Contemporary Naturalistic Philosophies of Human Nature

Course content

This course offers a critical examination of some of the modern philosophies that either denies human nature (for instance, the blank-slate view of modern empiricism and their twentieth century versions) or accounts of human nature in terms of immaterial/transcendent soul with certain intellectual and moral imprints from a naturalistic perspective that proposes naturalistic theories of human nature. The course starts with a survey of the above-mentioned non-naturalistic theories and naturalism in philosophy and then continues with a critical defense of contemporary naturalistic theories of human nature based on advances in biology and cognitive sciences. In relation to the human nature problem several other issues are also examined, such as ethics, politics, gender, violence, education, arts.