Most scholars argue that ‘race’ has no relation to human nature. A minority contend that it does. I argue that ‘race’ is a cultural category which can become an embodied part of the human experience. This embodiment helps account for the power of the

Received: March 18, 2015; Accepted: March 20, 2015; Published: March 22, 2015 If you read these pages, you certainly know the seminal book by Benoit B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982). In his Masterpiece, Benoit provides both a mathematical model and a description for many of the seemingly complex forms and patterns in nature, showing that fractal patterns are extremely famili...

The philosophy of biology began to develop as a distinct field within the philosophy of science in the early 1970s, shortly before Philip Kitcher turned from mathematics and physics to biology in his thinking about general issues concerning the nature of science. Not only did the answers to traditional questions within the field seem problematic once one turned from the “hard sciences” to the s...

In Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain, Elio Frattaroli presents an extended argument against the medical model of treatment for mental disorders and especially focuses on the limitations of psychotropic medications. His theoretical perspective is deeply rooted in psychoanalysis and he argues for a psychotherapeutic model of treatment. Many of his criticisms of mainstream psychiatry will b...

The concept of human nature played an important role in the Aristotelian attempt to characterize the specific difference of humans from other animals and serves as a normative guide. But with the positivistic turn in the modern conception of nature and the denaturalization of reason (typically since Kant), the essential characteristic of human beings can no more be thought of as "natural". The ...

Strawson and Kant is a collection of articles originally presented at the Kant Society’s 1999 conference, which was dedicated to Strawson. The articles discuss issues related to Strawson’s interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the rise of interest in metaphysics started by Strawson’s Individuals, and key issues in Strawson’s analytic Kantianism. There are also articles in the collec...

rom an economic perspective on individual decision making, human beings have three key characteristics: preferences, beliefs and rationality. Beliefs are the probabilities with which people think various outcomes will occur, conditional on information that might be available. Preferences are the rankings over the set of gambles that are based on such beliefs over the outcomes. Rationality is th...

Extending and modifying his domain of life by artifact production is one of the main characteristics of humankind. From the first hominid, who used a wood stick or a stone for extending his upper limbs and augmenting his gesture strength, to current systems engineers who used technologies for augmenting human cognition, perception and action, extending human body capabilities remains a big issu...

“When the significance of poverty was realised”, writes Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, “the stage was set for the nineteenth century.” (2001, 116) Indeed, the transformation from the “Age of Rights” (Dagger 1989, 301) of the late 18 century – exemplified by Declaration of Independence in 1776 in the United States and Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens in 1789 in France ...