it the case that it belongs to the species Homo sapiens . The second concerns the properties in virtue of which a population or metapopulation is the species Homo sapiens . Correspondingly, “human nature” can pick out either the properties of organisms that constitute their partaking in the species Homo sapiens or the properties of some higher-level entity that constitute it as that species. Human nature might then either be the nature of the species or the nature of species specimens as specimens of the species.

It is evolution that confers on this distinction its particular form and importance. The variation among organismic traits, without which there would be no evolution, has its decisive effects at the level of populations. These are groups of organisms that in some way cohere at a time in spite of the variation of traits among the component organisms. It is population-level groupings, taxa, not organisms, that evolve and it is taxa, such as species, that provide the organisms that belong to them with genetic resources (Ghiselin 1987: 141). The species Homo sapiens appears to be a metapopulation that coheres at least in part because of the gene flow between its component organisms brought about by interbreeding (cf. Ereshefsky 1991: 96ff.). Hence, according to evolutionary theory, Homo sapiens is plausibly a higher-level entity—a unit of evolution—consisting of the lower-level entities that are individual human beings. The two questions phrased in terms of “human nature” thus concern the conditions for individuation of the population-level entity and the conditions under which organisms are components of that entity.

The theory of evolution transforms the way we should understand the relationship between human organisms and the species to which they belong. The taxonomic assumption of TP5 was that species are individuated by means of intrinsic properties that are individually instantiated by certain organisms. Instantiating those properties is taken to be necessary and sufficient for those organisms to belong to the species. Evolutionary theory makes it clear that species, as population-level entities, cannot be individuated by means of the properties of lower-level constituents, in our case, of individual human organisms (Sober 1980: 355).

The exclusion of this possibility grounds a decisive difference from the way natural kinds are standardly construed in the wake of Locke and Kripke. Recall that, in this Kripkean construal, lumps of matter are instances of chemical kinds because of their satisfaction of intrinsic necessary and sufficient conditions, viz. their atoms possessing a certain number of protons. The same conditions also individuate the chemical kinds themselves. Chemical kinds are thus spatiotemporally unrestricted sets. This means that there are no metaphysical barriers to the chance generation of members of the kind, independently of whether the kind is instantiated at any contiguous time or place. Nitrogen could come to exist by metaphysical happenstance, should an element with the atomic number 14 somehow come into being, even in a world in which up to that point no nitrogen has existed (Hull 1978: 349; 1984: 22).

In contrast, a species can only exist at time \(t_n\) if either it or a parent species existed at \(t_{n-1}\) and there was some relationship of spatial contiguity between component individuals of the species at \(t_n\) and the individuals belonging to either the same species or the parent species at \(t_{n-1}\). This is because of the essential role of the causal relationship of heredity. Heredity generates both the coherence across a population requisite for the existence of a species and the variability of predominant traits within the population, without which a species would not evolve.

For this reason, the species Homo sapiens , like every other species taxon, must meet a historical or genealogical condition. (For pluralistic objections to even this condition, see Kitcher 1984: 320ff.; Dupré 1993: 49f.) This condition is best expressed as a segment of a population-level phylogenetic tree, where such trees represent ancestor-descendent series (Hull 1978: 349; de Queiroz 1999: 50ff.; 2005). Species, as the point is often put, are historical entities, rather than kinds or classes (Hull 1978: 338ff.; 1984: 19). The fact that species are not only temporally, but also spatially restricted has also led to the stronger claim that they are individuals (Ghiselin 1974; 1997: 14ff.; Hull 1978: 338). If this is correct, then organisms are not members, but parts of species taxa. Independently of whether this claim is true for all biological species, Homo sapiens is a good candidate for a species that belongs to the category individual . This is because the species is characterised not only by spatiotemporal continuity, but also by causal processes that account for the coherence between its component parts. These processes plausibly include not only interbreeding, but also conspecific recognition and particular forms of communication (Richards 2010: 158ff., 218).

Importantly, the genealogical condition is only a necessary condition, as genealogy unites all the segments of one lineage. The segment of the phylogenetic tree that represents some species taxon begins with a node that represents a lineage-splitting or speciation event. Determining that node requires attention to general speciation theory, which has proposed various competing criteria (Dupré 1993: 48f.; Okasha 2002: 201; Coyne & Orr 2004). In the case of Homo sapiens , it requires attention to the specifics of the human case, which are also controversial (see Crow 2003; Cela-Conde & Ayala 2017: 11ff.). The end point of the segment is marked either by some further speciation event or, as may seem likely in the case of Homo sapiens , by the destruction of the metapopulation. Only when the temporal boundaries of the segment have become determinate would it be possible to adduce sufficient conditions for the existence of such a historical entity. Hence, if “human nature” is understood to pick out the necessary and sufficient conditions that individuate the species taxon Homo sapiens , its content is not only controversial, but epistemically unavailable to us.

If we take such a view of the individuating conditions for the species Homo sapiens , what are the consequences for the question of which organisms belong to the species? It might appear that it leaves open the possibility that speciation has resulted in some intrinsic property or set of properties establishing the cohesion specific to the taxon and that such properties count as necessary and sufficient for belonging to it (cf. Devitt 2008: 17ff.). This appearance would be deceptive. To begin with, no intrinsic property can be necessary because of the sheer empirical improbability that all species specimens grouped together by the relevant lineage segment instantiate any such candidate property. For example, there are individuals who are missing legs, inner organs or the capacity for language, but who remain biologically human (Hull 1986: 5). Evolutionary theory clarifies why this is so: variability, secured by mechanisms such as mutation and recombination, is the key to evolution, so that, should some qualitative property happen to be universal among all extant species specimens immediately after the completion of speciation, that is no guarantee that it will continue to be so throughout the lifespan of the taxon (Hull 1984: 35; Ereshefsky 2008: 101). The common thought that there must be at least some genetic property common to all human organisms is also false (R. Wilson 1999a: 190; Sterelny & Griffiths 1999: 7; Okasha 2002: 196f.): phenotypical properties that are shared in a population are frequently co-instantiated as a result of the complex interaction of differing gene-regulatory networks. Conversely, the same network can under different circumstances lead to differing phenotypical consequences (Walsh 2006: 437ff.). Even if it should turn out that every human organism instantiated some property, this would be a contingent, rather than a necessary fact (Sober 1980: 354; Hull 1986: 3).

Moreover, the chances of any such universal property also being sufficient are vanishingly small, as the sharing of properties by specimens of other species can result from various mechanisms, in particular from the inheritance of common genes in related species and from parallel evolution. This doesn’t entail that there may be no intrinsic properties that are sufficient belonging to the species. There are fairly good candidates for such properties, if we compare humans with other terrestrial organisms. Language use and a self-understanding as moral agents come to mind. However, whether non-terrestrial entities might possess such properties is an open question. And decisively, they are obviously hopeless as necessary conditions (cf. Samuels 2012: 9).

This leaves only the possibility that the conditions for belonging to the species are, like the individuating conditions for the species taxon, relational. Lineage-based individuation of a taxon depends on its component organisms being spatially and temporally situated in such a way that the causal processes necessary for the inheritance of traits can take place. In the human case, the key processes are those of sexual reproduction. Therefore, being an organism that belongs to the species Homo sapiens is a matter of being connected reproductively to organisms situated unequivocally on the relevant lineage segment. In other words, the key necessary condition is having been sexually reproduced by specimens of the species (Kronfeldner 2018: 100). Hull suggests that the causal condition may be disjunctive, as it could also be fulfilled by a synthetic entity created by scientists that produces offspring with humans who have been generated in the standard manner (Hull 1978: 349). Provided that the species is not in the throes of speciation, such direct descent or integration into the reproductive community, i.e., participation in the “complex network […] of mating and reproduction” (Hull 1986: 4), will also be sufficient.

The lack of a “human essence” in the sense of intrinsic necessary and sufficient conditions for belonging to the species taxon Homo sapiens , has led a number of philosophers to deny that there is any such thing as human nature (Hull 1984: 19; 1986; Ghiselin 1997: 1; de Sousa 2000). As this negative claim concerns properties intrinsic both to relevant organisms and to the taxon, it is equally directed at the “nature” of the organisms as species specimens and at that of the species taxon itself. An alternative consists in retracting the condition that a classificatory essence must be intrinsic, a move which allows talk of a historical or relational essence and a corresponding relational conception of taxonomic human nature (Okasha 2002: 202).

Which of these ways of responding to the challenge from evolutionary theory appears best is likely to depend on how one takes it that the classificatory issues relate to the other matters at stake in the original human nature package. These concern the explanatory and normative questions raised by TP1–TP4. We turn to these in the following three sections of this article.

An exclusively genealogical conception of human nature is clearly not well placed to fulfil an explanatory role comparable to that envisaged in the traditional package. What might have an explanatory function are the properties of the entities from which the taxon or its specimens are descended. Human nature, genealogically understood, might serve as the conduit for explanations in terms of such properties, but will not itself explain anything. After all, integration in a network of sexual reproduction will be partly definitive of the specimens of all sexual species, whilst what is to be explained will vary enormously across taxa.

This lack of fit between classificatory and explanatory roles confronts us with a number of further theoretical possibilities. For example, one might see this incompatibility as strengthening the worries of eliminativists such as Ghiselin and Hull: even if the subtraction of intrinsicality were not on its own sufficient to justify abandoning talk of human nature, its conjunction with a lack of explanatory power, one might think, certainly is (Dupré 2003: 109f.; Lewens 2012: 473). Or one might argue that it is the classificatory ambitions associated with talk of human nature that should be abandoned. Once this is done, one might hope that certain sets of intrinsic properties can be distinguished that figure decisively in explanations and that can still justifiably be labelled “human nature” (Roughley 2011: 15; Godfrey-Smith 2014: 140).

Taking this second line in turn raises two questions: first, in what sense are the properties thus picked out specifically “human”, if they are neither universal among, nor unique to species specimens? Second, in what sense are the properties “natural”? Naturalness as independence from the effects of human intentional action is a key feature of the original package (TP1). Whether some such conception can be coherently applied to humans is a challenge for any non-classificatory account.

3. Characteristic Human Properties

The answer given by TP2 to the first question was in terms of the fully developed human form, where “form” does not refer solely to observable physical or behavioural characteristics, but also includes psychological features. This answer entails two claims: first, that there is one single such “form”, i.e., property or set of properties, that figures in explanations that range across individual human organisms. It also entails that there is a point in human development that counts as “full”, that is, as development’s goal or “telos”. These claims go hand in hand with the assumption that there is a distinction to be drawn between normal and abnormal adult specimens of the species. There is, common sense tells us, a sense in which normal adult humans have two legs, two eyes, one heart and two kidneys at specific locations in the body; they also have various dispositions, for instance, to feel pain and to feel emotions, and a set of capacities, such as for perception and for reasoning. And these, so it seems, may be missing, or under- or overdeveloped in abnormal specimens.

Sober has influentially described accounts that work with such teleological assumptions as adhering to an Aristotelian “Natural State Model” (Sober 1980: 353ff.). Such accounts work with a distinction that has no place in evolutionary biology, according to which variation of properties across populations is the key to evolution. Hence, no particular end states of organisms are privileged as “natural” or “normal” (Hull 1986: 7ff.). So any account that privileges particular morphological, behavioural or psychological human features has to provide good reasons that are both non-evolutionary and yet compatible with the evolutionary account of species. Because of the way that the notion of the normal is frequently employed to exclude and oppress, those reasons should be particularly good (Silvers 1998; Dupré 2003: 119ff.; Richter 2011: 43ff.; Kronfeldner 2018: 15ff.).

The kinds of reasons that may be advanced could either be internal to, or independent of the biological sciences. If the former, then various theoretical options may seem viable. The first grounds in the claim that, although species are not natural kinds and are thus unsuited to figuring in laws of nature (Hull 1987: 171), they do support descriptions with a significant degree of generality, some of which may be important (Hull 1984: 19). A theory of human nature developed on this basis should explain the kind of importance on the basis of which particular properties are emphasised. The second theoretical option is pluralism about the metaphysics of species: in spite of the fairly broad consensus that species are defined as units of evolution, the pluralist can deny the primacy of evolutionary dynamics, arguing that other epistemic aims allow the ecologist, the systematist or the ethologist to work with an equally legitimate concept of species that is not, or not exclusively genealogical (cf. Hull 1984: 36; Kitcher 1986: 320ff.; Hull 1987: 178–81; Dupré 1993: 43f.). The third option involves a relaxation of the concept of natural kinds, such that it no longer entails the instantiation of intrinsic, necessary, sufficient and spatiotemporally unrestricted properties, but is nevertheless able to support causal explanations. Such accounts aim to reunite taxonomic and explanatory criteria, thus allowing species taxa to count as natural kinds after all (Boyd 1999a; R. Wilson, Barker, & Brigandt 2007: 196ff.). Where, finally , the reasons advanced for privileging certain properties are independent of biology, these tend to concern features of humans’—“our”—self-understanding as participants in, rather than observers of, a particular form of life. These are likely to be connected to normative considerations. Here again, it seems that a special explanation will be required for why these privileged properties should be grouped under the rubric “human nature”.

The accounts to be described in the next subsection (3.2) of this entry are examples of the first strategy. Section 4 includes discussion of the relaxed natural kinds strategy. Section 5 focuses on accounts of human nature developed from a participant perspective and also notes the support that the pluralist metaphysical strategy might be taken to provide.

Begin, then, with the idea that to provide an account of “human nature” is to circumscribe a set of generalisations concerning humans. An approach of this sort sees the properties thus itemised as specifically “human” in as far as they are common among species specimens. So the privilege accorded to these properties is purely statistical and “normal” means statistically normal. Note that taking the set of statistically normal properties of humans as a non-teleological replacement for the fully developed human form retains from the original package the possibility of labelling as “human nature” either those properties themselves (TP3) or their developmental cause (TP2). Either approach avoids the classificatory worries dealt with in section 2 : it presupposes that those organisms whose properties are relevant are already distinguished as such specimens. What is to be explained is, then, the ways humans generally, though not universally, are. And among these ways are ways they may share with most specimens of some other species, in particular those that belong to the same order (primates) and the same class (mammals).

One should be clear what follows from this interpretation of “human”. The organisms among whom statistical frequency is sought range over those generated after speciation around 150,000 years ago to those that will exist immediately prior to the species’ extinction. On the one hand, because of the variability intrinsic to species, we are in the dark as to the properties that may or may not characterise those organisms that will turn out to be the last of the taxon. On the other hand, the time lag of around 100,000 years between the first anatomically modern humans and the general onset of behavioural modernity around the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic means that there are likely to be many widespread psychological properties of contemporary humans that were not possessed by the majority of the species’ specimens during two thirds of the species’ history. This is true even if the practices seen as the signatures of behavioural modernity (see §1.1 ) developed sporadically, disappeared and reappeared at far removed points of time and space over tens of thousands of years before 50,000 ka (McBrearty & Brooks 2000; Sterelny 2011).

According to several authors (Machery 2008; 2018; Samuels 2012; Ramsey 2013), the expression “human nature” should be used to group properties that are the focus of much current behavioural, psychological and social science. However, as the cognitive and psychological sciences are generally interested in present-day humans, there is a mismatch between scientific focus and a grouping criterion that takes in all the properties generally or typically instantiated by specimens of the entire taxon. For this reason, the expression “human nature” is likely to refer to properties of an even more temporally restricted set of organisms belonging to the species. That restriction can be thought of in indexical terms, i.e., as a restriction to contemporary humans. However, some authors claim explicitly that their accounts entail that human nature can change (Ramsey 2013: 992; Machery 2018: 20). Human nature would then be the object of temporally indexed investigations, as is, for example, the weight of individual humans in everyday contexts. (Without temporal specification, there is no determinate answer to a question such as “How much did David Hume weigh?”) An example of Machery’s is dark skin colour. This characteristic, he claims, ceased to be a feature of human nature thus understood 7,000 years ago, if that was when skin pigmentation became polymorphic. The example indicates that the temporal range may be extremely narrow from an evolutionary point of view.

Such accounts are both compatible with evolutionary theory and coherent. However, in as far as they are mere summary or list conceptions, it is unclear what their epistemic value might be. They will tend to accord with everyday common sense, for which “human nature” may in a fairly low-key sense simply be the properties that (contemporary) humans generally tend to manifest (Roughley 2011: 16). They will also conform to one level of the expression’s use in Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), which, in an attempt to provide a human “mental geography” (1748 [1970: 13]), lists a whole series of features, such as prejudice (1739–40, I,iii,13), selfishness (III,ii,5), a tendency to temporal discounting (III,ii,7) and an addiction to general rules (III,ii,9).

Accounts of this kind have been seen as similar in content to field guides for other animals (Machery 2008: 323; Godfrey-Smith 2014: 139). As Hull points out, within a restricted ecological context and a short period of evolutionary time, the ascription of readily observable morphological or behavioural characteristics to species specimens is a straightforward and unproblematic enterprise (Hull 1987: 175). However, the analogy is fairly unhelpful, as the primary function of assertions in field guides is to provide a heuristics for amateur classification. In contrast, a list conception of the statistically normal properties of contemporary humans presupposes identification of the organisms in question as humans. Moreover, such accounts certainly do not entail easy epistemic access to the properties in question, which may only be experimentally discovered. Nevertheless, there remains something correct about the analogy, as such accounts are a collection of assertions linked only by the fact that they are about the same group of organisms (Sterelny 2018: 123).

More sophisticated nature documentaries may summarise causal features of the lives of animals belonging to specific species. An analogous conception of human nature has also been proposed, according to which human nature is a set of pervasive and robust causal nexuses amongst humans. The list that picks out this set would specify causal connections between antecedent properties, such as having been exposed to benzene or subject to abuse as a child, and consequent properties, such as developing cancer or being aggressive towards one’s own children (Ramsey 2013: 988ff.). Human nature thus understood would have an explanatory component, a component internal to each item on the list. Human nature itself would, however, not be explanatory, but rather the label for a list of highly diverse causal connections.

An alternative way to integrate an explanatory component in a statistical normality account involves picking out that set of statistically common properties that have a purely evolutionary explanation (Machery 2008; 2018). This reinterpretation of the concept of naturalness that featured in the original package (TP1) involves a contrast with social learning. Processes grouped together under this latter description are taken to be alternative explanations to those provided by evolution. However, learning plays a central role, not only in the development of individual humans, but also in the iterated interaction of entire populations with environments structured and restructured through such interaction (Stotz 2010: 488ff.; Sterelny 2012: 23ff.). Hence, the proposal raises serious epistemic questions as to how the distinction is precisely to be drawn and operationalised. (For discussion, see Prinz 2012; Lewens 2012: 464ff.; Ramsey 2013: 985; Machery 2018: 15ff.; Sterelny 2018: 116; Kronfeldner 2018: 147ff.).

4. Explanatory Human Properties

The replacement of the concept of a fully developed form with a statistical notion yields a deflationary account of human nature with, at most, restricted explanatory import. The correlative, explanatory notion in the original package, that of the fully developed form’s blueprint (TP2), has to some authors seemed worth reframing in terms made possible by advances in modern biology, particularly in genetics.

Clearly, there must be explanations of why humans generally walk on two legs, speak and plan many of their actions in advance. Genealogical, or what have been called “ultimate” (Mayr) or “historical” (Kitcher) explanations can advert to the accumulation of coherence among entrenched, stable properties along a lineage. These may well have resulted from selection pressures shared by the relevant organisms (cf. Wimsatt 2003; Lewens 2009). The fact that there are exceptions to any generalisations concerning contemporary humans does not entail that there is no need for explanations of such exception-allowing generalisations. Plausibly, these general, though not universal truths will have “structural explanations”, that is, explanations in terms of underlying structures or mechanisms (Kitcher 1986: 320; Devitt 2008: 353). These structures, so seems, might to a significant degree be inscribed in humans’ DNA.

The precise details of rapidly developing empirical science will improve our understanding of the extent to which there is a determinate relationship between contemporary humans’ genome and their physical, psychological and behavioural properties. There is, however, little plausibility that the blueprint metaphor might be applicable to the way DNA is transcribed, translated and interacts with its cellular environment. Such interaction is itself subject to influence by the organism’s external environment, including its social environment (Dupré 2001: 29ff.; 2003: 111ff.; Griffiths 2011: 326; Prinz 2012: 17ff.; Griffiths & Tabery 2013: 71ff.; Griffiths & Stotz 2013: 98ff., 143ff.). For example, the feature of contemporary human life for which there must according to Aristotle be some kind of blueprint, viz. rational agency, is, as Sterelny has argued, so strongly dependent on social scaffolding that any claim to the effect that human rationality is somehow genetically programmed ignores the causal contributions of manifestly indispensable environmental factors (Sterelny 2018: 120).

Nevertheless, humans do generally develop a specific set of physiological features, such as two lungs, one stomach, one pancreas and two eyes. Moreover, having such a bodily architecture is, according to the evidence from genetics, to a significant extent the result of developmental programmes that ground in gene regulatory networks (GRNs). These are stretches of non-coding DNA that regulate gene transcription. GRNs are modular, more or less strongly entrenched structures. The most highly conserved of these tend to be the phylogenetically most archaic (Carroll 2000; Walsh 2006: 436ff.; Willmore 2012: 227ff.). The GRNs responsible for basic physiological features may be taken, in a fairly innocuous sense, to belong to an evolved human nature.

Importantly, purely morphological features have generally not been the explananda of accounts that have gone under the rubric “human nature”. What has frequently motivated explanatory accounts thus labelled is the search for underlying structures responsible for generally shared psychological features. “Evolutionary Psychologists” have built a research programme around the claim that humans share a psychological architecture that parallels that of their physiology. This, they believe, consists of a structured set of psychological “organs” or modules (Tooby & Cosmides 1990: 29f.; 1992: 38, 113). This architecture is, they claim, in turn the product of developmental programmes inscribed in humans’ DNA (1992: 45). Such generally distributed developmental programmes they label “human nature” (1990: 23).

This conception raises the question of how analogous the characteristic physical and psychological “architectures” are. For one thing, the physical properties that tend to appear in such lists are far more coarse-grained than the candidates for shared psychological properties (D. Wilson 1994: 224ff.): the claim is not just that humans tend to have perceptual, desiderative, doxastic and emotional capacities, but that the mental states that realise these capacities tend to have contents of specific types. Perhaps an architecture of the former kind—of a formal psychology—is a plausible, if relatively unexciting candidate for the mental side of what an evolved human nature should explain. Either way, any such conception needs to adduce criteria for the individuation of such “mental organs” (D. Wilson 1994: 233). Relatedly, if the most strongly entrenched developmental programmes are the most archaic, it follows that, although these will be species-typical, they will not be species-specific. Programmes for the development of body parts have been identified for higher taxa, rather than for species.

A further issue that dogs any such attempts to explicate the “human” dimension of human nature in terms of developmental programmes inscribed in human DNA concerns Evolutionary Psychologists’ assertion that the programmes are the same in every specimen of the species. This assertion goes hand in hand with the claim that what is explained by such programmes is a deep psychological structure that is common to almost all humans and underlies the surface diversity of behavioural and psychological phenomena (Tooby & Cosmides 1990: 23f.). For Evolutionary Psychologists, the (near-)universality of both developmental programmes and deep psychological structure has an ultimate explanation in evolutionary processes that mark their products as natural in the sense of TP1. Both, they claim, are adaptations. These are features that were selected for because their possession in the past conferred a fitness advantage on their possessors. Evolutionary Psychologists conceive that advantage as conferred by the fulfilment of some specific function. They summarise selection for that function as “design”, which they take to have operated equally on all species specimens since the Pleistocene. This move reintroduces the teleological idea of a fully developed form beyond mere statistical normality (TP3).

This move has been extensively criticised. First, selection pressures operate at the level of groups and hence need not lead to the same structures in all a group’s members (D. Wilson 1994: 227ff.; Griffiths 2011: 325; Sterelny 2018: 120). Second, other evolutionary mechanisms than natural selection might be explanatorily decisive. Genetic drift or mutation and recombination might, for example, also confer “naturalness” in the sense of evolutionary genesis (Buller 2000: 436). Third, as we have every reason to assume that the evolution of human psychology is ongoing, evolutionary biology provides little support for the claim that particular programmes and associated traits evolved to fixity in the Pleistocene (Buller 2000: 477ff.; Downes 2010).

Perhaps, however, there might turn out to be gene control networks that do generally structure certain features of the psychological development of contemporary humans (Walsh 2006: 440ff.). The quest for such GNRs can, then, count as the search for an explanatory nature of contemporary humans, where the explanatory function thus sought is divorced from any classificatory role.

There has, however, been a move in general philosophy of science that, if acceptable, would transform the relationship between the taxonomic and explanatory features of species. This move was influentially initiated by Richard Boyd (1999a). It begins with the claim that the attempt to define natural kinds in terms of spatiotemporally unrestricted, intrinsic, necessary and sufficient conditions is a hangover from empiricism that should be abandoned by realist metaphysics. Instead, natural kinds should be understood as kinds that support induction and explanation, where generalisations at work in such processes need not be exceptionless. Thus understood, essences of natural kinds, i.e., their “natures”, need be neither intrinsic nor be possessed by all and only members of the kinds. Instead, essences consist of property clusters integrated by stabilising mechanisms (“homeostatic property clusters”, HPCs). These are networks of causal relations such that the presence of certain properties tends to generate or uphold others and the workings of underlying mechanisms contribute to the same effect. Boyd names storms, galaxies and capitalism as plausible examples (Boyd 1999b: 82ff.). However, he takes species to be the paradigmatic HPC kinds. According to this view, the genealogical character of a species’ nature does not undermine its causal role. Rather, it helps to explain the specific way in which the properties cohere that make up the taxon’s essence. Moreover, these can include extrinsic properties, for example, properties of constructed niches (Boyd 1991: 142, 1999a: 164ff.; Griffiths 1999: 219ff.; R. Wilson et al. 2007: 202ff.).

Whether such an account can indeed adequately explain taxonomic practice for species taxa is a question that can be left open here (see Ereshefsky & Matthen 2005: 16ff.). By its own lights the account does not identify conditions for belonging to a species such as Homo sapiens (Samuels 2012: 25f.). Whether it enables the identification of factors that play the explanatory roles that the term “human nature” might be supposed to pick out is perhaps the most interesting question. Two ways in which an account of human nature might be developed from such a starting point have been sketched.

According to Richard Samuels’ proposal, human nature should be understood as the empirically discoverable proximal mechanisms responsible for psychological development and for the manifestation of psychological capacities. These will include physiological mechanisms, such as the development of the neural tube, as well as environmentally scaffolded learning procedures; they will also include the various modular systems distinguished by cognitive science, such as visual processing and memory systems (Samuels 2012: 22ff.). Like mere list conceptions (cf. §3.2 ), such an account has a precedent in Hume, for whom human nature also includes causal “principles” that structure operations of the human mind (1739–40, Intro.), for example, the mechanisms of sympathy (III,iii,1; II,ii,6). Hume, however, thought of the relevant causal principles as intrinsic.

A second proposal, advanced by Paul Griffiths and Karola Stotz, explicitly suggests taking explanandum and explanans to be picked out by different uses of the expression "human nature". In both cases, the “nature” in question is that of the taxon, not of individual organisms. The former use simply refers to “what human beings are like”, where “human beings” means all species specimens. Importantly, this characterisation does not aim at shared characteristics, but is open for polymorphisms both across a population and across life stages of individual organisms. The causal conception of human nature, what explains this spectrum of similarity and difference in life histories, is equated by Griffiths and Stotz with the organism-environment system that supports human development. It thus includes all the genetic, epigenetic and environmental resources responsible for varying human life cycles (Griffiths 2011: 319; Stotz & Griffiths 2018, 66f.). It follows that explanatory human nature at one point in time can be radically different from human nature at some other point in time.

Griffiths and Stotz are clear that this account diverges significantly from traditional accounts, as it rejects assumptions that human development has a goal, that human nature is possessed by all and only specimens of the species and that it consists of intrinsic properties. They see these assumptions as features of the folk biology of human nature that is as scientifically relevant as are folk conceptions of heat for its scientific understanding (Stotz 2010: 488; Griffiths 2011: 319ff.; Stotz & Griffiths 2018: 60ff.). This raises the question as to whether such a developmental systems account should not simply advocate abandoning the term, as is suggested by Sterelny (2018) on the basis of closely related considerations. A reason for not doing so might lie in the fact that, as talk of “human nature” is often practised with normative intent or at least with normative consequences (Stotz & Griffiths 2018: 71f.), use of the term to pick out the real, complex explanatory factors at work might help to counter those normative uses that employ false, folk biological assumptions.

Explanatory accounts that emphasise developmental plasticity in the products of human DNA, in the neural architecture of the brain and in the human mind tend to reject the assumption that explanations of what humans are like should focus on intrinsic features. It should, however, be noted that such accounts can be interpreted as assigning the feature of heightened plasticity the key role in such explanations (cf. Montagu 1956: 79). Accounts that make plasticity causally central also raise the question as to whether there are not biological features that in turn explain it and should therefore be assigned a more central status in a theory of explanatory human nature.

A prime candidate for this role is what the zoologist Adolf Portmann labelled human “secondary altriciality”, a unique constellation of features of the human neonate relative to other primates: human neonates are, in their helplessness and possession of a relatively undeveloped brain, neurologically and behaviourally altricial, that is, in need of care. However they are also born with open and fully functioning sense organs, otherwise a mark of precocial species, in which neonates are able to fend for themselves (Portmann 1951: 44ff.). The facts that the human neonate brain is less than 30% of the size of the adult brain and that brain development after birth continues at the fetal rate for the first year (Walker & Ruff 1993, 227) led the anthropologist Ashley Montagu to talk of “exterogestation” (Montagu 1961: 156). With these features in mind, Portmann characterised the care structures required by prolonged infant helplessness as the “social uterus” (Portmann 1967: 330). Finally, the fact that the rapid development of the infant brain takes place during a time in which the infant’s sense organs are open and functioning places an adaptive premium on learning that is unparalleled among organisms (Gould 1977: 401; cf. Stotz & Griffiths 2018: 70).

Of course, these features are themselves contingent products of evolution that could be outlived by the species. Gould sees them as components of a general retardation of development that has characterised human evolution (Gould 1977: 365ff.), where “human” should be seen as referring to the clade—all the descendants of a common ancestor—rather than to the species. Anthropologists estimate that secondary altriciality characterised the lineage as from Homo erectus 1.5 million years ago (Rosenberg & Trevathan 1995: 167). We are, then, dealing with a set of deeply entrenched features, features that were in place long before behavioural modernity.

It is conceivable that the advent of secondary altriciality was a key transformation in generating the radical plasticity of human development beginning with early hominins. However, as Sterelny points out, there are serious difficulties with isolating any particular game changer. Secondary altriciality, or the plasticity that may in part be explained by it, would thus seem to fall victim to the same verdict as the game changers named by the traditional human nature slogans. However, maybe it is more plausible to think in terms of a matrix of traits: perhaps a game-changing constellation of properties present in the population after the split from pan can be shown to have generated forms of niche construction that fed back into and modified the original traits. These modifications may in turn have had further psychological and behavioural consequences in steps that plausibly brought selective advantages (Sterelny 2018: 115).

5. Human Nature, the Participant Perspective and Morality

In such a culture-mind coevolutionary account, there may be a place for the referents of some of the traditional philosophical slogans intended to pin down “the human essence“ or “human nature”—reason, linguistic capacity ( “ the speaking animal”, Herder 1772 [2008: 97]), a more general symbolic capacity ( animal symbolicum , Cassirer 1944: 44), freedom of the will (Pico della Mirandola 1486 [1965: 5]; Sartre 1946 [2007: 29, 47]), a specific, “political” form of sociality, or a unique type of moral motivation (Hutcheson 1730: §15). These are likely, at best, to be the (still evolving) products in contemporary humans of processes set in motion by a trait constellation that includes proto-versions of (some of) these capacities. Such a view may also be compatible with an account of “what contemporary humans are like” that abstracts from the evolutionary time scale of eons and focuses instead on the present (cf. Dupré 1993: 43), whilst neither merely cataloguing widely distributed traits ( §3.2 ) nor attempting explanations in terms of the human genome ( §4.1 ). The traditional slogans appear to be attempts to summarise some such accounts. It seems clear, though, that their aims are significantly different from those of the biologically, or otherwise scientifically orientated positions thus far surveyed.

Two features of such accounts are worth emphasising, both of which we already encountered in Aristotle’s contribution to the original package. The first involves a shift in perspective from that of the scientific observer to that of a participant in a contemporary human life form. Whereas the human—or non-human—biologist may ask what modern humans are like, just as they may ask what bonobos are like, the question that traditional philosophical accounts of human nature are plausibly attempting to answer is what it is like to live one’s life as a contemporary human. This question is likely to provoke the counter-question as to whether there is anything that it is like to live simply as a contemporary human, rather than as a human-in-a-specific-historical-and-cultural context (Habermas 1958: 32; Geertz 1973: 52f.; Dupré 2003: 110f.). For the traditional sloganeers, the answer is clearly affirmative. The second feature of such accounts is that they tend to take it that reference to the capacities named in the traditional slogans is in some sense normatively , in particular, ethically significant .

The first claim of such accounts, then, is that there is some property of contemporary humans that is in some way descriptively or causally central to participating in their form of life. The second is that such participation involves subjection to normative standards rooted in the possession of some such property. Importantly, there is a step from the first to the second form of significance, and justification of the step requires argument. Even from a participant perspective, there is no automatic move from explanatory to normative significance.

According to an “internal”, participant account of human nature, certain capacities of contemporary, perhaps modern humans unavoidably structure the way they (we) live their (our) lives. Talk of “structuring” refers to three kinds of contributions to the matrix of capacities and dispositions that both enable and constrain the ways humans live their lives. These are contributions, first, to the specific shape other features of humans lives have and, second, to the way other such features hang together (Midgley 2000: 56ff.; Roughley 2011: 16ff.). Relatedly, they also make possible a whole new set of practices. All three relations are explanatory, although their explanatory role appears not necessarily to correspond to the role corresponding features, or earlier versions of the features, might have played in the evolutionary genealogy of contemporary human psychology. Having linguistic capacities is a prime candidate for the role of such a structural property: human perception, emotion, action planning and thought are all plausibly transformed in linguistic creatures, as are the connections between perception and belief, and the myriad relationships between thought and behaviour, connections exploited and deepened in a rich set of practices unavailable to non-linguistic animals. Similar things could be claimed for other properties named by the traditional slogans.

In contrast to the ways in which such capacities have frequently been referred to in the slogan mode, particularly to the pathos that has tended to accompany it, it seems highly implausible that any one such property will stand alone as structurally significant. It is more likely that we should be picking out a constellation of properties, a constellation that may well include properties variants of which are possessed by other animals. Other properties, including capacities that may be specific to contemporary humans, such as humour, may be less plausible candidates for a structural role.

Note that the fact that such accounts aim to answer a question asked from the participant perspective does not rule out that the features in question may be illuminated in their role for human self-understanding by data from empirical science. On the contrary, it seems highly likely that disciplines such as developmental and comparative psychology, and neuroscience will contribute significantly to an understanding of the possibilities and constraints inherent in the relevant capacities and in the way they interact.

5.2. Human Nature and the Human ergon

The paradigmatic strategy for deriving ethical consequences from claims about structural features of the human life form is the Platonic and Aristotelian ergon or function argument. The first premise of Aristotle’s version ( Nicomachean Ethics 1097b–1098a) connects function and goodness: if the characteristic function of an entity of a type X is to φ, then a good entity of type X is one that φs well. Aristotle confers plausibility on the claim by using examples such as social roles and bodily organs. If the function of an eye as an exemplar of its kind is to enable seeing, then a good eye is one that enables its bearer to see well. The second premise of the argument is a claim we encountered in section 1.4 of this entry, a claim we can now see as predicating a structural property of human life, the exercise of reason. According to this claim, the function or end of individual humans as humans is, depending on interpretation (Nussbaum 1995: 113ff.), either the exercise of reason or life according to reason. If this is correct, it follows that a good human being is one whose life centrally involves the exercise of, or life in accordance with, reason.

In the light of the discussion so far, it ought to be clear that, as it stands, the second premise of this argument is incompatible with the evolutionary biology of species. It asserts that the exercise of reason is not only the key structural property of human life, but also the realization of the fully developed human form. No sense can be made of this latter notion in evolutionary terms. Nevertheless, a series of prominent contemporary ethicists—Alasdair MacIntyre (1999), Rosalind Hursthouse (1999), Philippa Foot (2001) and Martha Nussbaum (2006)—have all made variants of the ergon argument central to their ethical theories. As each of these authors advance some version of the second premise, it is instructive to examine the ways in which they aim to avoid the challenge from evolutionary biology.

Before doing so, it is first worth noting that any ethical theory or theory of value is engaged in an enterprise that has no clear place in an evolutionary analysis. If we want to know what goodness is or what “good” means, evolutionary theory is not the obvious place to look. This is particularly clear in view of the fact that evolutionary theory operates at the level of populations (Sober 1980: 370; Walsh 2006: 434), whereas ethical theory operates, at least primarily, at the level of individual agents. However, the specific conflict between evolutionary biology and neo-Aristotelian ethics results from the latter’s constructive use of the concept of species and, in particular, of a teleological conception of a fully developed form of individual members of the species “ qua members of [the] species” (MacIntyre 1999: 64, 71; cf. Thompson 2008: 29; Foot 2001: 27). The characterisation of achieving that form as fulfilling a “function”, which helps the analogy with bodily organs and social roles, is frequently replaced in contemporary discussions by talk of “flourishing” (Aristotle’s eudaimonia ). Such talk more naturally suggests comparisons with the lives of other organisms (although Aristotle himself excludes other animals from eudaimonia ; cf. Nicomachean Ethics 1009b). The concept of flourishing in turn picks out biological—etymologically: botanical—processes, but again not of a sort that play a role in evolutionary theory. It also seems primarily predicated of individual organisms. It may play a role in ecology; it is, however, most clearly at home in practical applications of biological knowledge, as in horticulture. In this respect, it is comparable to the concept of health.

Neo-Aristotelians claim that to describe an organism, whether a plant or a non-human or human animal, as flourishing is to measure it against a standard that is specific to the species to which it belongs. To do so is to evaluate it as a more or less good “specimen of its species (or sub-species)” (Hursthouse 1999: 198). The key move is then to claim that moral evaluation is, “quite seriously” (Foot 2001: 16), evaluation of the same sort: just as a non-defective animal or plant exemplifies flourishing within the relevant species’ life form, someone who is morally good is someone who exemplifies human flourishing, i.e., the fully developed form of the species. This metaethical claim has provoked the worry as to whether such attributions to other organisms are really anything more than classifications, or at most evaluations of “stretched and deflated” kinds that are missing the key feature of authority that we require for genuine normativity (Lenman 2005: 46ff.).

Independently of questions concerning their theory of value, ethical Neo-Aristotelians need to respond to the question of how reference to a fully developed form of the species can survive the challenge from evolutionary theory. Three kinds of response may appear promising.

The first adverts to the plurality of forms of biological science, claiming that there are life sciences, such as physiology, botany, zoology and ethology in the context of which such evaluations have a place (Hursthouse 1999: 202; 2012: 172; MacIntyre 1999: 65). And if ethology can legitimately attribute not only characteristic features, but also defects or flourishing to species members, in spite of species not being natural kinds, then there is little reason why ethics shouldn’t do so too. This strategy might ground in one of the moves sketched in section 3.1 of this entry. It might be argued, with Kitcher and Dupré, that such attributions are legitimate in other branches of biological science because there is a plurality of species concepts, indeed of kinds of species, where these are relative to epistemic interests. Or the claim might simply rest on a difference in what is taken to be the relevant time frame, where temporal relevance is indexed relative to the present. In ethics we are, it might be claimed, interested in humans as they are “at the moment and for a few millennia back and for maybe not much longer in the future” (Hursthouse 2012: 171).

This move amounts to the concession that talk of “the human species” is not to be understood literally. Whether this concession undermines the ethical theories that use the term is perhaps unclear. It leaves open the possibility that, as human nature may change significantly, there may be significant changes in what it means for humans to flourish and therefore in what is ethically required. This might be seen as a virtue, rather than a vice of the view.

A second response to the challenge from evolutionary biology aims to draw metaphysical consequences from epistemic or semantic claims. Michael Thompson has argued that what he calls alternatively “the human life form” and “the human species” is an a priori category. Thompson substantiates this claim by examining forms of discourse touched on in section 3.2 , forms of discourse that are generally taken to be of mere heuristic importance for amateur practices of identification, viz. field guides or animal documentaries. Statements such as “The domestic cat has four legs, two eyes, two ears and guts in its belly”, are, Thompson claims, instances of an important kind of predication that is neither tensed nor quantifiable. He calls these “natural historical descriptions” or “Aristotelian categoricals” (Thompson 2008: 64ff.). Such generic claims are not, he argues, made false where what is predicated is less than universal, or even statistically rare. Decisively, according to Thompson, our access to the notion of the human life form is non-empirical. It is, he claims, a presupposition of understanding ourselves from the first-person perspective as breathing, eating or feeling pain (Thompson 2004: 66ff.). Thus understood, the concept is independent of biology and therefore, if coherent, immune to problems raised by the Darwinian challenge.

Like Foot and Hursthouse, Thompson thinks that his Aristotelian categoricals allow inferences to specific judgments that members of species are defective (Thompson 2004: 54ff.; 2008: 80). He admits that such judgments in the case of the human life form are likely to be fraught with difficulties, but nevertheless believes that judgments of (non-)defective realization of a life form are the model for ethical evaluation (Thompson 2004: 30, 81f.). It may seem unclear how this might be the case in view of the fact that access to the human life form is supposed to be given as a presupposition of using the concept of “I”. Another worry is that the everyday understanding on which Thompson draws may be nothing other than a branch of folk biology. The folk tendency to ascribe teleological essences to species, as to “races” and genders, is no indication of the reality of such essences (Lewens 2012: 469f.; Stotz & Griffiths 2018: 60ff.; cf. Pellegrin 1982 [1986: 16ff., 120] and Charles 2000: 343ff., 368, on Aristotle’s own orientation to the usage of “the people”).

A final response to evolutionary biologists’ worries aims equally to distinguish the Neo-Aristotelian account of human nature from that of the sciences. However, it does so not by introducing a special metaphysics of “life forms”, but by explicitly constructing an ethical concept of human nature. Martha Nussbaum argues that the notion of human nature in play in what she calls “Aristotelian essentialism” is, as she puts it, “internal and evaluative”. It is a hermeneutic product of “human” self-understanding, constructed from within our best ethical outlook: “an ethical theory of human nature”, she claims,

should force us to answer for ourselves, on the basis of our very own ethical judgment, the question which beings are fully human ones. (Nussbaum 1995: 121f.; cf. Nussbaum 1992: 212ff.; 2006: 181ff.; McDowell 1980 [1998: 18ff.]; Hursthouse 1999: 229; 2012: 174f.)

There can be no question here of moving from a biological “is” to an ethical “ought”; rather, which features are taken to belong to human nature is itself seen as the result of ethical deliberation. Such a conception maintains the claim that the key ethical standard is that of human flourishing. However, it is clear that what counts as flourishing can only be specified on the basis of ethical deliberation, understood as striving for reflective equilibrium (Nussbaum 2006: 352ff.). In view of such a methodological proposal, there is a serious question as to what work is precisely done by the concept of human nature.

Neo-Aristotelians vary in the extent to which they flesh out a conception of species-specific flourishing. Nussbaum draws up a comprehensive, open-ended catalogue of what she calls “the central human capacities”. These are in part picked out because of their vulnerability to undermining or support by political measures. They include both basic bodily needs and more specifically human capacities, such as for humour, play, autonomy and practical reason (Nussbaum 1992: 216ff.; 2006: 76ff.). Such a catalogue allows the setting of three thresholds, below which a human organism would not count as living a human life at all (anencephalic children, for instance), as living a fully human life or as living a good human life (Nussbaum 2006: 181). Nussbaum explicitly argues that being of human parents is insufficient for crossing the first, evaluatively set threshold. Her conception is partly intended to provide guidelines as to how societies should conceive disability and as to when it is appropriate to take political measures in order to enable agents with nonstandard physical or mental conditions to cross the second and third thresholds.

Nussbaum has been careful to insist that enabling independence, rather than providing care, should be the prime aim. Nevertheless, the structure of an account that insists on a “species norm”, below which humans lacking certain capacities count as less than fully flourishing, has prompted accusations of illiberality. According to the complaint, it disrespects the right of members of, for example, deaf communities to set the standards for their own forms of life (Glackin 2016: 320ff.).

Other accounts of species-specific flourishing have been considerably more abstract. According to Hursthouse, plants flourish when their parts and operations are well suited to the ends of individual survival and continuance of the species. In social animals, flourishing also tends to involve characteristic pleasure and freedom from pain, and a contribution to appropriate functioning of relevant social groups (Hursthouse 1999: 197ff.). The good of human character traits conducive to pursuit of these four ends is transformed, Hursthouse claims, by the addition of “rationality”. As a result, humans flourish when they do what they correctly take themselves to have reason to do—under the constraint that they do not thereby cease to foster the four ends set for other social animals (Hursthouse 1999: 222ff.). Impersonal benevolence is, for example, because of this constraint, unlikely to be a virtue. In such an ethical outlook, what particular agents have reason to do is the primary standard; it just seems to be applied under particular constraints. A key question is thus whether the content of this primary standard is really determined by the notion of species-specific flourishing.

Where Hursthouse’s account builds up to, and attempts to provide a “natural” framework for, the traditional Aristotelian ergon of reason, MacIntyre builds his account around the claim that flourishing specific to the human “species” is essentially a matter of becoming an “independent practical reasoner” (MacIntyre 1999: 67ff.). It is because of the central importance of reasoning that, although human flourishing shares certain preconditions with the flourishing, say, of dolphins, it is also vulnerable in specific ways. MacIntyre argues that particular kinds of social practices enable the development of human reasoning capacities and that, because independent practical reasoning is, paradoxically, at core cooperatively developed and structured, the general aim of human flourishing is attained by participation in networks in local communities (MacIntyre 1999: 108). “Independent practical reasoners” are “dependent rational animals”. MacIntyre’s account thus makes room on an explanatory level for the evolutionary insight that humans can only become rational in a socio-cultural context which provides scaffolding for the development and exercise of rationality ( §4 ). Normatively, however, this point is subordinated to the claim that, from the point of view of participation in the contemporary human life form, flourishing corresponds to the traditional slogan.

MacIntyre, Hursthouse and Nussbaum (Nussbaum 2006: 159f.) all aim to locate the human capacity for reasoning within a framework that encompasses other animals. Each argues that, although the capacities to recognise reasons as reasons and for deliberation on their basis transform the needs and abilities humans share with other animals, the reasons in question remain in some way dependent on humans’ embodied and social form of life. This emphasis is intended to distinguish an Aristotelian approach from other approaches for which the capacity to evaluate reasons for action as reasons and to distance oneself from ones desires is also the “central difference” between humans and other animals (Korsgaard 2006: 104; 2018: 38ff.; cf. MacIntyre 1999: 71ff.). According to Korsgaard’s Kantian interpretation of Aristotle’s ergon argument, humans cannot act without taking a normative stand on whether their desires provide them with reasons to act. This she takes to be the key structural feature of their life, which brings with it “a whole new way of functioning well or badly” (Korsgaard 2018: 48; cf. 1996: 93). In such an account, “human nature” is monistically understood as this one structural feature which is so transformative that the concept of life applicable to organisms that instantiate it is no longer that applicable to organisms that don’t. Only “humans” live their lives, because only they possess the type of intentional control over their bodily movements that grounds in evaluation of their actions and self-evaluation as agents (Korsgaard 2006: 118; 2008: 141ff.; cf. Plessner 1928 [1975: 309f.]).

We have arrived at an interpretation of the traditional slogan that cuts it off from a metaphysics with any claims to be “naturalistic”. The claim now is that the structural effect of the capacity for reasoning transforms those features of humans that they share with other animals so thoroughly that those features pale into insignificance. What is “natural” about the capacity for reasoning for humans here is its unavoidability for contemporary members of the species, at least for those without serious mental disabilities. Such assertions also tend to shade into normative claims that discount the normative status of “animal” needs in view of the normative authority of human reasoning (cf. McDowell 1996 [1998: 172f.]).

The most radical version of this thought leads to the claim encountered towards the end of section 1.4 : that talk of “human nature” involves no essential reference at all to the species Homo sapiens or to the hominin lineage. According to this view, the kind to which contemporary humans belong is a kind to which entities could also belong who have no genealogical relationship to humans. That kind is the kind of entities that act and believe in accordance with the reasons they take themselves to have. Aliens, synthetically created agents and angels are further candidates for membership in the kind, which would, unlike biological taxa, be spatiotemporally unrestricted. The traditional term for the kind, as employed by Aquinas and Kant, is “person” (cf. Hull 1986: 9).

Roger Scruton has recently taken this line, arguing that persons can only be adequately understood in terms of a web of concepts inapplicable to other animals, concepts whose applicability grounds in an essential moral dimension of the personal life form. The concepts pick out components of a life form that is permeated by relationships of responsibility, as expressed in reactive attitudes such as indignation, guilt and gratitude. Such emotions he takes to involve a demand for accountability, and as such to be exclusive to the personal life form, not variants of animal emotions (Scruton 2017: 52). As a result, he claims, they situate their bearers in some sense “outside the natural order” (Scruton 2017: 26). According to such an account, we should embrace a methodological dualism with respect to humans: as animals, they are subject to the same kinds of biological explanations as all other organisms, but as persons, they are subject to explanations that are radically different in kind. These are explanations in terms of reasons and meanings, that is, exercises in “Verstehen”, whose applicability Scruton takes to be independent of causal explanation (Scruton 2017: 30ff., 46).

Such an account demonstrates with admirable clarity that there is no necessary connection between a theory of “human nature” and metaphysical naturalism. It also reinforces the fact, emphasised throughout this entry, that discussions of “human nature” require both serious conceptual spadework and explicit justification of the use of any one such concept rather than another.

• Aristotle, Topics , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , J. Barnes (ed.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, Vol. 1, 167–277.
• –––, Physics , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , Vol. 1, 315–446.
• –––, History of Animals , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , Vol. 1, 774–993.
• –––, Parts of Animals , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , Vol. 1, 994–1086
• –––, Metaphysics , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , Vol. 2, 1552–1728
• –––, Nicomachean Ethics , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , Vol. 2, 1729–1867
• –––, Politics , in The Complete Works of Aristotle , Vol. 2, 1986–2129.
• Balme, D. M., 1980, “Aristotle’s Biology Was Not Essentialist”, Archiv Für Geschichte Der Philosophie , 62(1): 1–12. doi:10.1515/agph.1980.62.1.1
• –––, 1987, “Aristotle’s Use of Division and Differentiae”, in Gotthelf and Lennox 1987: 69–89. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511552564.008
• Bickerton, Derek, 2005, “Language First, Then Shared Intentionality, Then a Beneficent Spiral”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 28(5): 691–692. doi:10.1017/S0140525X05220125
• Boulter, Stephen J., 2012, “Can Evolutionary Biology Do Without Aristotelian Essentialism?”, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement , 70: 83–103. doi:10.1017/S1358246112000057
• Boyd, Richard, 1991, “Realism, Anti-Foundationalism and the Enthusiasm for Natural Kinds”, Philosophical Studies , 61(1–2): 127–148. doi:10.1007/BF00385837
• –––, 1999a, “Homeostasis, Species and Higher Taxa”, in R. Wilson 1999b: 141–185.
• –––, 1999b, “Kinds, Complexity and Multiple Realization”, Philosophical Studies , 95(1/2): 67–98. doi:10.1023/A:1004511407133
• Buller, David J., 2006, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Carroll, Sean B, 2000, “Endless Forms: The Evolution of Gene Regulation and Morphological Diversity”, Cell , 101(6): 577–580. doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(00)80868-5
• Cassirer, Ernst, 1944, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Culture , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Cela-Conde, Camilo José and Francisco J. Ayala, 2017, “The Advent of Biological Evolution and Humankind”, in On Human Nature: Biology, Psychology, Ethics, Politics, and Religion , Michel Tibayrenc, and Francisco J. Ayala (eds.), London: Elsevier, 3–15. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-420190-3.00001-6
• Charles, David, 2000, Aristotle on Meaning and Essence , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019925673X.001.0001
• Coyne, Jerry A. and H. Allen Orr, 2004, Speciation , Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.
• Crow, Tim J. (ed.), 2003, The Speciation of Modern Homo Sapiens (Proceedings of the British Academy, 106), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• de Queiroz, Kevin, 1999, “The General Lineage Concept of Species and the Defining Properties of the Species Category”, in R. Wilson 1999b: 49–89.
• –––, 2005, “Different Species Problems and Their Resolution”, BioEssays , 27(12): 1263–1269. doi:10.1002/bies.20325
• de Sousa, Ronald, 2000, “Learning to be Natural”, in Roughley 2000: 287–307.
• Devitt, Michael, 2008, “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism*”, Philosophy of Science , 75(3): 344–382. doi:10.1086/593566
• –––, 2010, “Species Have (Partly) Intrinsic Essences”, Philosophy of Science , 77(5): 648–661. doi:10.1086/656820
• Downes, Stephen M., 2010, “The Basic Components of the Human Mind Were Not Solidified during the Pleistocene Epoch”, in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology , Francisco J. Ayala and Robert Arp (eds.), Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 243–252. doi:10.1002/9781444314922.ch14
• Dupré, John, 1993, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2001, Human Nature and the Limits of Science , Oxford: Clarendon Press. doi:10.1093/0199248060.001.0001
• –––, 2003, “On Human Nature”, Human Affairs , 2003(2): 109–122. [ Dupré 2003 available online ]
• Eberl, Jason T., 2004, “Aquinas on the Nature of Human Beings”, Review of Metaphysics , 58(2): 333–365.
• Ereshefsky, Marc, 1991, “Species, Higher Taxa, and the Units of Evolution”, Philosophy of Science , 58(1): 84–101. doi:10.1086/289600
• –––, 2001, The Poverty of the Linnean Hierarchy. A Philosophical Study of Biological Taxonomy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511498459
• –––, 2008, “Systematics and Taxonomy”, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology , Sarkar Sahotra and Anya Plutynski (eds.), Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 99–118. doi:10.1002/9780470696590.ch6
• Ereshefsky, Marc and Mohan Matthen, 2005, “Taxonomy, Polymorphism, and History: An Introduction to Population Structure Theory*”, Philosophy of Science , 72(1): 1–21. doi:10.1086/426848
• Foot, Philippa, 2001, Natural Goodness , Oxford: Clarendon Press. doi:10.1093/0198235089.001.0001
• Geertz, Clifford, 1973, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays , New York: Basic Books.
• Ghiselin, Michael T., 1974, “A Radical Solution to the Species Problem”, Systematic Zoology , 23(4): 536–544. doi:10.2307/2412471
• –––, 1987, “Species Concepts, Individuality, and Objectivity”, Biology & Philosophy , 2(2): 127–143. doi:10.1007/BF00057958
• –––, 1997, Metaphysics and the Origin of Species , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Glackin, Shane N., 2016, “Three Aristotelian Accounts of Disease and Disability”, Journal of Applied Philosophy , 33(3): 311–326. doi:10.1111/japp.12114
• Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 2014, Philosophy of Biology , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Gotthelf, Allan and James G. Lennox (eds.), 1987, Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511552564
• Gould, Stephen Jay, 1977, Ontogeny and Phylogeny , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
• Griffiths, Paul E., 1999, “Squaring the Circle: Natural Kinds with Historical Essences”, in R. Wilson 1999b: 209–228.
• –––, 2011, “Our Plastic Nature”, in Transformations of Lamarckism: From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology , Snait B. Gissis, and Eva Jablonka (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 319–330. doi:10.7551/mitpress/8686.003.0038
• Griffiths, Paul E. and James Tabery, 2013, “Developmental Systems Theory: What Does It Explain, and How Does It Explain It?”, in Embodiment and Epigenesis: Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Understanding the Role of Biology within the Relational Developmental System. Part A: Philosophical, Theoretical, and Biological Dimensions , Richard M. Lerner and Janette B. Benson (eds.), (Advances in Child Development and Behavior 44), Amsterdam: Elsevier, 65–94. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-397947-6.00003-9
• Griffiths Paul E. and Karola Stotz, 2013, Genetics and Philosophy: An Introduction , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Habermas, Jürgen, 1958, “Anthropologie”, in Philosophie , A. Diemer, and I. Frenzel (eds.), Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, pp. 18–35.
• Hannon, Elizabeth and Tim Lewens (eds.), 2018, Why We Disagree About Human Nature , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198823650.001.0001
• Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1772 [2008], Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache . Translated as “Treatise on the Origins of Language”, Michael N. Forster (trans.) in Herder: Philosophical Writings , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 65–164. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139164634.007
• Hull, David L., 1965, “The Effect of Essentialism on Taxonomy—Two Thousand Years of Stasis (I)”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , 15(60): 314–326. doi:10.1093/bjps/XV.60.314
• –––, 1978, “A Matter of Individuality”, Philosophy of Science , 45(3): 335–360. doi:10.1086/288811
• –––, 1984, “Historical Entities and Historical Narratives”, in Minds, Machines and Evolution: Philosophical Studies , Christopher Hookway (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 17–42.
• –––, 1986, “On Human Nature”, PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , 1986(2): 3–13. doi:10.1086/psaprocbienmeetp.1986.2.192787
• –––, 1987, “Genealogical Actors in Ecological Roles”, Biology & Philosophy , 2(2): 168–184. doi:10.1007/BF00057961
• Hume, David, 1739–40, A Treatise of Human Nature , London: John Noon. Reprinted Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
• –––, 1748, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , London: A. Millar. Reprinted in Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals , Oxford: Clarendon Press 1970.
• Hursthouse, Rosalind, 1999, On Virtue Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199247994.001.0001
• –––, 2012, “Human Nature and Aristotelian Virtue Ethics”, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement , 70: 169–188. doi:10.1017/S1358246112000094
• Hutcheson, Francis, 1730 [1933], “Glasgoviensis de naturali hominum socialitate: Oratio inauguralis”, Glasgoviæ: Typis academicis. Translated as “Inaugural Lecture on the Social Nature of Man”, Thomas Mautner and Colin Mayrhofer (trans), in Two Texts on Human Nature , Thomas Mautner (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 124–147.
• Kant, Immanuel, 1785 [1996], Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten , Riga. Translated as “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals”, in Practical Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 37–108.
• Kappeler, Peter M., Claudia Fichtel, and Carel P. van Schaik, 2019, “There Ought to Be Roots: Evolutionary Precursors of Social Norms and Conventions in Non-Human Primates”, in The Normative Animal? The Anthropological Significance of Social, Moral and Linguistic Norms , Neil Roughley and Kurt Bayertz (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press, 65–82. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190846466.003.0003
• Kitcher, Philip, 1984, “Species”, Philosophy of Science , 51(2): 308–333. doi:10.1086/289182
• Korsgaard, Christine M., 1996, The Sources of Normativity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2006, “Morality and the Distinctiveness of Human Action”, in Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers. How Morality Evolved , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 98–119.
• –––, 2008, “Aristotle’s Function Argument”, in her The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 129–150.
• –––, 2018, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other Animals , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198753858.001.0001
• Kripke, Saul A., 1972 [1980], Naming and Necessity , in Semantics of Natural Language , Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman (eds), Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Revised and published separately, 1980, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Kronfeldner, Maria, 2018, What’s Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. doi:10.7551/mitpress/11606.001.0001
• Kronfeldner, Maria, Neil Roughley, and Georg Toepfer, 2014, “Recent Work on Human Nature: Beyond Traditional Essences”, Philosophy Compass , 9(9): 642–652. doi:10.1111/phc3.12159
• Lenman, James, 2005, “The Saucer of Mud, the Kudzu Vine and the Uxorious Cheetah: Against Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism in Metaethics”, European Journal of Applied Philosophy , 1(2): 37–50.
• Lennox, James G., 1987, “Kinds, Forms of Kinds, and the More and the Less in Aristotle’s Biology”, in Gotthelf and Lennox 1987: 339–359. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511552564.019
• –––, 1999, “The Place of Mankind in Aristotle’s Zoology:”, Philosophical Topics , 27(1): 1–16. doi:10.5840/philtopics199927116
• –––, 2009, “Form, Essence, and Explanation in Aristotle’s Biology”, in A Companion to Aristotle , Georgios Anagnostopoulos (ed.), Malden, MA: Wiley, pp. 348–367. doi:10.1002/9781444305661.ch22
• Lewens, Tim, 2009, “Evo-Devo and ‘Typological Thinking’: An Exculpation”, Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution , 312B(8): 789–796. doi:10.1002/jez.b.21292
• –––, 2012, “Human Nature: The Very Idea”, Philosophy & Technology , 25(4): 459–474. doi:10.1007/s13347-012-0063-x
• Lloyd, G. E. R., 1983, Science, Folklore and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Locke, John, 1689, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , London: Thomas Basset.
• Machery, Edouard, 2008, “A Plea for Human Nature”, Philosophical Psychology , 21(3): 321–329. doi:10.1080/09515080802170119
• –––, 2018, “Doubling Down on the Nomological Notion of Human Nature”, in Hannon and Lewens 2018: 18–39.
• MacIntyre, Alasdair C., 1999, Dependent Rational Animals. Why Human Beings Need the Virtues , London: Duckworth.
• Mayr, Ernst, 1959 [1976], “Typological versus Population Thinking”, in Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal , Washington, DC: The Anthropological Society of Washington, pp. 409–412. Reprinted in Mayr 1976: 26–29.
• –––, 1968, “Theory of Biological Classification”, Nature , 220(5167): 545–548. Reprinted in Mayr 1976: 425–432. doi:10.1038/220545a0
• –––, 1976, Evolution and the Diversity of Life , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
• –––, 1982, The Growth of Biological Thought. Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
• McBrearty, Sally and Alison S. Brooks, 2000, “The Revolution That Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior”, Journal of Human Evolution , 39(5): 453–563. doi:10.1006/jhev.2000.0435
• McDowell, John, 1980 [1998], “The Role of Eudaimonia in Aristotle’s Ethics”, in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics , Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 359–376. Reprinted in McDowell 1998: 3–22. doi:10.1525/9780520340985-022
• –––, 1996 [1998], “Two Sorts of Naturalism”, in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory , Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn (eds), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 149–179. Reprinted in McDowell 1998: 167–197.
• –––, 1998, Mind, Value, and Reality , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Midgley, Mary, 2000, “Human Nature, Human Variety, Human Freedom”, in Roughley 2000: 47–63.
• Montagu, Ashley, 1956, The Biosocial Nature of Man , Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
• –––, 1961, “Neonatal and Infant Immaturity in Man”, Journal of the American Medical Association , 178(1): 56. doi:10.1001/jama.1961.73040400014011
• Nadaf, Gerard, 2005, The Greek Concept of Nature , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Nussbaum, Martha C., 1992, “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism”, Political Theory , 20(2): 202–246. doi:10.1177/0090591792020002002
• –––, 1995, “Aristotle on Human Nature and the Foundations of Ethics”, in World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams , J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 86–131. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511621086.007
• –––, 2006, Frontiers of Justice. Disability, Nationality, Species Membership , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
• Okasha, Samir, 2002, “Darwinian Metaphysics: Species And The Question Of Essentialism”, Synthese , 131(2): 191–213. doi:10.1023/A:1015731831011
• Pellegrin, Pierre, 1982 [1986], La Classification des animaux chez Aristote: Statut de la biologie et unité de l’aristotélisme , Paris: Société d’édition “Les Belles Lettres”. Translated as Aristotle’s Classification of Animals: Biology and the Conceptual Unity of the Aristotelian Corpus , Anthony Preus (trans.), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/9780520330412
• Pico della Mirandola, 1486 [1965], De hominis dignitate . Translated as On the Dignity of Man , Charles Wallis, Paul Miller, and Douglas Carmichael (trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1965.
• Plato, Statesman , Julia Annas and Robin Waterfield (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Plessner, Helmuth, 1928 [1975], Die Stufen Des Organischen Und Der Mensch: Einleitung in Die Philosophische Anthropologie , Berlin: De Gruyter. Reprinted Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1975. doi:10.1515/9783111537429
• Portmann, Adolf, 1951, Biologische Fragmente zu einer Lehre vom Menschen , Basel: Schwabe.
• –––, 1967, “Die Stellung des Menschen in der Natur”, in Zoologie aus vier Jahrzehnten. Gesammelte Abhandlungen , München: Piper, pp. 312–336.
• Prinz, Jesse J., 2012, Beyond Human Nature. How Culture and Experience Shape Our Lives , London: Allen Lane.
• Ramsey, Grant, 2013, “Human Nature in a Post-Essentialist World”, Philosophy of Science , 80(5): 983–993. doi:10.1086/673902
• Richards, Richard A., 2010, The Species Problem: A Philosophical Analysis , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511762222
• Richter, Daniel S., 2011, Cosmopolis. Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199772681.001.0001
• Rosenberg, Karen and Wenda Trevathan, 1995, “Bipedalism and Human Birth: The Obstetrical Dilemma Revisited”, Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews , 4(5): 161–168. doi:10.1002/evan.1360040506
• Roughley, Neil (ed.), 2000, Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives , Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110822809
• –––, 2011, “Human Natures”, in Human Nature and Self Design , Sebastian Schleidgen, Michael Jungert, Robert Bauer, and Verena Sandow (eds), Paderborn: Mentis, pp. 11–33.
• Samuels, Richard, 2012, “Science and Human Nature”, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement , 70: 1–28. doi:10.1017/S1358246112000021
• Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1946 [2007], L’Existentialisme est un humanisme , Paris: Nagel. Translated as Existentialism is a Humanism , Carol Macomber (trans.), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
• Scruton, Roger, 2017, On Human Nature , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Sedley, David, 2010, “Teleology, Aristotelian and Platonic”, in Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle: Essays in Honor of Allan Gotthelf , James G. Lennox and Robert Bolton (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 5–29. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511919275.004
• Silvers, Anita, 1998, “A Fatal Attraction to Normalizing. Treating Disabilities as Deviations from ‘Species-Typical’ Functioning”, in Arguing About Human Nature: Contemporary Debates , Stephen M. Downes, and Edouard Machery (eds), New York: Routledge, pp. 503–520.
• Sober, Elliott, 1980, “Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism”, Philosophy of Science , 47(3): 350–383. doi:10.1086/288942
• Sterelny, Kim, 2011, “From Hominins to Humans: How Sapiens Became Behaviourally Modern”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , 366(1566): 809–822. doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0301
• –––, 2012, The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique , Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. doi:10.7551/mitpress/9780262016797.001.0001
• –––, 2018, “Sceptical Reflections on Human Nature”, in Hannon, and Lewens 2018: 108–126.
• Sterelny, Kim and Paul E. Griffiths, 1999, Sex and Death. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Biology , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Stotz, Karola, 2010, “Human Nature and Cognitive–Developmental Niche Construction”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences , 9(4): 483–501. doi:10.1007/s11097-010-9178-7
• Stotz, Karola and Paul E. Griffiths, 2018, “A Developmental Systems Account of Human Nature”, in Hannon, and Lewens 2018: 58–75.
• Thompson, Michael, 2004, “Apprehending Human Form”, in Modern Moral Philosophy , Anthony O’Hear (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 47–74. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511550836.004
• –––, 2008, Life and Action. Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Tooby, John and Leda Cosmides, 1990, “On the Universality of Human Nature and the Uniqueness of the Individual: The Role of Genetics and Adaptation”, Journal of Personality , 58(1): 17–67. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1990.tb00907.x
• –––, 1992, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”, in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture , Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 19–136.
• Walker, Alan and Christopher B. B. Ruff, 1993, “Reconstruction of the Pelvis”, in The Nariokotome Homo Erectus Skeleton , Richard Leakey and Alan Walker (eds.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 221–233.
• Walsh, Denis, 2006, “Evolutionary Essentialism”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , 57(2): 425–448. doi:10.1093/bjps/axl001
• Wilkins, John S., 2018, Species. The Evolution of an Idea , second edition, Boca Raton, LA: CRC Press.
• Willmore, Katherine E., 2012, “The Body Plan Concept and Its Centrality in Evo-Devo”, Evolution: Education and Outreach , 5(2): 219–230. doi:10.1007/s12052-012-0424-z
• Wilson, David Sloan, 1994, “Adaptive Genetic Variation and Human Evolutionary Psychology”, Ethology and Sociobiology , 15(4): 219–235. doi:10.1016/0162-3095(94)90015-9
• Wilson, Robert A., 1999a, “Realism, Essence, and Kind. Resuscitating Biological Essentialism?”, in R. A. Wilson (ed.) 1999b: 188–207.
• ––– (ed.), 1999b, Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Wilson, Robert A., Matthew J. Barker, and Ingo Brigandt, 2007, “When Traditional Essentialism Fails: Biological Natural Kinds”, Philosophical Topics , 35(1): 189–215. doi:10.5840/philtopics2007351/29
• Wimsatt, William C., 2003, “Evolution, Entrenchment, and Innateness”, in Reductionism and the Development of Knowledge , Terrance Brown, and Leslie Smith (eds), Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 53–81.
• Winsor, Mary P., 2003, “Non-Essentialist Methods in Pre-Darwinian Taxonomy”, Biology & Philosophy , 18(3): 387–400. doi:10.1023/A:1024139523966
• –––, 2006, “The Creation of the Essentialism Story: An Exercise in Metahistory”, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences , 28(2): 149–174.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

Aquinas, Thomas | Aristotle, General Topics: biology | Aristotle, General Topics: ethics | ethics: virtue | evolution | Kant, Immanuel | Locke, John: on real essence | naturalism: moral | natural kinds | psychology: evolutionary | species

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Michelle Hooge, Maria Kronfeldner, Nick Laskowski and Hichem Naar for their comments on earlier drafts.

Copyright © 2021 by Neil Roughley < neil . roughley @ uni-due . de >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, summary of plato’s theory of human nature.

Plato (427-347 BCE) “was one of the first to argue that the systematic use of our reason can show us the best way to live.” [Platonic thinking is part of this rise of reason in ancient Greece—often called the Greek miracle. It replaced superstitious, religious, mythological, supernatural thinking with rational, scientific, philosophical, naturalistic thinking. The lives we live today, especially the benefits of science and technology, owe much to this Greek miracle.] Plato argues that if we truly understand human nature we can find “individual happiness and social stability.” [We can answer ethical and political questions.]

Plato’s Life and Works – Plato “was born into an influential family … of Athens.” Athens was at the center of the Greek miracle, the use of reason to understand the world. He was especially influenced by Socrates , but after Athens lost the twenty-seven year Peloponnesian War with Sparta, Socrates came under suspicion and was eventually condemned to death. [Here is my summary of the  trial of Socrates .]

Socrates was interested in political and ethical matters, especially about whether the Sophists were correct in defending moral (cultural) relativism . [This is the idea that morality is relative to, conditioned by, or dependent upon cultural conventions.] Socrates believed that the use of reason could resolve philosophical questions, especially if one employed the method of rational argument and counter-argument; the Socratic method  uses a series of questions and answers designed to uncover the truth.

Socrates claimed that he did not know the answers to questions beforehand, but that he was wiser than others in knowing that he didn’t know. [This is the essence of Socratic wisdom —he is wiser than others in knowing he doesn’t know, whereas the ignorant often claim to know with great certainty. Using the Socratic Method, he showed people that they didn’t know what they claimed to know. Needless to say, questioning people about their beliefs and implicitly asking them to defend them often arouses resentment and hostility . As Spinoza said “I cannot teach philosophy without being a disturber of the peace”]

Plato was shocked by Socrates’ execution but maintained faith in rational inquiry. Plato wrote extensively, and in a series of dialogues, expounded the first (relatively) systematic philosophy of the Western world. [The early dialogues recount the trial and death of Socrates. Most of the rest of the Platonic dialogues portray Socrates questioning those who think they know the meaning of justice (in the Republic ), moderation (in the Charmides ), courage (in the Laches ), knowledge, (in the Theaetetus ), virtue (in the Meno ), piety (in the Euthyphro ), or love (in the Symposium ).] The Republic is the most famous dialogue. It touches on many of the great philosophical issues including the best form of government, the best life to live, the nature of knowledge, as well as family, education, psychology, and more. It also expounds on Plato’s theory of human nature. [The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of philosophy is just footnotes to Plato.]

Metaphysical Background: The Forms – Plato is not a theist or polytheist, and he is certainly not a biblical theist. When he talks about the divine he is referring to reason (logos), a principle that organizes the world from preexisting matter. What is most distinctive about Plato’s philosophy is his theory of forms, although his description of forms isn’t precise. But Plato thought that knowledge is an active process through which we organize and classify our perceptions. Forms are ideas or concepts which have at least 4 aspects:

A) Logical – how does “table” or “tree” apply to various tables/trees? How does a universal concept like “bed” or “dog” or “red” or “hot” apply to many individual things? [Any word, except proper names and pronouns, refers to a form.] Nominalists argue that words simply name things, there are no universal concepts existing over and above individuals. [Words are convenient names that demarcate some things from others.] Platonic realists argue that universal forms really exist independently, and individual things are x’s because they participate in the form of xness. [Dogs are mammals because they participate in doginess—which transcends individual dogs.] At times Plato suggests that there is a form for all general words—other times he doesn’t.

B) Metaphysical – are forms ultimately real; do they exist independently? Plato says yes. Universal, eternal, immaterial, unchanging forms are more real than individuals. Individual material things are known by the senses, whereas forms are known by the intellect. And the forms have a real, independent existence—there is a world of forms.

C) Epistemological – knowledge is of forms, perceptions in this world lead only to belief or opinion. We find the clearest example of knowledge based on forms in mathematics. [Hence the motto of Plato’s academy. “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.”] The objects of mathematical reasoning are often not found in this world—and we can never see most of them—but they provide us with knowledge about the world. [Plato is challenging us to account for mathematical knowledge without positing mathematical forms. Even today most mathematicians are mathematical Platonists.]

D) Moral – ideals of human conduct, moral concepts like justice, and equality are forms. [So there are physical, mathematical, and moral forms.] Individuals and societies can participate in justice, liberty, or equality, but in this world, we never encounter the perfect forms. The most prominent of all the forms is the form of the “good.”

The parables of the sun and cave are primarily about understanding forms and the form of the good. [Plato compares the sun’s illumination of the world with the form of the good’s illumination of reality.] Plato thought that by using reason we could come to know the good, and then we would do the good. Thus knowledge of the good is sufficient for virtue, doing the good. [This seems mistaken as Aristotle will point out because our will can be weak.] Thus Plato’s philosophy responds to intellectual and moral relativism—there are objective truths about the nature of reality and about human conduct. [ The allegory of the cave, the myth of the sun , and the divided line are the devices Plato uses to explain the forms. I will explain these in tomorrow’s post .]

Theory of Human Nature – The Tripartite Structure of the Soul – [Having encountered the social self of Confucianism, the divine self of Hinduism, and the no-self of Buddhism, we come to dualism.]

Plato is a dualist ; there is both immaterial mind (soul) and material body, and it is the soul that knows the forms. Plato believed the soul exists before birth and after death. [We don’t see perfect circles or perfect justice in this world, but we remember seeing them in Platonic heaven before we were born.] Thus he believed that the soul or mind attains knowledge of the forms, as opposed to the senses. Needless to say, we should care about our soul rather than our body.

The soul (mind) itself is divided into 3 parts: reason ; appetite (physical urges); and will  (emotion, passion, spirit.) The will is the source of love, anger, indignation, ambition, aggression, etc. When these aspects are not in harmony, we experience mental conflict. The will can be on the side of either reason or the appetites. We might be pulled by lustful appetite, or the rational desire to find a good partner. To explain the interaction of these 3 parts of the self, Plato uses the image is of the charioteer (reason) who tries to control horses representing will and appetites. [Elsewhere he says that reason uses the will to control the appetites.

Plato also emphasized the social aspect of human nature. We are not self-sufficient, we need others, and we benefit from our social interactions, from other person’s talents, aptitudes, and friendship.

Diagnosis – Persons differ as to which part of their nature is predominant. Individual dominated by reason seeks are philosophical and seek knowledge; individuals dominated by spirit/will/emotion are victory loving and seek reputation; individuals dominated by appetites are profit loving and seek material gain. Although each has a role to play, reason ought to rule the will and appetites. And in the same way, those with the most developed reason ought to rule society. A well-ordered, harmonious, or just society is one in which each kind of person plays their proper role.  Thus there is a parallel between proper functioning individuals and proper functioning societies. Good societies help produce good people who in turn help produce good societies, while bad societies tend to produce bad individuals who in turn help produce bad societies.

Plato differentiates between 5 classifications of societies. 1) The best is a meritocracy , where the talented rule. This may degenerate into increasingly bad forms, each one worse than the other as we go down the list. 2) The timarchic society, which values honor and fame while reason is neglected. In such a society spirit dominates the society and the ruling class. 3) Oligarchy , where money-making is valued and political power lies with the wealthy. In such a society appetites dominate the society and the ruling class. 4) Democracy , where the poor seize power. They are also dominated by appetites. He describes the common people as “lacking in discipline [and] pursuing mere pleasure of the moment …” 5) Anarchy is the sequel to the permissiveness and self-indulgence of democracy.  It is a total lack of government. Plato thought this would usher in a tyrant to restore order.

Prescription – Justice is the same in both individuals and society—the harmonious workings of the parts to create a flourishing whole. But how is this attained? Plato believes that education —academic, musical, and physical— is the key. Education takes place in the context of a social and political system. Not surprisingly this includes kings (rulers) being philosophers, those in whom reason dominates. If there really is a truth about how people should live, then only those with such knowledge should rule. [Think of the parallels with Confucianism, where those who rule have mastered the Confucian political texts.]

To achieve this end Plato, the guardians or rulers must engage in a long educational process in which they learn about the Forms. [After a nearly 50 year-long process, those of the highest moral and intellectual excellence will rule.] The guardians cannot own personal property and cannot have families. [The idea is that only the desire to serve the common good motivates them, rather than money or power.] He hopes that the guardians will so love wisdom that they will not misuse their power. As for those dominated by will/emotion/spirit they are best suited to being auxiliaries —soldiers, police, and civil servants. The final class is composed of the majority, those in whom the appetites dominate. They will be farmers, craftsmen, traders, and other producers of the materials necessary for living.

Critics have called Plato’s republic authoritarian or totalitarian, and Plato advocated both censorship and propaganda as means of maintaining social control.  He certainly believed that the masses [who he says like to “shop and spend”] were unable to govern the society and that an elite, composed of the morally and intellectually excellent should make the important decisions about how best to govern a society.

Share this:

36 thoughts on “ summary of plato’s theory of human nature ”.

Great compilation…really helpful. Thanks a lot.

Appreciate your comments.

Wonderful piece. Need more of this.

Thanks for the comments.

Thank you. I really appreciate this post 🙂

i love this document, its well explained and summerized

Thank you very much for your kind words. JGM

Great staff…I’m impressed

Thanks for the compliment.

That was an absolutely wonderful study guide. It helped my review immensely.

thanks for the comment Chris.

I think that you should have had also emphasized on the preaching of human rights by Plato. The rest was considerable and helpful, i believe.

nicely written and well thought through. very helpful to us as students studying of Plato. Thanks a lot for your help.

Thanks so much for your kind words.

Absolutely magnificent. Bravo and thank you very much indeed

• Pingback: Monday’s Mtg: Is human nature best grasped by science, philosophy, or religion? | Civilized Conversation

thank you so much. because can help us as a student to study more the Philosophy of plato.

thank you so much

you’re welcome. JGM

a great resource! thank you very much for this.

omg thank you this article helped me so much! i read the whole thing and it was really good

Thanks for the article. I wanted to know more of Plato’s arguments on immortality.

Thank you for your explanation about Plato. It’s a great resource

You’re welcome. Good luck in philosophy.

In search of more understanding, I stumbled across this great read. Thank you for your work, I look forward to reading more.

thanks Natasha

Thanks so much sir. Can you give us the summary of plato’s theories of human nature and there relationship to education. Then give us the reference

no, you get to do that.

Such an instructive and super clear explanation of things that certainly require a lot of time and work to understand and learn. I am getting into Plato after reading the wonderful “Memoirs of Socrates” by Xenophon. Although I had already read Crito, Phaedo and a couple other dialogues, only now I start to understand how much I love Socrates. What a character. The Jesus of philosophy!

“He describes the common people as “lacking in discipline [and] pursuing mere pleasure of the moment …”.

I agree with most things Plato says. Totalitarian he might be, but he’s right about most people being vulgar and lazy. And let it be said, ignorant and stupid. I too am all that, but I try to be aware of it.

Ironically, the more I learn, the less I can have a “conversation ” with anyone! I must be on the right track, ha ha!

“Don’t go where most people are going, for they are going the wrong ways.”. -Seneca

thanks for the compliment. And you are a real searcher after truth Luigi.

Dr. Messerly,

You have no idea how encouraging and heart warming is your approval in regard to my little mind. I’ll continue learning with even more vigor. I’ll never learn as much as you have, but I am sure it will be still worthwhile.

Thank you! Luigi

thanks for your kind words and you can learn as much as you want.

my grade will thank you

thanks Nick

I compel to re- think in between who is my natural self and constructed my self ?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of new posts by email.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Emotions
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Acquisition
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Religion
• Music and Culture
• Music and Media
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Politics
• Law and Society
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Oncology
• Medical Toxicology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Medical Ethics
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Security
• Computer Games
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Strategy
• Business History
• Business Ethics
• Business and Government
• Business and Technology
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic Systems
• Economic Methodology
• Economic History
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Political Theory
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Politics and Law
• Public Administration
• Public Policy
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

Kant’s Human Being: Essays on His Theory of Human Nature

• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

This book continues and deepens avenues of research first initiated in the author’s highly acclaimed book, Kant’s Impure Ethics . Drawing on a wide variety of both published and unpublished works spanning all periods of Kant’s extensive writing career, the author focuses on Kant’s under-appreciated empirical work on human nature, with particular attention to the connections between this body of work and his much-discussed ethical theory. Kant repeatedly claimed that the question, “What is the human being” is philosophy’s most fundamental question, one that encompasses all others. The author analyzes and evaluates Kant’s own answer to his question, showing how it differs from other accounts of human nature. The book is divided into three parts. Part One explores the nature and role of virtue in Kant’s ethical theory, showing how the conception of human nature behind Kant’s virtue theory results in a virtue ethics that is decidedly different from more familiar Aristotelian virtue ethics programs. Part Two uncovers the dominant moral message in Kant’s anthropological investigations, drawing new connections between Kant’s work on human nature and his ethics. Part Three explores specific aspects of Kant’s theory of human nature developed outside of his anthropology lectures, in his works on religion, geography, education, and aesthetics, and shows how these writings substantially amplify his account of human beings.

Signed in as

Institutional accounts.

• Google Scholar Indexing
• GoogleCrawler [DO NOT DELETE]

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code

Institutional access

• Sign in with a library card Sign in with username/password Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Sign in through your institution

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Sign in with a library card

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

• Home ›
• Reviews ›

Kant's Human Being: Essays on His Theory of Human Nature

Robert B. Louden, Kant's Human Being: Essays on His Theory of Human Nature , Oxford University Press, 2011, 222pp, $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199768714.

Reviewed by Leslie Stevenson, University of St Andrews, Scotland

A slightly odd title -- and the image on the cover suggests the pleasant fantasy that Kant had a secret mistress who was given to gazing into dark pools in the forests around Konigsberg! But this is of course a book centered on Kant's concept or conception of human nature. It is a collection of essays written for other occasions, rather than a through-composed work, and it contains quite a lot of repetition -- to my mind, rather too many trees looking much the same (as in those Prussian forests). But Louden's historical scholarship is very impressive: he seems to have read and digested not only Kant's extensive published works, but all the sets of student lecture-notes, plus many major and minor eighteenth-century writers, and much relevant secondary literature.

As well as writing and lecturing on his famously original and heavy-duty philosophy, Kant delivered series of popular lecture-courses on anthropology, geography, and education for much of his university career. (What a workaholic he must have been -- clearly there could have been no time for a mistress!) Indeed, he did much to get those areas going as academic disciplines, as part of the grand Enlightenment project. If you want a summary of what was in Kant's popular courses without having to wade through all those lecture notes of questionable accuracy that publishers are still bringing out, then Louden's your man in Part Three of this book. He finishes with an investigation of Kant's stereotyped remarks on national character in the early Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime , which despite its title has little to say about aesthetics. It does seem that in his popular lectures and writing Kant relied too much on such stereotyping. This was especially unfortunate in his treatment of race, and Louden finds no evidence that Kant rose above the racist prejudice typical of his period, however much we might like to think otherwise. He was also typical of many philosophers in not taking much trouble to get his empirical facts right: for example, at one point he asserted that children's blood temperature is higher than that of adults, so they do not need to be kept warm (see p. 195 n. 10). Mistress or not, Kant can't have had much to do with children, except with their minds, in his early days as tutor to aristocratic families.

Louden has done the intellectual community (especially historians of ideas) a useful service in researching this material so thoroughly and giving us a readable digest of the results, even if the results are somewhat meager philosophically. But I do not wish to damn this book with faint praise, for in the first two parts Louden offers a more substantial contribution to philosophy which will richly reward anyone interested in Kant's ethics and his conception of human nature (two closely-intertwined topics) from both the historical and the systematic points of view.

In Part One, Louden argues against the stereotype (still too common, even amongst philosophers who should know better) of Kant as a stern imposer of exceptionless moral rules, the very paradigm of a rigid deontologist who ignores the rich heritage of the ethics of virtue bequeathed to us by the classical philosophers and their Christian successors. Some Kant-scholars have gone to the other extreme, protesting that he offered primarily an ethic of virtues rather than an ethic of rules. Louden offers us a middle way, that Kant quite rightly does both. The phrase 'virtue ethics' has become fashionable but it is vague, for after all, it is difficult to see how ethics could not be concerned with virtue in some way! However, the main point is to take as the most fundamental ethical question what sort of people we ought to be, rather than what results we should strive to bring about or what kinds of action we should do or refrain from doing.

The usual understanding of Kant as obsessed with rules comes presumably from brief acquaintance with the Groundwork (or worse, with superficial summaries of it in student textbooks), where the focus is usually on "the" categorical imperative and Kant's rather questionable deductions of perfect duties from it. However, the Groundwork begins with the statement that the only thing that is good without qualification is a good will . Some may say that all Kant means by that is that behind each particular action there should be an intention to obey the relevant moral rule, but Louden argues that what he really means is that each person should have, throughout their life, a settled disposition to guide their life and actions by respect for moral law. He offers a similar understanding of Kant's technical but ill-defined term 'maxim' as not so much the intention behind each particular action but rather the more general underlying intention that orchestrates a whole series of actions. In the late Metaphysics of Morals Kant formulates two "necessary ends of reason" that he says all rational agents have a duty to adopt as their guiding principle for the whole of their lives, namely, one's own moral perfection and the happiness of others. Louden claims that the duty to develop one's own moral character is the linchpin of Kant's entire system of duties (p. 11). Our emotions are not enemies to this project, they ought rather to help, but they need to be restrained and directed aright. Indeed, Kant says we need to cultivate "a habitually cheerful heart" so that we can act with joy (pp. 12-15).

In the rest of Part One Louden expands on the themes of duties to oneself, self-mastery or moral strength, and the role of the emotions in the moral life. In his account of humility, Kant presents a middle way between pagan self-assertion and Christian denial (p. 26): we find in ourselves a respect for the moral law but also temptations to allow exceptions to it in our own case, to satisfy our self-interested desires; hence Kant's doctrine of radical evil and our lifelong struggle with selfish inclinations (pp. xxvii, 31-4, 107-120). So his account of the ethical life is darker than that of the classical philosophers and has something in common with the Pauline doctrine of original sin. In the last paper of this section Louden suggests that Kant could have welcomed Jane Austen's Mansfield Park as a valuable source of insight into human nature (p. 39), despite the warning in his anthropology lectures that reading novels "makes distraction habitual"! However, in several versions of those lectures he is reported as saying that novels can help us acquire an understanding of human nature, and Louden applauds that thought.

Louden describes Part Two -- "Anthropology and Ethics" -- as the core of this book, and it should be studied in conjunction with his substantial Introduction (pp. xvii-xxviii). Kant wrote in at least three places that "What is the human being?" is the most fundamental question in philosophy. Yet there is no particular place where he answers it, not even in the anthropology lectures. It is rather a pervasive theme that recurs throughout his oeuvre, and he offers no complete or final answer, not because of carelessness, but because he thinks no such answer is possible, given our freedom what to make of ourselves. Kant does think there is such a thing as human nature, namely a set of (basically biological) characteristics that is shared by all normal members of our species, and he allowed as a real possibility that there may be other species of rational beings elsewhere in the universe with a different biology. Besides having a biological nature as all animal species do, we are distinctively rational. But Kant's conception of rationality is rich and deep, we are not merely instrumentally rational in choosing means to achieve our end, we are substantively or teleologically rational in our ability to deliberate about which ends to pursue and our freedom to determine our ends on a rational basis. Thus Kant agrees with existentialists who insist that we have an inescapable freedom to choose, but he would certainly dissent from the view that our fundamental choices are arbitrary, beyond all rational debate.

Kant recognizes that we are ineradicably social beings (indeed, that is part of our biological nature), and also that the forms human society has taken have varied widely over time and place. His lectures on anthropology are studded with examples of such variation (though he relied on sources that were limited and not entirely reliable). Like other philosophers of the Enlightenment and the historicist philosophers who followed him, Kant had a vivid sense of how human cultures had developed in history, and he entertained hopes of further cultural development in a progressive, enlightened direction. Recent studies of primates have been claimed to show that they too exhibit "culture", i.e., some distinctive patterns of behavior in different social groups that are passed on through social or observational learning. But Kant's conception of human culture is deeper and richer: for him, culture involves substantive rationality and freedom of choice, it is something that can be consciously improved upon by successive generations (pp. xxii-xxiv), though we can also slip backwards into chaos and evil, as history shows. Louden argues that the moral dimension dominates all other features of Kant's conception of human nature (p. xxvii). His popular lectures were entitled "Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View ": they were designed to help his hearers understand themselves and others, to promote "enlightenment for common life" (p. 51) -- a kind of Weltkenntnis that Kant complained most moral philosophers and clergymen lack (p. 57)! He hoped to make people better citizens of their nation and of the world, and he presented a vision of a gradually emerging worldwide community, extending slowly outwards from its Eurocentric core (p. 59). Progressive education has a vital role to play in this. Overall, the Kantian view of human nature is that we are influenced very strongly by our biology, our upbringing and our culture, but not determined by them. Whether that combination can be made consistent is of course a large question for Kant and for us all.

The rest of Part Three elaborates on these themes, with a certain degree of repetition. Despite that slight cavil, this is an excellent book which will deepen its readers' understanding of Kant on human nature, and of human nature itself.

• Subject List
• Take a Tour
• For Authors
• Subscriber Services
• Publications
• African American Studies
• African Studies
• American Literature
• Anthropology
• Architecture Planning and Preservation
• Art History
• Atlantic History
• Biblical Studies
• British and Irish Literature
• Childhood Studies
• Chinese Studies
• Cinema and Media Studies
• Communication
• Criminology
• Environmental Science
• Evolutionary Biology
• International Law

International Relations

• Islamic Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Latino Studies
• Linguistics
• Literary and Critical Theory
• Medieval Studies
• Military History
• Political Science
• Public Health
• Renaissance and Reformation
• Social Work
• Urban Studies
• Victorian Literature
• Browse All Subjects

How to Subscribe

• Free Trials

In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Human Nature in International Relations

Introduction, classical texts.

• Introductory Interdisciplinary Writings
• Introductory Disciplinary Writings
• Constructivist Theories
• Deconstructivist Theories
• Feminist Theories
• New Materialism
• Practice Theories
• Pragmatist Theories
• Realist Theories
• Agents and Structures
• The Life Sciences and International-Relations Theory
• Post-humanism and the Anthropocene

Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about

About related articles close popup.

Lorem Ipsum Sit Dolor Amet

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Aliquam ligula odio, euismod ut aliquam et, vestibulum nec risus. Nulla viverra, arcu et iaculis consequat, justo diam ornare tellus, semper ultrices tellus nunc eu tellus.

• International Relations Theory

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

• Crisis Bargaining
• History of Brazilian Foreign Policy (1808 to 1945)
• Indian Foreign Policy
• Find more forthcoming articles...
• Export Citations
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Human Nature in International Relations by Daniel Jacobi LAST MODIFIED: 22 April 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199743292-0286

“Human nature” is not a notion that has originated from theories of world politics. On the contrary, it represents one of the oldest points of reference in various cultural traditions of thought. An aspect, however, that makes the current status of the human in international relations (IR) interesting is the fact that since the 1980s, the discipline has undergone a rigorous and critical examination of its core terminologies. Above all, this effort has led scholars to become aware of the concurrent appropriations of their terms: once as scientific concepts and once as ontological facts. However, while various aspects of the human have always found their way into the theorization of world politics, so far the actual impact of the equally diverse “models of man” on the latter has hardly been subjected to systematic consideration. Observing “human nature” not only as a “naturally given fact” but also as an observational concept connects IR with the broader literatures on how the (political) world may be interpreted and analyzed. The proposition to begin a reappraisal of “human nature’s” framing effects on the basis of the distinction of anthropological and post-anthropological approaches ( Human Beings in International Relations . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015) calls upon IR scholars to appreciate what happens when they study world politics through a lens that either places the human at the center of its observations or one that opts to decenter it to different extents. A reflection on the distinction of an international political anthropology and an international political post-anthropology as a starting point for theory building then not only draws attention to what is included and excluded in regard to the human when studying world politics. It moreover exposes how different views on the (post)human come to shape different theoretical architectures. What is more, it also reveals that such foundations do not run parallel to the classical IR heuristic of distinct paradigms. A closer look at their post-human foundations then shows how much these schools of thought, once conceived as highly coherent, have now been differentiated internally. The said absence of a systematic debate on the status of the human in the IR theories also poses a challenge to this article. Not only is the human still rarely reflected upon as a theoretical core concept; at the same time, parallel debates exist that are guided less by theoretical frameworks but rather by the problems that arise from specific ideas about the post-human. In this sense, this article also pursues a dual strategy: on the one hand, the listing either of obvious or subtle uses of post-human views by various theoretical traditions , and on the other hand, the identification of specific core problems that have formed in the wake of specific angles on the post-human. Since inquiries into the post-human also include an intersection of IR theories with other scientific literatures, the article also features text references that will help readers find their way into the state of the art of those important adjacent debates.

Notions of “human nature” do not originally stem from IR scholarship. Rather, they can already be found at the earliest stages of making sense of and describing the (political) world. The following sources are not IR texts but rather are some of the works that have laid the groundwork for and thus strongly contributed to the many latent and manifest views on the (post)human in world politics. Their authors are the major contextual and rhetorical “attractors” of various debates about the human, and particularly “human nature.” Many of them have provided and still do form the backbone of various international political theories and philosophies. In this sense, Aristotle 1995 and Plato 2008 lay the foundations for ideas about how being human is inherently connected with political-community formation. Descartes 2008 , Hume 2001 , Kant 2006 , and Marx and Engels 2011 elaborate from different angles on the potential of human autonomy. Hobbes 1991 and Darwin 2008 focus on the malleability of the human via education and evolution.

Aristotle. Politics . 2d rev. ed. Translated by Ernest Barker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Aristotle’s work traces the interdependence between the human and the political. He argues that both reveal and take on their true form only in relation to each other. Politics, always conceived as political community ( polis ), is the environment in which man appears as a political animal ( zoon politicon ). Only in this can he perform his unique natural function of “the active life of the rational part of the soul” (chapter XII) and at the same time realize the teleology of “good for man” ( eudaimonia ). As the idea of striving for happiness, this undoubtedly still finds strong resonance in early-21st-century politics.

Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species . Rev. ed. Edited by Gillian Beer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Darwin’s work, originally published in 1859, sits at the intersection of diverse approaches to the concept of evolution: while the idea that the human species changes over time had been around since Greek antiquity, it was commonly accepted only after this publication. It is relevant as a basic read because evolutionary perspectives are now also common in IR. Particularly Darwin’s tripartite explanatory mechanism has now been applied to the analysis of many core phenomena of world politics and is also recognizable in other theories of the political.

Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies . Translated by Michael Moriarty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

In his Meditations , first published in 1641, Descartes rewrites the classical notion of the hypokeimenon —a self-sufficient entity that founds its own being and, in turn, everything else—by combining it with the idea of the cogitans and subsequently delegating the grounds of certainty from an objective outside to the subjective inside. Hence, humans were no longer simply “things” in a world of other things but became the foundation of the world. This laid the basis for the still-prevailing view that humans are individuals whose subjectivity rests on their consciousness.

Hobbes, Thomas. Man and Citizen: De Homine and De Cive . Edited by Bernard Gert. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991.

Usually recognized for his influence on realism, this volume, originally published in 1642, presents a differentiated view of the human. It reveals why Hobbes’s “state of nature” must not be mistaken for an account of a universal “human nature.” The book shows that his writings present mostly select (albeit negative) aspects of human behavior rooted in a misguided education and socialization. While humans do have a biological nature, it is nevertheless assumed to be malleable.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature . Edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Directed against the Cartesian project of certainty, Hume’s philosophy of “human nature” elaborates on the mind not in the sense of reason but rather with a focus on its experiential dimension as well as potential for imagination. This work, first published in 1739, is groundbreaking insofar as it not only introduces a historical dimension to common life but also grants the human the agency to actively shape his own societal and political contexts.

Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Kant held that the first three core questions of philosophy converge to answer a final fourth question of “What is the human being?” In distinguishing a pragmatic anthropology from a biological one, this book, first published in 1798, is post-anthropological insofar as it focuses mostly on autonomy (i.e., the potential of the indeterminateness of humans). It is important since it subsequently and together with Kant’s other treatises lays the foundation for a still-prevailing understanding of the human as a subject.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology . Edited by Roy Pascal. Mansfield, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2011.

Long unpublished (written in 1846 but not published until 1932), it outlines Marx’s philosophy of history. Particularly in building on his sixth thesis on Feuerbach, this reveals his view of the human. Criticizing classical ideas of “human nature,” Marx prefers the term “species-being” and lays out how humans are shaped not by nature but rather by their social interactions. The term can be read both anthropologically and post-anthropologically, since the status of the “ true nature” from which man is supposedly alienated is contested.

Plato. Republic . Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

As a representative of mind-body dualism, Plato focuses on the former, understood as soul and its tripartite structure (reason, appetite, will). The different conceivable relations of these elements create different societies as well as structures of rule. However, only when the soul is in harmony is the individual and thus society in balance. Plato’s way there leads through a just society organized via political education. Similar to Aristotle, the close interlocking of concepts of “human nature” with the organization of political communities is also evident here, albeit from a different angle.

back to top

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login .

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here .

• About International Relations »
• Meet the Editorial Board »
• Academic Theories of International Relations Since 1945
• Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
• Arab-Israeli Wars
• Arab-Israeli Wars, 1967-1973, The
• Armed Conflicts/Violence against Civilians Data Sets
• Arms Control
• Asylum Policies
• Audience Costs and the Credibility of Commitments
• Authoritarian Regimes
• Balance of Power Theory
• Bargaining Theory of War
• Brazilian Foreign Policy, The Politics of
• Canadian Foreign Policy
• Case Study Methods in International Relations
• Casualties and Politics
• Causation in International Relations
• Central Europe
• Challenge of Communism, The
• China and Japan
• China's Defense Policy
• China’s Foreign Policy
• Chinese Approaches to Strategy
• Cities and International Relations
• Civil Resistance
• Civil Society in the European Union
• Cold War, The
• Colonialism
• Comparative Foreign Policy Security Interests
• Comparative Regionalism
• Complex Systems Approaches to Global Politics
• Conflict Behavior and the Prevention of War
• Conflict Management
• Conflict Management in the Middle East
• Constructivism
• Contemporary Shia–Sunni Sectarian Violence
• Counterinsurgency
• Countermeasures in International Law
• Coups and Mutinies
• Criminal Law, International
• Critical Theory of International Relations
• Cuban Missile Crisis, The
• Cultural Diplomacy
• Cyber Security
• Cyber Warfare
• Decision-Making, Poliheuristic Theory of
• Demobilization, Post World War I
• Democracies and World Order
• Democracy and Conflict
• Democracy in World Politics
• Deterrence Theory
• Development
• Digital Diplomacy
• Diplomacy, Gender and
• Diplomacy, History of
• Diplomacy in the ASEAN
• Diplomacy, Public
• Disaster Diplomacy
• Diversionary Theory of War
• Drone Warfare
• Eastern Front (World War I)
• Economic Coercion and Sanctions
• Economics, International
• Embedded Liberalism
• Emerging Powers and BRICS
• Empirical Testing of Formal Models
• Energy and International Security
• Environmental Peacebuilding
• Epidemic Diseases and their Effects on History
• Ethics and Morality in International Relations
• Ethnicity in International Relations
• European Migration Policy
• European Security and Defense Policy, The
• European Union as an International Actor
• European Union, International Relations of the
• Experiments
• Face-to-Face Diplomacy
• Fascism, The Challenge of
• Feminist Methodologies in International Relations
• Feminist Security Studies
• Food Security
• Forecasting in International Relations
• Foreign Aid and Assistance
• Foreign Direct Investment
• Foreign Policy Decision-Making
• Foreign Policy of Non-democratic Regimes
• Foreign Policy of Saudi Arabia
• Foreign Policy, Theories of
• French Empire, 20th-Century
• From Club to Network Diplomacy
• Future of NATO
• Game Theory and Interstate Conflict
• Gender and Terrorism
• Genocide, Politicide, and Mass Atrocities Against Civilian...
• Genocides, 20th Century
• Geopolitics and Geostrategy
• Germany in World War II
• Global Citizenship
• Global Civil Society
• Global Constitutionalism
• Global Environmental Politics
• Global Ethic of Care
• Global Governance
• Global Justice, Western Perspectives
• Globalization
• Governance of the Arctic
• Grand Strategy
• Greater Middle East, The
• Greek Crisis
• Hague Conferences (1899, 1907)
• Hierarchies in International Relations
• History and International Relations
• Human Nature in International Relations
• Human Rights
• Human Rights and Humanitarian Diplomacy
• Human Rights, Feminism and
• Human Rights Law
• Human Security
• Hybrid Warfare
• Ideal Diplomat, The
• Identity and Foreign Policy
• Ideology, Values, and Foreign Policy
• Illicit Trade and Smuggling
• Imperialism
• Indian Perspectives on International Relations, War, and C...
• Indigenous Rights
• Industrialization
• Intelligence
• Intelligence Oversight
• Internal Displacement
• International Conflict Settlements, The Durability of
• International Criminal Court, The
• International Economic Organizations (IMF and World Bank)
• International Health Governance
• International Justice, Theories of
• International Law, Feminist Perspectives on
• International Monetary Relations, History of
• International Negotiation and Conflict Resolution
• International Nongovernmental Organizations
• International Norms for Cultural Preservation and Cooperat...
• International Organizations
• International Relations, Aesthetic Turn in
• International Relations as a Social Science
• International Relations, Practice Turn in
• International Relations, Research Ethics in
• International Security
• International Society
• International Society, Theorizing
• International Support For Nonstate Armed Groups
• Internet Law
• Interstate Cooperation Theory and International Institutio...
• Intervention and Use of Force
• Interviews and Focus Groups
• Iran, Politics and Foreign Policy
• Iraq: Past and Present
• Japanese Foreign Policy
• Just War Theory
• Kurdistan and Kurdish Politics
• Law of the Sea
• Laws of War
• Leadership in International Affairs
• Leadership Personality Characteristics and Foreign Policy
• League of Nations
• Lean Forward and Pull Back Options for US Grand Strategy
• Mediation and Civil Wars
• Mediation in International Conflicts
• Mediation via International Organizations
• Memory and World Politics
• Mercantilism
• Middle East, The Contemporary
• Middle Powers and Regional Powers
• Military Science
• Minorities in the Middle East
• Minority Rights
• Morality in Foreign Policy
• Multilateralism (1992–), Return to
• National Liberation, International Law and Wars of
• National Security Act of 1947, The
• Nation-Building
• Nations and Nationalism
• NATO, Europe, and Russia: Security Issues and the Border R...
• Natural Resources, Energy Politics, and Environmental Cons...
• New Multilateralism in the Early 21st Century
• Nonproliferation and Counterproliferation
• Nonviolent Resistance Datasets
• Normative Aspects of International Peacekeeping
• Normative Power Beyond the Eurocentric Frame
• Nuclear Proliferation
• Peace Education in Post-Conflict Zones
• Peace of Utrecht
• Peacebuilding, Post-Conflict
• Peacekeeping
• Political Demography
• Political Economy of National Security
• Political Extremism in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Political Learning and Socialization
• Political Psychology
• Politics and Islam in Turkey
• Politics and Nationalism in Cyprus
• Politics of Extraction: Theories and New Concepts for Crit...
• Politics of Resilience
• Popuism and Global Politics
• Popular Culture and International Relations
• Post-Civil War State
• Post-Conflict and Transitional Justice
• Post-Conflict Reconciliation in the Middle East and North ...
• Power Transition Theory
• Preventive War and Preemption
• Prisoners, Treatment of
• Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs)
• Process Tracing Methods
• Pro-Government Militias
• Proliferation
• Prospect Theory in International Relations
• Psychoanalysis in Global Politics and International Relati...
• Psychology and Foreign Policy
• Public Opinion and Foreign Policy
• Public Opinion and the European Union
• Quantum Social Science
• Race and International Relations
• Rebel Governance
• Reconciliation
• Reflexivity and International Relations
• Religion and International Relations
• Religiously Motivated Violence
• Reputation in International Relations
• Responsibility to Protect
• Rising Powers in World Politics
• Role Theory in International Relations
• Russian Foreign Policy
• Russian Revolutions and Civil War, 1917–1921
• Sanctions in International Law
• Science Diplomacy
• Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), The
• Secrecy and Diplomacy
• Securitization
• Self-Determination
• Shining Path
• Sinophone and Japanese International Relations Theory
• Small State Diplomacy
• Social Scientific Theories of Imperialism
• Sovereignty
• Soviet Union in World War II
• Space Strategy, Policy, and Power
• Spatial Dependencies and International Mediation
• State Theory in International Relations
• Status in International Relations
• Strategic Air Power
• Strategic and Net Assessments
• Sub-Saharan Africa, Conflict Formations in
• Sustainable Development
• Systems Theory
• Teaching International Relations
• Territorial Disputes
• Terrorism and Poverty
• Terrorism, Geography of
• Terrorist Financing
• Terrorist Group Strategies
• The Changing Nature of Diplomacy
• The Politics and Diplomacy of Neutrality
• The Politics and Diplomacy of the First World War
• The Queer in/of International Relations
• the Twenty-First Century, Alliance Commitments in
• The Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic and Consular Relation...
• Theories of International Relations, Feminist
• Theory, Chinese International Relations
• Time Series Approaches to International Affairs
• Transnational Actors
• Transnational Law
• Transnational Social Movements
• Tribunals, War Crimes and
• Trust and International Relations
• UN Security Council
• United Nations, The
• United States and Asia, The
• Uppsala Conflict Data Program
• US and Africa
• US–UK Special Relationship
• Voluntary International Migration
• War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714)
• Weapons of Mass Destruction
• Western Balkans
• Western Front (World War I)
• Westphalia, Peace of (1648)
• Women and Peacemaking Peacekeeping
• World Economy 1919-1939
• World Polity School
• World War II Diplomacy and Political Relations
• World-System Theory
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility

Powered by:

• [66.249.64.20|185.80.151.41]
• 185.80.151.41

• Advanced Search
• All new items
• Journal articles
• Manuscripts
• All Categories
• Metaphysics and Epistemology
• Epistemology
• Metaphilosophy
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Religion
• Value Theory
• Applied Ethics
• Meta-Ethics
• Normative Ethics
• Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality
• Philosophy of Law
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Value Theory, Miscellaneous
• Science, Logic, and Mathematics
• Logic and Philosophy of Logic
• Philosophy of Biology
• Philosophy of Cognitive Science
• Philosophy of Computing and Information
• Philosophy of Mathematics
• Philosophy of Physical Science
• Philosophy of Social Science
• Philosophy of Probability
• General Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Science, Misc
• History of Western Philosophy
• Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy
• Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy
• 17th/18th Century Philosophy
• 19th Century Philosophy
• 20th Century Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy, Misc
• Philosophical Traditions
• African/Africana Philosophy
• Asian Philosophy
• Continental Philosophy
• European Philosophy
• Philosophy of the Americas
• Philosophical Traditions, Miscellaneous
• Philosophy, Misc
• Philosophy, Introductions and Anthologies
• Philosophy, General Works
• Teaching Philosophy
• Philosophy, Miscellaneous
• Other Academic Areas
• Natural Sciences
• Social Sciences
• Cognitive Sciences
• Formal Sciences
• Arts and Humanities
• Professional Areas
• Other Academic Areas, Misc
• Submit a book or article
• Upload a bibliography
• Personal page tracking
• Archives we track
• Information for publishers
• Introduction
• Submitting to PhilPapers
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Subscriptions
• Editor's Guide
• The Categorization Project
• For Publishers
• For Archive Admins
• PhilPapers Surveys
• Bargain Finder
• About PhilPapers
• Create an account

Three theories of human nature

Author's profile.

Reprint years

Philarchive, external links.

• From the Publisher via CrossRef (no proxy)

• interscience.wiley.com (no proxy)
• onlinelibrary.wiley.com (no proxy)

Through your library

• Sign in / register and customize your OpenURL resolver
• Configure custom resolver

Similar books and articles

Citations of this work, references found in this work.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Thirteen Theories of Human Nature

thirteen theories of human nature

Related Papers

Mikael Stenmark

usama binjunaid

Philosophy Compass

munaza kazmi

Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization -- Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 3rd Ed 686p(2017)

Michael R Starks

Like most writing on human behavior, these articles lack a coherent framework and so I hesitate to recommend this book to anyone, as the experienced ought to have about the same perspective I do, and the naïve will mostly be wasting their time. Since I find most of these essays obviously off the mark or just very dull, I can't generate much enthusiasm for commenting on them, so after providing what I consider a reasonable precis of a framework (see my other articles for an expanded version) I provide cursory comments on the various articles. Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my article The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language as Revealed in Wittgenstein and Searle 59p(2016). For all my articles on Wittgenstein and Searle see my e-book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Wittgenstein and Searle 367p (2016). Those interested in all my writings in their most recent versions may consult my e-book Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2016’ 662p (2016). All of my papers and books have now been published in revised versions both in ebooks and in printed books. Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071HVC7YP. The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071P1RP1B. Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711R5LGX Suicide by Democracy: an Obituary for America and the World (2018) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQVWV9C

This paper attempts to explore the behavioral characteristics of human beings from a point of view that is not based on inter-human comparisons, but on an examination of the intrinsic physical, biological, intellectual, emotional, and social characteristics of this species. It is argued that the experience-based nature of the human cognitive system greatly reduces our ability to adapt to changes in our environment, exploit opportunities, and create new knowledge. A fundamental biological survival instinct drives the human being to seek a level of certainty and security that is irreconcilable with a continuously changing and largely unpredictable environment. The symptoms of this distinctly human struggle manifest themselves in a strong resistance to change and an emotional aversion to experimentation and risk taking. The author postulates that the merging of biology and technology will allow the human species to accelerate progress along its evolutionary path in preparation for a se...

Najwa M. Hesimuddin (Jojo)

Not complete .

Fernando A G Alcoforado

Israel Wajda

عہہأيہہشہہ فہہوور

We live at a time of multiple revolutions in science, particularly in medical science and technology. Profound innovations are emerging that will not just change the problems we address or the ways we respond to problems, but which may transform the sorts of creatures that we are. Our species may be changed for better or worse by what is in prospect. The nature of the human species is therefore at stake. " The Past, Present and Future of Human Nature " might seem all encompassing, but it leaves almost everything out. For most of the time that living creatures have existed there have been no humans and thus no human nature. We are a recent and probably transient phenomenon; we are well advised to keep that humbling fact in mind. Still, as a member of this recent but disarmingly clever species, I have an interest in understanding what our nature is, what it might become, and how that might depend on the choices we make. It is distinctively human to engage in self-conscious reflection on our own nature. Doing so has gone on for all of recorded human history and must have been going on longer than that. Wonder is among the most salient distinguishing characteristics of humans: we are the self-reflective creature. Our intellectual history centers prominently on efforts to understand our own behavior and motivations, our relationship to nature, and our place in the universe or, on some views, beyond. We have devoted much thought to exploring whether we are by nature altruistic or selfish, warlike or peace-loving, monogamous or polygamous, shaped more by genetics or by experience and environment, driven by deterministic causes or free to make autonomous choices. We have sought answers to understand the human condition, and to know whether we are the result of purposive design or the chance product of natural processes. We have long wondered about the relationship among our minds, our brains, and the baffling phenomena of consciousness, personal identity, and self-awareness. These issues were historically addressed primarily by philosophers and theologians; now, they are also vigorously pursued by others such as sociobiologists, cognitive neuroscientists, computational linguists, and physicists. We have sought to discern what about ourselves is inherent in our nature and what is socially constructed. We find ourselves unendingly fascinating. On the traditional Judeo-Christian view, humans were the apex of God's intentional creation; distinct from the rest of the world, they exerted dominion over nature. Other views, such as those of some Native American cultures, saw humans as being at one with nature, properly seeking harmony with the larger whole. Science, even in its earliest iterations, is the human effort to understand what nature

RELATED PAPERS

Dian Novita

Dian Novita sari

Applied Geomatics (2020) 12:209–223

nutan tyagi

Liselotte Nyström Böhm

SISTEM Jurnal Ilmu Ilmu Teknik

Denny Kurniawati

Gabriele Carbone

Noopur Sinha

Eduardo Migon

Health Science Journal of Indonesia

Nina Mariana

Quaternary International

László Bartosiewicz

Geophysical Research Letters

Bernd Sierk

2015 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Proceedings

nasser ghariban

Digestive and Liver Disease

Maria Di Martino

RSC Advances

Journal of Religion &amp; Spirituality in Social Work: Social Thought

Brian Corbin

Industrial Engineering Journal

Nukhe Silviana

Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management

Stéphanie Horion

Kirsty Leśniak

Anaesthesia and Intensive Care

Zeynep Kayhan

Problems of Strength and Plasticity

Sergey Shevtsov

Forest Ecology and Management

Åke Lindelöw

Nucleic Acids Research

Man-chiu Poon

Ancient science of life

Gorica Cvijanovic

International Journal of Hydrogen Energy

See More Documents Like This

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

An Empirical Argument for Mencius’ Theory of Human Nature

• Published: 12 April 2022
• Volume 21 , pages 235–259, ( 2022 )

Cite this article

• Ilari Mäkelä 1  

433 Accesses

Explore all metrics

Mencius 孟子 is famous for arguing that human nature is good ( xingshan 性善). In this article, I offer a reading of Mencius’ argument which can be evaluated in terms of empirical psychology. In this reading, Mencius’ argument begins with three claims: (1) humans naturally have prosocial inclinations, (2) prosocial inclinations can be cultivated into mature forms of virtue, and (3) the growth of prosocial inclinations is more natural than the growth of their alternatives. I also argue that each of these claims is well supported by empirical psychology. The relevant studies demonstrate, for example, that humans’ prosocial inclinations are not merely products of social conditioning or egoistic concerns; that prosocial inclinations can be cultivated by environmental factors and personal effort; that humans—even preverbal infants—have a natural inclination to prefer prosociality over its alternatives; and that growth in prosociality is positively associated with human health. Finally, I suggest we interpret Mencius’ expression “human nature is good” as a rhetorical tool to capture the totality of such empirically minded claims.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Prosocial Behavior

Natural Goodness

Universal norm psychology leads to societal diversity in prosocial behaviour and development

Bailey R. House, Patricia Kanngiesser, … Joan B. Silk

Alden, Lynn E., and Jennifer L. Trew. 2013. “If It Makes You Happy: Engaging in Kind Acts Increases Positive Affect in Socially Anxious Individuals.” Emotion 13.1: 64–75.

Article   Google Scholar  

Ames, Roger T. 1991. “The Mencian Conception of Ren Xing : Does It Mean ‘Human Nature’?” In Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts: Essays Dedicated to Angus C. Graham , edited by Henry Rosemont. La Salle: Open Court.

Banka, Rafal. 2016. “Psychological Argumentation in Confucian Ethics as a Methodological Issue in Cross-Cultural Philosophy.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 15.4: 591–606.

Baron-Cohen, Simon. 2011. Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty . New York: Allen Lane.

Google Scholar  

Batson, C. Daniel. 2011. Altruism in Humans . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Beck, E. M., and Stewart E. Tolnay. 1990. “The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Market for Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks, 1882–1930.” American Sociological Review 55.4: 526–539.

Bennett, C. Susanne. 2006. “Attachment Theory and Research Applied to the Conceptualization and Treatment of Pathological Narcissism.” Clinical Social Work Journal 34.1: 45–60.

Blair, R. J., L. Jones, F. Clark, and M. Smith. 1997. “The Psychopathic Individual: A Lack of Responsiveness to Distress Cues?” Psychophysiology 34.2: 192–198.

Bloom, Irene, trans. 2009. Mencius . Edited and with an introduction by Philip J. Ivanhoe. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bloom, Paul. 2013. Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil . 1st ed. New York: Crown Publishers.

______. 2017. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion . 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Böckler, Anne, Anita Tusche, Peter Schmidt, and Tania Singer. 2018. “Distinct Mental Trainings Differentially Affect Altruistically Motivated, Norm Motivated, and Self-Reported Prosocial Behaviour.” Scientific Reports 8.1: 13560. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-31813-8 (last accessed on February 25, 2022).

Bowlby, John. 1944. “Forty-four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home-life.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 25: 19–53.

Brown, Stephanie. 2003. “An Altruistic Reanalysis of the Social Support Hypothesis: The Health Benefits of Giving.” New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising 42: 49–57.

Brown, Stephanie L., and R Michael Brown. 2015. “Connecting Prosocial Behavior to Improved Physical Health: Contributions from the Neurobiology of Parenting.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 55: 1–17.

Burnette, Mandi L., Assaf Oshri, Rachael Lax, Dayton Richards, and Shayne N. Ragbeer. 2012. “Pathways from Harsh Parenting to Adolescent Antisocial Behavior: A Multidomain Test of Gender Moderation.” Development and Psychopathology 24.3: 857–870.

Callaghan, Tara, Henrike Moll, Hannes Rakoczy, Felix Warneken, Ulf Liszkowski, Tanya Behne, and Michael Tomasello. 2011. “Early Social Cognition in Three Cultural Contexts.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development .

Casimir, Michael, and Michael Schnegg. 2002. “Shame Across Cultures: The Evolution, Ontogeny and Function of a ‘Moral Emotion’.” In Between Culture and Biology: Perspectives on Ontogenetic Development , edited by H. Keller and Y. H. Poortingha. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chida, Yoichi, and Andrew Steptoe. 2009. “The Association of Anger and Hostility with Future Coronary Heart Disease: A Meta-Analytic Review of Prospective Evidence.” Journal of the American College of Cardiology 53.11: 936–946.

Choi, Dobin. 2018. “Moral Artisanship in Mengzi 6A7.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 17.3: 331–348.

Chopik, William J., Ed O’Brien, and Sara H. Konrath. 2017. “Differences in Empathic Concern and Perspective Taking Across 63 Countries.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 48.1: 23–38.

Condon, Paul, Gaëlle Desbordes, Willa B. Miller, and David DeSteno. 2013. “Meditation Increases Compassionate Responses to Suffering.” Psychological Science 24.10: 2125–2127.

Cua, A. S. 1978. “The Quasi-Empirical Aspect of Hsün-Tzu’s Philosophy of Human Nature.” Philosophy East and West 28.1: 3–19.

Dawkins, Richard. 2006. Selfish Gene . 30th anniversary ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

DeLisi, Matt, Alan J. Drury, and Michael J. Elbert. 2019. “The Etiology of Antisocial Personality Disorder: The Differential Roles of Adverse Childhood Experiences and Childhood Psychopathology.” Comprehensive Psychiatry 92: 1–6.

de Waal, Frans B. M. 2019. Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves . 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Der Spiegel. 1962. “Himmlers Wölffchen.” https://www.spiegel.de/politik/himmlers-woelffchen-a-e23a4fef-0002-0001-0000-000045138994 (last accessed on March 29, 2021).

Doris, John M. 2002. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Feng, Youlan, and Derk Bodde. 1997. A Short History of Chinese Philosophy . New York: Free Press.

Flanagan, Owen. 2016. Geography of Morals . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Flook, Lisa, Simon B. Goldberg, Laura Pinger, and Richard J. Davidson. 2015. “Promoting Prosocial Behavior and Self-Regulatory Skills in Preschool Children through a Mindfulness-Based Kindness Curriculum.” Developmental Psychology 51.1: 44–51.

Foot, Philippa. 2001. Natural Goodness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Frazier, Annabelle, Patricia A. Ferreira, and Joseph E. Gonzales. 2019. “Born This Way? A Review of Neurobiological and Environmental Evidence for the Etiology of Psychopathy.” Personality Neuroscience 2: e8, 1–16.

Galler, Janina R., Deborah Waber, Robert Harrison, and Frank Ramsey. 2005. “Behavioral Effects of Childhood Malnutrition.” American Journal of Psychiatry 162.9: 1760–1761.

Gentile, Douglas A., and Craig A. Anderson et al. 2009. “The Effects of Prosocial Video Games on Prosocial Behaviors: International Evidence from Correlational, Longitudinal, and Experimental Studies.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35.6: 752–763.

Ghiselin, Michael T. 1974. The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Goldstein, Arnold P., Mark Sherman, N. Jane Gershaw, Robert P. Sprafkin, and Barry Glick. 1978. “Training Aggressive Adolescents in Prosocial Behavior.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 7.1: 73–92.

Graham, Angus C. 1967. “The Background of the Mencian Theory of Human Nature.” Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies 6: 215–271.

Gustafson, Daniel. 2020. “Hunger to Violence: Explaining the Violent Escalation of Nonviolent Demonstrations.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 64.6: 1121–1145.

Haidt, Jonathan. 2003. “‘Elevation and the Positive Psychology of Morality.” In Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived , edited by Corey L. M. Keyes and Jonathan Haidt. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

______. 2013. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion . New York: Vintage Books.

Hamlin, J. Kiley, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom. 2007. “Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants.” Nature 450.7169: 557–559.

Hare, Brian, and Vanessa Woods. 2020. Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity . 1st ed. New York: Random House.

Harlow, H., and R. Zimmerman. 1959. “Affectionate Response in the Infant Monkey.” Science 130: 421–432.

Harman, Gilbert. 2000. “The Nonexistence of Character Traits.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100.2: 223–226.

Harbaugh, William T., Ulrich Mayr, and Daniel R. Burghart. 2007. “Neural Responses to Taxation and Voluntary Giving Reveal Motives for Charitable Donations.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 316.5831: 1622–1625.

Harris, Nadine B. 2018. The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-term Effects of Childhood Adversity . New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Hoge, Elizabeth A., Maxine M. Chen, Esther Orr, Christina A. Metcalf, Laura E. Fischer, Mark H. Pollack, Immaculata De Vivo, and Naomi M. Simon. 2013. “Loving-Kindness Meditation Practice Associated with Longer Telomeres in Women.” Brain, Behavior, and Immunity 32: 159–163.

Hunter, K. I., and Margaret W. Linn. 1981. “Psychosocial Differences between Elderly Volunteers and Non-Volunteers.” The International Journal of Aging and Human Development 12.3: 205–213.

Hutton, Eric. 2002. “Moral Connoisseurship in Mengzi.” In Essays on the Moral Philosophy of Mengzi , edited by Xiusheng L iu and Philip Ivanhoe. Indianapolis: Hackett.

______, trans. 2014. Xunzi: The Complete Text . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen. 2011. “Me, My ‘Self’ and You: Neuropsychological Relations between Social Emotion, Self-Awareness, and Morality.” Emotion Review 3.3: 313–315.

Ivanhoe, P. J. 2000. Confucian Moral Self Cultivation . 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett.

______. 2009. “Introduction.” In Mencius , trans. by Irene Bloom, and edited by Philip J. Ivanhoe. New York: Columbia University Press.

______. 2015. “The Historical Significance and Contemporary Relevance of the Four-Seven Debate.” Philosophy East and West 65.2: 401–429.

Jaffee, Sara R., Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Alan Taylor. 2004. “Physical Maltreatment Victim to Antisocial Child: Evidence of an Environmentally Mediated Process.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 113.1: 44–55.

Kärtner, Joscha, Heidi Keller, and Nandita Chaudhary. 2010. “Cognitive and Social Influences on Early Prosocial Behaviour in Two Sociocultural Contexts.” Developmental Psychology 46.4: 905–914.

Kaufman, Scott Barry, and Emanuel Jauk. 2020. “Healthy Selfishness and Pathological Altruism: Measuring Two Paradoxical Forms of Selfishness.” Frontiers in Psychology 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01006 (last accessed on February 25, 2022).

Kaufman, Scott Barry, David Bryce Yaden, Elizabeth Hyde, and Eli Tsukayama. 2019. “The Light vs. Dark Triad of Personality: Contrasting Two Very Different Profiles of Human Nature.” Frontiers in Psychology 10: 467. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00467 (last accessed on February 25, 2022).

Kim, Richard T. 2015. “The Role of Human Nature in Moral Inquiry: MacIntyre, Mencius, and Xunzi.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 32.4: 313–333.

Koonz, Claudia. 2003. The Nazi Conscience . Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Kratzer, Anne. 2020. “Harsh Nazi Parenting Guidelines May Still Affect German Children of Today.” Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/harsh-nazi-parenting-guidelines-may-still-affect-german-children-of-today1/ (last accessed on April 15, 2020).

Krause, Neal, Berit Ingersoll-Dayton, Jersey Liang, and Hidehiro S ugisawa . 1999. “Religion, Social Support, and Health among the Japanese Elderly.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 40.4: 405–421.

Lau, D. C. 2000. “Theories of Human Nature in Mencius and Xunzi.” In Virtue, Nature and Moral Agency in the Xunzi , edited by T. C. Kline and Philip J. Ivanhoe. Indianapolis: Hackett.

______, trans. 2004. Mencius. London: Penguin Classics.

Law, Rita R. W. 2011. “An Analogue Study of Loving-kindness Meditation as a Buffer against Social Stress.” The University of Arizona. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. 3450739.

Leiberg, Susanne, Olga Klimecki, and Tania Singer. 2011. “Short-term Compassion Training Increases Prosocial Behavior in a Newly Developed Prosocial Game.” Plos One 6.3: e17798.

Lepper, Mark R., David Greene, and Richard E. Nisbett. 1973. “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward: A Test of the ‘Overjustification’ Hypothesis.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28.1: 129–137.

Leung, Mei-Kei, Chetwyn C. H. Chan, Jing Y in , Chack-Fan L ee , Kwok-Fai S o , and Tatia M. C. Lee. 2013. “Increased Gray Matter Volume in the Right Angular and Posterior Parahippocampal Gyri in Loving-Kindness Meditators.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 8.1: 34–39.

Liang, Tao. 2009. “Mencius and the Tradition of Articulating Human Nature in Terms of Growth.” Trans. by Andrew Lambert. Frontiers of Philosophy in China 4.2: 180–197.

Liu, JeeLoo. 2006. An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy: From Ancient Philosophy to Chinese Buddhism . Oxford: Blackwell.

MacNair, Rachel M. 2001. “Psychological Reverberations for the Killers: Preliminary Historical Evidence for Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress.” Journal of Genocide Research 3.2: 273–282.

______. 2015. “Causing Trauma as a Form of Trauma.” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 21.3: 313–321.

Martin, Sean R., Stéphane Côté, and Todd Woodruff. 2016. “Echoes of Our Upbringing: How Growing Up Wealthy or Poor Relates to Narcissism, Leader Behavior, and Leader Effectiveness.” Academy of Management Journal 59.6: 2157–2177.

McClelland, David C., and Carol Kirshnit. 1988. “The Effect of Motivational Arousal through Films on Salivary Immunoglobulin A.” Psychology & Health 2.1: 31–52.

Munro, Donald J. 2002. “Mencius and an Ethics of the New Century.” In Mencius: Contexts and Interpretations , edited by Kam-leung C han . Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Neumann, Craig, and Robert D. Hare. 2008. “Psychopathic Traits in a Large Community Sample: Links to Violence, Alcohol Use, and Intelligence.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 76.5: 893–899.

Ogilvie, Claire A., Emily Newman, Lynda Todd, and David Peck. 2014. “Attachment & Violent Offending: A Meta-Analysis.” Aggression and Violent Behavior 19.4: 322–339.

Oman, Doug, Carl E. Thoresen, and Kay Mcmahon. 1999. “Volunteerism and Mortality among the Community-Dwelling Elderly.” Journal of Health Psychology 4.3: 301–316.

“Philip Zimbardo on ‘What Makes a Hero?’”. 2020. https://www.facinghistory.org/rescuers/philip-zimbardo-what-makes-hero (last accessed on July 15, 2020).

Pietromonaco, Paula R., and Lindsey A. Beck. 2019. “Adult Attachment and Physical Health.” Current Opinion in Psychology 25: 115–120.

Piff, Paul K., Michael W. Kraus, Stéphane Côté, Bonnie Hayden Cheng, and Dacher Keltner. 2010. “Having Less, Giving More: The Influence of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99.5: 771–784.

Popper, Karl. 1947. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Vol. II. London: George Routledge & Sons.

Post, Stephen G., ed. 2005. Altruism and Health . New York: Oxford University Press.

Raine, Adrian, Kjetil Mellingen, Jianghong L iu , Peter Venables, and Sarnoff A. Mednick. 2003. “Effects of Environmental Enrichment at Ages 3–5 Years on Schizotypal Personality and Antisocial Behavior at Ages 17 and 23 Years.” American Journal of Psychiatry 160.9: 1627–1635.

Rhodes, Richard. 2003. Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust. New York: Vintage.

Rogol, Alan David. 2020. “Emotional Deprivation in Children: Growth Faltering and Reversible Hypopituitarism.” Frontiers in Endocrinology 11: 596144. https://doi.org/10.3389/fendo.2020.596144 (last accessed on February 25, 2022).

Rorty, Richard. 2009. “Responses to Critics.” In Rorty, Pragmatism, and Confucianism: With Responses by Richard Rorty , edited by Yong H uang . Albany: State University of New York Press.

Russell, Nestar. 2019. “The Nazi’s Pursuit for a ‘Humane’ Method of Killing.” In Understanding Willing Participants , Vol. 2: Milgram’s Obedience Experiments and the Holocaust , edited by Nestar Russell. Cham: Springer.

Ryan, James A. 1998. “Moral Philosophy and Moral Psychology in Mencius.” Asian Philosophy 8.1: 47–64.

Salzinger, Suzanne, Richard S. Feldman, Muriel Hammer, and Margaret Rosario. 1993. “The Effects of Physical Abuse on Children’s Social Relationships.” Child Development 64.1: 169–187.

Sapolsky, Robert M. 2004. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers . 3rd ed. New York: Times Books.

Schwartz, Carolyn. 2007. “Altruism and Subjective Well-Being: Conceptual Model and Empirical Support.” In Altruism and Health , edited by Stephen Post. New York: Oxford University Press.

Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2007. “Human Nature and Moral Education in Mencius, Xunzi, Hobbes, and Rousseau.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 24.2: 147–168.

Seok, Bongrae. 2008. “Mencius’s Vertical Faculties and Moral Nativism.” Asian Philosophy 18.1: 51–68.

Slingerland, Edward. 2007. “Chinese Thought from an Evolutionary Perspective.” Philosophy East and West 57.3: 375–388.

______. 2011. “The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics.” Ethics 121.2: 390–419.

Sober, Elliott, and David Sloan Wilson. 1998. Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sugimoto, Tasuku, Hiromi K obayashi , Noritomo N obuyoshi , Yasushi K iriyama , Hideko T akeshita , Tomoyasu N akamura , and Kazuhide H ashiya . 2010. “Preference for Consonant Music over Dissonant Music by an Infant Chimpanzee.” Primates 51.1: 7–12.

Tan, Charlene. 2019. “Rethinking the Concept of Mindfulness: A Neo-Confucian Approach.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 53.2: 359–373.

Tomasello, Michael, Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Michael Skyrms, and Elisabeth Spelke. 2009. Why We Cooperate . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Tonelli, Makenzie E., and Amy B. Wachholtz. 2014. “Meditation-based Treatment Yielding Immediate Relief for Meditation-naïve Migraineurs.” Pain Management Nursing: Official Journal of the American Society of Pain Management Nurses 15.1: 36–40.

Usman, Solomon Ayegba. 2015. “Unemployment and Poverty as Sources and Consequence of Insecurity in Nigeria: The Boko Haram Insurgency Revisited.” African Journal of Political Science and International Relations 9.3: 90–99.

Van Norden, Bryan W. 2007. Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy . New York: Cambridge University Press.

______, trans. 2009. Mengzi: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries . Indianapolis: Hackett.

Waley, Arthur. 1939. Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China . Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Warneken, Felix, and Michael Tomasello. 2008. “Extrinsic Rewards Undermine Altruistic Tendencies in 20-Month-Olds.” Developmental Psychology 44.6: 1785–1788.

Weinstein, Netta, and Richard M. Ryan. 2010. “When Helping Helps: Autonomous Motivation for Prosocial Behavior and Its Influence on Well-Being for the Helper and Recipient.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98.2: 222–244.

Westermann, Edward B. 2016. “Stone-Cold Killers or Drunk with Murder? Alcohol and Atrocity during the Holocaust.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30.1: 1–19.

Wilson, David Sloan, and Edward O. Wilson. 2008. “Evolution ‘for the Good of the Group’: The Process Known as Group Selection Was Once Accepted Unthinkingly, Then Was Widely Discredited; It’s Time for a More Discriminating Assessment.” American Scientist 96.5: 380–389.

Wittig, Roman M., Catherine Crockford, Tobias Deschner, Kevin E. Langergraber, Toni E. Ziegler, and Klaus Zuberbühler. 2014. “Food Sharing Is Linked to Urinary Oxytocin Levels and Bonding in Related and Unrelated Wild Chimpanzees.” Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences 281.1778: 20133096. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2013.3096 (last accessed on February 25, 2022).

Wong, David. 2015. “Growing Virtue: The Theory and Science of Developing Compassion from a Mencian Perspective.” In The Philosophical Challenge from China , edited by Brian Bruya. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Zahn-Waxler, Carolyn, and Marian Radke-Yarrow. 1990. “The Origins of Empathic Concern.” Motivation and Emotion 14.2: 107–130.

Download references

Acknowledgments

I am greatly indebted to Roger T. Ames for his extensive help during the preparation of this essay. I am also grateful for the immensely valuable comments of P eng Feng, W en Haiming, and T ian Chenshan, as well as two anonymous reviewers. They helped me avert many mistakes.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Yenching Academy, Peking University, Jingyuan Courtyard 3, 5 Yiheyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing, Municipality of Beijing, 100871, People’s Republic of China

Ilari Mäkelä

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ilari Mäkelä .

Additional information

Publisher’s note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Mäkelä, I. An Empirical Argument for Mencius’ Theory of Human Nature. Dao 21 , 235–259 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11712-022-09827-x

Download citation

Published : 12 April 2022

Issue Date : June 2022

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11712-022-09827-x

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Confucianism
• Human nature
• Moral psychology
• Prosociality
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

Human Nature and Instincts: Theories and Principles Essay

Introduction, argument for and against human nature, validity of human instincts.

Humanity can best be described by the special characters and personality that exist amongst the human race. Varied scholars and psychologists have over the years developed a special interest in studying how different people act, react and behave under similar situations. From these studies, it has been conclusively determined that situations in which similar behaviors and responses are exhibited appear to be common for all people (Dougall, 2008). These attributes have been summarized into one general term: human nature. This paper shall set out to provide a detailed exploration of the theories and principles that best explain the existence or lack thereof of human nature. From these discussions, we shall be able to determine whether the concept of human instinct does exist or not.

Dewey (2007) proposes that the term “human nature” refers to the inbuilt differentiated characteristics that human beings tend to have as regarding to thoughts, feelings and behavior. The author claims that human nature is innate and fixed and cannot therefore be altered by others or by situations affecting our lives. Fear, happiness, greed and love are feelings common in all human beings and are not taught but activated through the nurturing process. In addition to this, Dewey (2007) further asserts that it is common and perfectly natural for humans to have wants and needs. The presence of these two aspects consequently fosters feelings of greed, selfishness and the desire to help one another.

However, the concept of human nature is not universally accepted as can be demonstrated by Evans (2004) who argues for the Karl Marx’s theory of human nature which assumes that human beings are a blank slate at birth with no thoughts or feelings. Marx claimed that the character and personality that human beings posses are inducted in them through the process of socialization and civilization. He claimed that if a child is born in a violent time, he will grow up to be a violent man and if a child is born in a peaceful environment, he will undoubtedly be an advocate for peace. According to this theory, Marx asserts that human nature is developed through our life experiences and is not inborn as Dewey states (Evans, 2004).

In an interview carried out by Kate Soper (1998), Noam Chomsky reiterates that the political, social, cultural and religious stance that one takes is based on the conception of human nature. She argues that decisions made on these aspects are derived from human wants and potential which constitute to human nature. Chomsky continues by saying that through history, people like Genghis Khan, Bill gates, the Nazis and even Jesus justify their actions through the fundamental principle a common good for all (Soper, 1998). This means that they did what they did not for their personal gain but in order to help others and make a difference. This principal is true because the desire to make a difference is within us as a human race. It is a basic want, and we all have a potential to do so. This undoubtedly justifies the existence human nature.

On the other hand, most pre-modernists contest this argument by asserting that human nature has no effect on our mental make up, our wants, values and knowledge. They claim that a child born and raised in New York will develop a different way of thinking separate from a child raised amongst the Amazon tribes’ people. They argue that this is because every human being constructs a complex mental framework of coping with the environment they are in based on the challenges and phenomenon that they are dully exposed to. This goes to show that human nature does not exist and even if it did, it would have little to no impact on our continual survival, ability to gain knowledge, values and aspirations.

The perception of morality has been contested to vary from person to person (Lemetti & Piirimäe, 2007). As such, what one person deems as immoral may be ethical to another person and vise versa. One of the prominent 19 th century thinkers, Hobbes, theorized that human beings are naturally evil and as such, require some sort of governance to monitor and control their actions (Lemetti & Piirimäe, 2007). This fact can be reinforced when one takes a look at the situation in places like the Middle East where due to lack of governance, the states have been reduced to a state of chaos and war. Additionally, our ability to determine what is good or evil is perfectly natural but the decision making structure as pertaining to these aspects is instinctual. Dougall (2008) defines instincts as, “Natural inward impulse; unconscious, involuntary, or unreasoning prompting to any mode of action, whether bodily, or mental, without a distinct apprehension of the end or object to be accomplished.” Human instincts are inborn and are used to facilitate our survival. According to Dougall (2008), the environment in which a person stays does not push him to doing good or evil. Such decisions are inclined to their need for survival which is at most times called the “survival instincts”. Naturally, human beings will at all times do what they deem best for themselves and those that they love.

On the same note, man’s desire to procreate, socialize, protect those close to them, eat, sleep and even feel are purely instinctual and geared towards their survival. This means that human instincts do exist and are indeed the driving force to our existence and survival in a dynamic and highly competitive society. The destruction brought about by the hurricane Katrina show cased how human nature and instincts co-exist within the society. On one hand, governments as well as private individuals dedicated their time and resources to help those that were affected by the hurricane. On the other hand, there were other people who saw an opportunity in that chaotic time and pretended to be refugees so that they could get government aid, while others resulted into looting and robbing off the little that was left, others took more than they actually needed for themselves and their families. This disaster perfectly demonstrates how naturally, some people came out to help those in need and to make a difference while others instinctively resulted into theft and vandalism in a bid to ensure their survival through the troubling time.

This paper by large demonstrates that there is overwhelming evidence that human instincts do exist and play a pivotal role in the survival of the human race. In addition to this, human needs and wants despite their differences are common to all people and are developed through the different situations and circumstances that we often find ourselves in. From the discussions presented herein, we can conclude that the understanding and existence of human nature is a complex issue and vary from person to person and as a result no definite theory or principle can best answer the questions that evolve around this issue.

Dewey, J. (2007). Human Nature and Conduct – An Introduction to Social Psychology . USA: READ BOOKS.

Dougall, W, M. (2008). An Introduction to Social Psychology. READ BOOKS.

Evans, M. (2004). Karl Marx . USA: Routledge

Lemetti, J & Piirimäe, E. (2007). Human nature as the basis of morality and society in early modern philosophy. Philosophical Society of Finland.

Soper, K. (1998). On Human Nature . Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, December 16). Human Nature and Instincts: Theories and Principles. https://ivypanda.com/essays/human-nature-and-instincts-theories-and-principles/

"Human Nature and Instincts: Theories and Principles." IvyPanda , 16 Dec. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/human-nature-and-instincts-theories-and-principles/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Human Nature and Instincts: Theories and Principles'. 16 December.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Human Nature and Instincts: Theories and Principles." December 16, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/human-nature-and-instincts-theories-and-principles/.

1. IvyPanda . "Human Nature and Instincts: Theories and Principles." December 16, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/human-nature-and-instincts-theories-and-principles/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Human Nature and Instincts: Theories and Principles." December 16, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/human-nature-and-instincts-theories-and-principles/.

• Background and Elements of Dewey’s Philosophy
• John Dewey Theory
• John Dewey's Ideas on Education Systems Renewal
• Teaching Approaches by Dewey, Montessori and Vygotsky
• Critique of Dewey's Argument for Experiential Education
• John Dewey: Philosophical Ideas of the Twentieth Century
• Darwin’s Influence on John Dewey’s Reflex Arc Concept
• Human Instincts as an Informative Tool
• Ideas of John Dewey on the Teachings of Christ
• Which Phone Is Superior Samsung Instinct or Apple iPhone?
• Mills' "The Sociological Imagination" Summary
• Housing and Community Development Concepts and Theories
• Using Sidewalks for Dissent
• The Community and Communication Concept
• Interview Techniques Most Efficient Types

PHIL102 - Theories of Human Nature

Credit points, campus offering, prerequisites, incompatible.

PHCC102 Being Human

Teaching organisation

This unit involves 150 hours of focused learning, and will be offered in both semesters in attendance mode, and intensive mode.

Unit rationale, description and aim

This unit introduces students to philosophical reflection concerning what it is to be a human being. Students examine key concepts, theories and debates relating to a range of important themes in this area, such as the nature of mind and its relation to the body; the basis of personal identity and the ‘self’; the relationship between rationality and emotion; the meaning and extent of personal freedom; the inter-personal nature of being human; the significance of gender & sexuality; considerations about the meaning of life; and the implications of human finitude and mortality. The unit aims to assist students to develop an understanding of key philosophical concepts and theories that allow them to reflect on their beliefs and assumptions, and to engage with the views of others. It also looks to enhance students’ skills in critical reflection on experience, the analysis of arguments, and the formulation and communication of coherent positions of their own.

Learning outcomes

To successfully complete this unit you will be able to demonstrate you have achieved the learning outcomes (LO) detailed in the below table. Each outcome is informed by a number of graduate capabilities (GC) to ensure your work in this, and every unit, is part of a larger goal of graduating from ACU with the attributes of insight, empathy, imagination and impact. Explore the graduate capabilities.

On successful completion of this unit, students should be able to:

LO1 - identify and demonstrate comprehension of some of the central problems and important theories concerning human nature and personhood (GA5);

LO2 - analyse and review key debates in philosophical anthropology, noting the ways in which the complexity, dignity and diversity of the human condition has been understood, and develop consistent positions in relation to them (GA1; GA4; GA8); 

LO3 - demonstrate beginning skills in the clear, well-structured and well-referenced presentation of a philosophical argument, in formal oral and/or written contexts (GA5; GA9).  

Graduate attributes

GA1 - demonstrate respect for the dignity of each individual and for human diversity 

GA4 - think critically and reflectively 

GA5 - demonstrate values, knowledge, skills and attitudes appropriate to the discipline and/or profession 

GA8 - locate, organise, analyse, synthesise and evaluate information 

GA9 - demonstrate effective communication in oral and written English language and visual media 

• Theories of mind, body and soul;
• Understandings of personal identity and the ‘self’; 
• The social nature of being human, and the common good;
• The meaning and extent of personal freedom; 
• The relationship between reason, emotion and knowledge; 
• The meaning of gender and sexuality
• The human quest for meaning, value, and fulfilment; 
• The implications of human finitude & mortality.

Learning and teaching strategy and rationale

This unit involves 150 hours of focused learning, and will be offered in both semester attendance mode, and intensive mode. Different modes are required in order to provide all students with the opportunity to satisfy their Core Curriculum requirements in the context of a diverse range of course structures across the University. Semester attendance mode allows students to develop their understanding and engagements across an extended period, while intensive mode offers a more concentrated experience with students completing readings and activities in LEO during and shortly after extended class meetings.

When offered in semester attendance mode, the unit has been designed as a blend of collaborative learning and project-based learning approaches, combined with some direct instruction to ensure that unfamiliar concepts and theories are understood. The collaborative learning aspect emerges most strongly in the interactive oral presentations and debates by students in class and which emerge out of peer learning and presentation contexts. The project-based aspect relates to the research project that students will engage in throughout the second half of the unit, culminating in their research essay. 

When offered in intensive mode, the unit will similarly utilise a blend of collaborative learning and project-based learning approaches, combined with direct instruction. The collaborative learning aspect emerges most strongly in the class or LEO forum-based interactions and which require students to enter into critical engagement with each other in thinking through key problems in the field. The project-based aspect relates to the research project that students will engage in throughout the second half of the unit, culminating in their research essay.    

Assessment strategy and rationale

The assessment strategy for this introductory unit in philosophy is designed to facilitate broad engagement with what for many students will be a new field of study, while also making possible deeper engagement with one of the unit topics. For both modes of delivery, the early structured analysis task serves to build both a knowledge base and skills needed for effective philosophical analysis. The oral presentation/debate task (in semester attendance mode) or the class or LEO forum-based interactions (in intensive mode) are designed to facilitate collaborative learning and the presentation of coherent and carefully structured arguments in dialogue with others. The research essay task (both modes) provides students with the opportunity to undertake sustained philosophical reading and research, culminating in an extended piece of formal writing that develops a coherent central argument.   

Overview of assessments

Semester attendance mode:;, intensive mode:, representative texts and references.

Aristotle (1986).  On the Soul . Hugh Lawson-Tancred (transl). London: Penguin.

Cowburn, J. (2008).  Free Will, Predestination, and Determinism . Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. 

Gallagher, S (ed). (2011)  The Oxford Handbook of the Self . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kupperman, J. J. (2010).  Theories of Human Nature . Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. 

Mandik, P. (2014).  This is Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Nicholson, S.E and Fisher, V.D., (2014).  Integral Voices on Sex, Gender, and Sexuality:

Critical Inquiries . Albany: State University of New York Press. 

Pojman, L.P. (2006).  Who Are We?: Theories of Human Nature . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Macquarrie, John. (1982)  In Search of Humanity . London: SCM Press.

Seachris, J, et al (eds). (2012).  Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide . Wiley-Blackwell.

Solomon, R. (1993).  The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life . Indianapolis: Hackett.

Have a question?

We're available 9am–5pm AEDT, Monday to Friday If you’ve got a question, our AskACU team has you covered. You can search FAQs, text us, email, live chat, call – whatever works for you.

Live chat with us now

Chat to our team for real-time answers to your questions.

Visit our FAQs page

Find answers to some commonly asked questions.