Michale Brearley will give the next talk in the London series on philosophy and sport at 5.45 on Friday, 3 February. His talk is called, 'Rivalry and Cooperation in Sport'. Please note a change of venue: this talk will be in the Archaeology Lecture Theatre, Archaeology Building, on the corner of Gordon Square and Endsleigh Place.
Report from Human Nature Conference - Adam Ferner
Posted in Philosophy on 28/06/2010 - 09:01
Human Nature
Tuesday 15th
Last week, Brookes University hosted the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s annual conference, where the focus was on the theme of ‘human nature’. The discussion of what we are, how we class ourselves, and how we relate to other animals, is a philosophical staple, but one that is coming increasingly to the fore: bio-tech advances – the possibility of human/animal hybrids – make us question our essential nature and natural kinds, while our ecological actions – from oil-spills to wider climate change – force us to consider our duties to other creatures (and ourselves). The program promised debate from three angles: the philosophy of cognitive science, the philosophy of biology, and philosophical psychology.
…it neglected, however, to mention that the conference hall was at the top of one wholly unholy mountain (Harcourt Hill) which, as a human/bike hybrid, caused me considerable grief. However – struggling for breath – I arrived just in time to catch Richard Samuels’ opening talk, an insightful survey of the current views of natural kinds, and a persuasive defence of a version of Boydian ‘homeostatic property cluster’ conception of human nature. (Brutishly put, the view is that there are no essential species features, but a set of typical regularities – ‘clusters’ – each of which typically favours the presence of others, which characterise members of that extension.) A convincing paper but I was left (along with some of the other audience members) with a lingering unease about the ‘normalcy’ of the conditions against which we measure these regularities.
Samuels’ talk was followed by Mark Cain’s valiant attempt to convince us of ‘radical concept nativism’, which states, somewhat surprisingly, that all lexical concepts (‘dog’, etc) are innate. (Faced with this kind of extreme nativism, it’s always a bit of a puzzle at what point – between egg and adult – these concepts, or proto-type concepts, start to appear.) This, in turn, was followed by Wolfram Hinzen’s examination of the role of grammar in human nature, and its contribution to the structure of the human mind. He argued that the various dietetic (referential and contextual) possibilities of syntax allow us to orient ourselves in the world in a particular way; a bare lexicon is only enough to establish categories, but grammar allows us to choose perspectives on members of those categories (my pain, paining, painfulness, pained, etc). The session ended in the traditional manner, with drinks, dinner… and more drinks.
Wednesday 16th
After my crippling cycle-ride, I took great pains on the second day to plot a pleasant route across the more idyllic pastures of Harcourt Hill. I got utterly lost, and ended up waist-deep in a field of brambles, being circled by a pack of cocker spaniels and an elderly lady, who angrily accused me of trespassing. As a result I arrived embarrassingly late, midway through Stephen Boulter’s paper on evolutionary biology’s presupposition of essentialism.
Boulter proposed that evolutionary biology fulfils its explanatory commitments only by presupposing essentialism. He defended this claim with an argument based on species diversity. The idea behind this was, roughly, that if species A splits into species B and species C, we should say both that species A has ceased to exist, and that B and C are non-identical – thus committing us to saying that their existence and identity conditions are distinct (if there are three species, there has to be something that makes them what they are, and not the others). Tracking species through change – one of the prime aims of evolutionary biology – leads to a set of existence and identity conditions. And these, he concluded, specify the Aristotelian essence of that species. The response to this paper was lively, focussing on Boulter’s assumption of the ‘tree of life’ model of evolution. To this end John Dupré emphasized the prevalence of species hybridization, particularly among bacteria that exhibit (rather excitingly!) horizontal gene transfer, where genetic material is not inherited exclusively from parent bacteria, but can be assimilated from bacterial peers. That is, the schema of species A branching into species B and C is not nearly so simple as biologists formerly supposed.
Dupré continued this foray into genetics in his talk ‘What does genomics tell us about Human Nature?’. While I found the science quite involved, the main thrust of this paper was interesting, highlighting the role that non-genetic factors play in human make-up. There does seem to be something of a philosophical fetishization of DNA and genetics (particularly, for instance, among the animalists), and Dupré helped readdress the balance by emphasizing how changes in our developmental systems – public education, mobile phones, etc – are similarly decisive factors in our evolution.
The attention to current biological and neuro-biological research continued in Tim Crow’s examination of the speech processing cortices in human brains, (which I just wish had been dumbed down slightly, for my own, feebly slow speech processing units). And this talk gave some helpful scientific background to lingualism, which was examined from a ‘philosophically anthropological’ perspective by Hans-Johann Glock. It is our linguistic capacities, Glock argued, that underpin those features that separate us from non-human animals: our highly complex social relationships, the capacity to adapt to vastly diverse circumstances, and our multifarious forms of communication.
The day finished with Kim Sterelny’s talk ‘From Fitness to Utility’. Sterelny is a prominent figure in the philosophy of biology and his paper was correspondingly rich, centring on methods of modelling human nature. He gave only a cursory setup before moving swiftly onto a synthesis of various models – which did allow him to cover considerable conceptual ground, but had the unfortunate side effect of leaving behind anybody who was relatively new to the field. For the second time that day, I have to admit, I got a little lost. In basic terms, then, his view of human nature involved representing humans as both self-interested maximisers of economic welfare (utility) and as optimisers of fitness; human phenomena are too complex for a single model, and, he argued, only a synthesis can accommodate the dynamicity of our peculiar nature.
Thursday 17th
Avoiding brambles, spaniels, hills, and pensioners, I arrived at exactly 9.30 on Thursday morning, only to discover that the session had started precipitously early thirty minutes before. However, Peter Hacker, the philosopher with the heartiest laugh in England, didn’t appear to mind. He was presenting a challenge to the ‘consciousness-studies community’, by claiming that – despite a fair amount of literature exclusively devoted to the topic – there cannot, in fact, be something that it is like to be a bat. From the point of view of English grammar, in such sentences ‘like’ drops out in existential generalization. We are asking what it is, not what it is like, the latter more properly expressed by the curiously redundant question: what is it like for a bat to be a bat?
Peter Kail then gave an illuminating account of Hume’s position on human nature. Like Montaigne before him, Hume ultimately rejected the notion that there is some metaphysical difference between humans and other animals. One thing that featured prominently in the subsequent discussion was the tension between this naturalistic stance and Hume’s egregious racism, notably his description of an ‘original’ (i.e. fundamental) distinction between the ‘Negroes and the Whites’. If there is no real distinction between humans and other animals why then, is there one between races – a form of racism that is not only repugnant but inconsistent.
Kail’s talk also distinguished itself with a fascinating reference to the Defecating Duck of 1738 (a mechanical toy that was constructed to chew grain, and excrete organic detritus). John Cottingham, a well-respected philosopher and all-round Renaissance man, upped the ante by deploying the phrase: ‘giant cosmic turd’. The aim of Cottingham’s paper ‘Human nature and the transcendent’ was to direct our attention to an under-discussed but tangible quality of human life: our transcendent longings. As human beings, he said, we are resistant to remaining content with mere existence and we strive for cosmological, aesthetic and moral explanations. On these grounds he criticised the brute facticity of the Big Bang theory, by which the universe is ‘just there’, sitting, so he said, like the aforementioned fecal deposit. Why, when it is part of our nature to question such things, are we content with such an explanatory dead end? He went on to discuss transcendent experiences, quoting from Wordsworth and Traherne, and Scruton on Wagner, but in a way which I found worryingly myopic. The phenomenology of these transcendent moments – the experience of ‘goodness tied to beauty’ – is not, as John Dupré pointed out, distinctively human, but distinctively Western. Certainly the ‘oceanic experience’ described in Buddhist literature is not remotely characterised in these terms. Having said this, maybe by dint of being one of the more contentious talks, Cottingham’s was also one of the most interesting.
The conference ended with a paper from Beverly Clack, titled ‘Being Human: Religion and Superstition in a Psychoanalytic Philosophy of Religion’. Unfortunately, at the mercy of off-peak train times, I had to cycle off halfway through this talk, which was both motivating and unusual (unusual for analytic philosophy), drawing on the likes of Freud, via Kristeva and D. Z. Phillips, to examine another construction peculiar to our species: religion. It was, I think, a fitting conclusion to an enlightening conference, the success of which was due not just to the lucidity of its speakers, but to the variety and range of topics discussed.
You will be pleased to know that cycle to the station from Harcourt Hill campus was relatively uneventful, save for the pot-hole, the bent spoke, and the grazed knee. And the missed train.
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Trespass
Posted by Stephen Cumberland on 2010-07-03 21:58:28 UTC
If I see you in my field again I will be calling the police