Scientific Ties
Reimagining Human Beings and Our Place in the Natural World
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jeffrey K. Soleau
To understand human beings as “special” and “superior” beings because we are situated at the top of an ontological hierarchy is a Western model that is deeply problematic for those concerned about the environment and the future direction of the world. Humans have within us a self-contradiction - we have learned to think of ourselves as separate from the natural world - although we are of this natural world. Humans are indeed unique beings. Rather than superior beings, however, humans are unique beings with the freedom to engage in the ethical task of careful listening, of respectful speaking, and of preserving the natural world through responsive thought and action. Our essential task is to come to our senses by recovering and affirming our ethical role within the natural world. Sources considered in developing this paper include E. F. Schumacher, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Max Oelschlaeger.
The Tyranny of Science and the Humanities as a Liberating Force
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eric Cassell, Lauren Barron
For science, only knowledge from scientific methods or research is valid. Understandings from the humanities are discounted; subjectivity and subjective knowledge have no place. But people are concerned about and comprised of their experiences: past and present, waking and sleeping, thinking and feeling, interpersonal events and private ideas and fantasies. From the 1950s into the 1980s, dynamic psychologies infused these concerns with knowledge and sophistication. After WWII, science, scientific objectivity, and empiricism, plus a denigration of subjectivity, rode the success of medical science to increasing influence in Western society. By the mid-80s, science as a social force drove from favor previously successful everyday psychological sophistication. Science has taken the place of religion before the Renaissance. Devotion to STEM implies nothing else is important. This emphasis has had a malignant effect on the teaching and study of the humanities. Medicine about persons and relationships, not only the body, is case in point in which science reigns supreme and technology overrides human concerns. Scientific medicine implies that science makes the diagnosis and treats the patient. The humanities offer liberation from the tyranny of science. Medicine is constituted by physicians as persons caring for patients as persons. The humanities teach about persons, emphasizing their relationships, historical being, aesthetic nature, constant search for meaning, and drive for freedom. Science values sameness, but individuals differ one from another in every respect. This paper considers how teaching the humanities provides depth, rigor, and humanistic knowledge to thinking about people as human beings, not just human bodies.
Freedom Within the Bounds of Evolution: An Evolutionary Perspective on Normative Self-Government
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Mizzoni
We can broaden the scope of the humanities by doing more to unearth the roots in our evolved biology. Such a large project pushes the humanities toward a closer relationship to the sciences. This paper focuses on how the philosophical study of ethics has successfully moved in this direction. One might think that only ethical approaches that view ethics as purely social or emotion-based could achieve such a project. Yet even ethicists who maintain that morality emerges from a particular intellectual capacity—the capacity for normative self-government, i.e., freedom—can understood morality in an evolutionary framework. We need only accept that normative self-government can derive from self-consciousness. The capacity of normative self-government may be understood as an effect or side-effect of biological evolution. Under the perspective of the timeline of human evolutionary history, once human beings had evolved brains that could yield the intellectual capacity of reflective self-consciousness, then humans would have become capable of normative self-governance. Normative ethics, then, could be said to have become possible. The evolutionary process would have then provided the necessary conditions for morality, yet not the sufficient conditions.
