Human Nature

This major study examines the most fundamental categories in terms of which we conceive of ourselves, critically surveying the concepts of substance, causation, agency, teleology, rationality, mind, body and person, and elaborating the conceptual fields in which they are embedded.

• The culmination of 40 years of thought on the philosophy of mind and the nature of the mankind
• Written by one of the world’s leading philosophers, the co-author of the monumental 4 volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell Publishing, 1980-2004)
• Uses broad categories, such as substance, causation, agency and power to examine how we think about ourselves and our nature
• Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of human nature are sketched and contrasted
• Individual chapters clarify and provide an historical overview of a specific concept, then link the concept to ideas contained in other chapters

Preface xi

Chapter 1 The Project 1

1. Human nature 1

2. Philosophical anthropology 4

3. Grammatical investigation 7

4. Philosophical investigation 11

5. Philosophy and ‘mere words’ 14

6. A challenge to the autonomy of the philosophical enterprise: Quine 17

7. The Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in philosophical anthropology 21

Chapter 2 Substance 29

1. Substances: things 29

2. Substances: stuffs 34

3. Substance-referring expressions 37

4. Conceptual connections between things and stuffs 42

5. Substances and their substantial parts 44

6. Substances conceived as natural kinds 45

7. Substances conceived as a common logico-linguistic category 49

8. A historical digression: misconceptions of the category of substance 51

Chapter 3 Causation 57

1. Causation: Humean, neo-Humean and anti-Humean 57

2. On causal necessity 62

3. Event causation is not a prototype 65

4. The inadequacy of Hume’s analysis: observability, spatio-temporal relations and regularity 69

5. The flaw in the early modern debate 73

6. Agent causation as prototype 75

7. Agent causation is only a prototype 80

8. Event causation and other centres of variation 82

9. Overview 88

Chapter 4 Powers 90

1. Possibility 90

2. Powers of the inanimate 93

3. Active and passive powers of the inanimate 96

4. Power and its actualization 98

5. Power and its vehicle 103

6. First- and second-order powers; loss of power 105

7. Human powers: basic distinctions 106

8. Human powers: further distinctions 114

9. Dispositions 118

Chapter 5 Agency 122

1. Inanimate agents 122

2. Inanimate needs 128

3. Animate agents: needs and wants 130

4. Volitional agency: preliminaries 137

5. Doings, acts and actions 140

6. Human agency and action 144

7. A historical overview 146

8. Human action as agential causation of movement 153

Chapter 6 Teleology and Teleological Explanation 161

1. Teleology and purpose 161

2. What things have a purpose? 169

3. Purpose and axiology 175

4. The beneficial 180

5. A historical digression: teleology and causality 181

Chapter 7 Reasons and Explanation of Human Action 199

1. Rationality and reasonableness 199

2. Reason, reasoning and reasons 203

3. Explaining human behaviour 210

4. Explanation in terms of agential reasons 220

5. Causal mythologies 226

Chapter 8 The Mind 233

1. Homo loquens 233

2. The Cartesian mind 240

3. The nature of the mind 248

Chapter 9 The Self and the Body 257

1. The emergence of the philosophers’ self 257

2. The illusion of the philosophers’ self 261

3. The body 268

4. The relationship between human beings and their bodies 276

Chapter 10 The Person 285

1. The emergence of the concept 285

2. An unholy trinity: Descartes, Locke and Hume 289

3. Changing bodies and switching brains: puzzle cases and red herrings 301

4. The concept of a person 310

Index 317

"Full of helpful distinctions and arguments which show in different ways how carefully we must proceed … and how sensitive we must be to contexts." (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

"an outstanding contribution to contemporary metaphysics and philosophical anthropology"' (Stephen Mulhall, Philosophical Quarterly)

"an amazing achievement when writing about such potentially confusing and hotly contested issues" (Duncan Richter, Metapsychology)

P. M. S. Hacker is the leading authority on the philosophy of Wittgenstein. He is author of the four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, the first two volumes co-authored with G. P. Baker (Blackwell, 1980–96) and of Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-century Analytic Philosophy (Blackwell, 1996). He has also written extensively on philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, most recently Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Blackwell, 2003) and History of Cognitive Neuroscience (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), both co-authored with M. R. Bennett. He is also co-editor (with Joachim Schulte) and co-translator of the 4th edition of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). What distinguishes humanity from the rest of animate nature? What grounds the distinctive powers of human beings? What are the forms of explanation proper to the understanding of the exercise of these powers in action? Human beings have both a mind and a body – but what is a mind? What is it to have a body? How is a person’s mind related to their body? And what is a person?

This major new study, by one of the most penetrating and persistent critics of philosophical and scientific orthodoxy, returns to Aristotle in order to examine the salient categories in terms of which we think about ourselves and our nature. An overview of the concepts of substance, causation, power and agency provides the background for an investigation into teleology, rationality and explanations of behaviour in terms of reasons. This is the stage-set for the analysis of the concepts of mind, self, body and person.

This essay in philosophical anthropology ranges widely over themes in metaphysics, philosophy of mind and of action, and philosophy of biology, blending powerful philosophical analysis with a masterful grasp of the history of philosophical reflection on the topics in question.

"A remarkable contribution. A brilliant work in philosophical anthropology. This is philosophy as it should be. Thoroughly original and completely convincing. It is difficult to imagine a more perspicuous rendering of the ramifying network of concepts that comprise 'the human.'"
—Dennis Patterson, Rutgers University