Beyond Human Nature

In this provocative, revelatory tour de force, Jesse Prinz reveals how the cultures we live in - not biology - determine how we think and feel. He examines all aspects of our behaviour, looking at everything from our intellects and emotions, to love and sex, morality and even madness. This book seeks to go beyond traditional debates of nature and nurture. He is not interested in finding universal laws but, rather, in understanding, explaining and celebrating our differences. Why do people raised in Western countries tend to see the trees before the forest, while people from East Asia see the forest before the trees? Why, in South East Asia, is there a common form of mental illness, unheard of in the West, in which people go into a trancelike state after being startled? Compared to Northerners, why are people in the American South more than twice as likely to kill someone over an argument? And, above all, just how malleable are we? Prinz shows that the vast diversity of our behaviour is not engrained. He picks up where biological explanations leave off. He tells us the human story.

Environmentalism and ecology are areas of rapid growth in academia and society at large. Screening Nature is the first comprehensive work that groups together the wide range of concerns in the field of cinema and the environment, and what could be termed “posthuman cinema.” It comprises key readings that highlight the centrality of nature and nonhuman animals to the cinematic medium, and to the language and institution of film. The book offers a fresh and timely intervention into contemporary film theory through a focus on the nonhuman environment as principal register in many filmic texts. Screening Nature offers an extensive resource for teachers, undergraduate students, and more advanced scholars on the intersections between the natural world and the worlds of film. It emphasizes the cross-cultural and geographically diverse relevance of the topic of cinema ecology.

“A loud counterblast to the fashionable faith of our times: that human nature is driven by biology . . . urgent and persuasive.”—Sunday Times (London) In this era of genome projects and brain scans, it is all too easy to overestimate the role of biology in human psychology. But in this passionate corrective to the idea that DNA is destiny, Jesse Prinz focuses on the most extraordinary aspect of human nature: that nurture can supplement and supplant nature, allowing our minds to be profoundly influenced by experience and culture. Drawing on cutting-edge research in neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology, Prinz shatters the myth of human uniformity and reveals how our differing cultures and life experiences make each of us unique. Along the way he shows that we can’t blame mental illness or addiction on our genes, and that societal factors shape gender differences in cognitive ability and sexual behavior. A much-needed contribution to the nature-nurture debate, Beyond Human Nature shows us that it is only through the lens of nurture that the spectrum of human diversity becomes fully and brilliantly visible.

Anthony O'Hear takes a stand against the fashion for explaining human behaviour in terms of evolution. He maintains, controversially, that while the theory of evolution is successful in explaining the development of the natural world in general, it is of limited value when applied to the human world. Because of our reflectiveness and our rationality we take on goals and ideals which cannot be justified in terms of survival-promotion or reproductive advantage. O'Hear examines the nature of human self-consciousness, and argues that evolutionary theory cannot give a satisfactory account of such distinctive facets of human life as the quest for knowledge, moral sense, and the appreciation of beauty; in these we transcend our biological origins. It is our rationality that allows each of us to go beyond not only our biological but also our cultural inheritance: as the author says in the Preface, 'we are prisoners neither of our genes nor of the ideas we encounter as we each make our personal and individual way through life'.

Beyond Biofatalism is a lively and penetrating response to the idea that evolutionary psychology reveals human beings to be incapable of building a more inclusive, cooperative, and egalitarian society. Considering the pressures of climate change, unsustainable population growth, increasing income inequality, and religious extremism, this attitude promises to stifle the creative action we require before we even try to meet these threats. Beyond Biofatalism provides the perspective we need to understand that better societies are not only possible but actively enabled by human nature. Gillian Barker appreciates the methods and findings of evolutionary psychologists, but she considers their work against a broader background to show human nature is surprisingly open to social change. Like other organisms, we possess an active plasticity that allows us to respond dramatically to certain kinds of environmental variation, and we engage in niche construction, modifying our environment to affect others and ourselves. Barker uses related research in social psychology, developmental biology, ecology, and economics to reinforce this view of evolved human nature, and philosophical exploration to reveal its broader implications. The result is an encouraging foundation on which to build better approaches to social, political, and other institutional changes that could enhance our well-being and chances for survival.

Complexity is not a new issue. In fact, in their day, William of Ockham and René Descartes proposed what can best be described as reductionist methods for dealing with it. Over the course of the twentieth century, a science of complexity has emerged in an ever-increasing number of fields (computer science, artificial intelligence, engineering, among others), and has now become an integral part of everyday life. As a result, everyone is confronted with increasingly complex situations that need to be understood and analyzed from a global perspective, to ensure the sustainability of our common future. Complexities 1 analyzes how complexity is understood and dealt with in the fields of cybersecurity, medicine, mathematics and information. This broad spectrum of disciplines shows that all fields of knowledge are challenged by complexity. The following volume, Complexities 2, examines the social sciences and humanities in relation to complexity.

In Ontology and Closeness in Human-Nature Relationships, Neil H. Kessler identifies the preconceptions which can keep the modern human mind in the dark about what is happening relationally between humans and the more-than-human world. He has written an accessible work of environmental philosophy, with a focus on the ontology of human-nature relationships. In it, he contends that large-scale environmental problems are intimate and relational in origin. He also challenges the deeply embedded, modernist assumptions about the relational limitations of more-than-human beings, ones which place erroneous limitations on the possibilities for human/more-than-human closeness. Diverging from the posthumanist literature and its frequent reliance on new materialist ontology, the arguments in the book attempt to sweep away what ecofeminists call “human/nature dualisms. In doing so, conceptual avenues open up that have the power to radically alter how we engage in our daily interactions with the more-than-human world all around us. Given the diversity of fields and disciplines focused on the human-nature relationship, the topics of this book vary quite broadly, but always converge at the nexus of what is possible between humans and more-than-human beings. The discussion interweaves the influence of human/nature dualisms with the limitations of Deleuzian becoming and posthumanism’s new materialism and agential realism. It leverages interhuman interdependence theory, Charles Peirce’s synechism of feeling and various treatments of Theory of Mind while exploring the influence of human/nature dualisms on sustainability, place attachment, common worlds pedagogy, emergence, and critical animal studies. It also explores the implications of plant electrical activity, plant intelligence, and plant “neurobiology” for possibilities of relational capacities in plants while even grappling with theories of animism to challenge the animate/inanimate divide. The result is an engaging, novel treatment of human-nature relational ontology that will encourage the reader to look at the world in a whole new way.

This book explores both the possibilities and limits of arguments from human nature in the context of human rights. Can the concept of human nature provide a basis for understanding fundamental rights? Is it plausible to justify the claim to universal validity of human rights by reference to human nature? Or does the idea of human rights in its modern, post-1945 manifestation go, in essence, beyond human nature? The essays in this volume introduce naturalistic positions and their concomitant critiques. They address the role that human nature both actually does and potentially may play in forming a foundation for and acting as an exemplification of fundamental rights. Beyond that, they give attention to the challenges caused by Life Sciences. Human nature itself is subject to transformation and transgression in an unprecedented manner. The essays reflect on issues such as reproduction, species manipulation, corporeal autonomy and enhancement. Contributors are jurists, philosophers and political scientists from Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, Poland and Japan.