Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-fnpn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-02T10:16:57.915Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Nature/Nurture, Realism/Nominalism: Our Fundamental Conflict Over Human Identity. A Review Article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Fred Matthews
Affiliation:
York University

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
CSSH Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Two excellent discussions of the persistence of Aristotelian essentialism in widely different fields are Gombrich, E. H., Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), especially 87–9, 96100Google Scholar; and Mayr, Ernst, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), especially 38, 4551, 304–8, 488–9Google Scholar. A direct discussion of the conflict between essentialist and social-constructionist accounts is Boswell, John, “Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories,” Salmagundi, 5859 (Fall 1982Winter 1983), 89113Google Scholar. On Kuhn, see Longino, , Science as Social Knowledge, 25–8, 53–8Google Scholar.

2 Butler, , Gender Trouble, 19, 24Google Scholar; McCumber, John, Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, Reason (University of Chicago Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

3 Silber, , in A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: Freedom of Thought is in Danger on American Campuses (Columbia, S.C.: Southern Educational Communications Association, 1991), 6Google Scholar.

4 Butler, , Gender Trouble, 32Google Scholar. A recent effort to revive sociological functionalism is in Jeffrey Alexander, 's Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. On the use of functional explanation in sociobiology, and a dispute over its validity, see Horan, Barbara L., “Functional Explanations in Sociobiology,” Biology and Philosophy, 4 (1989), 131–58Google Scholar, and a series of replies, and rejoinders, Ibid., 158–228.

5 Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987)Google Scholar. A more biologically based argument for tradition is Fleming, Thomas, The Politics of Human Nature (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1988)Google Scholar, and the broader conflict between “absolutists” and “pluralists” (arguably a better term than “relativist”) is Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic, 1991)Google Scholar. Wilson, , Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Harvard University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. On unlimited interpretation in pre-Cartesian symbolic thought, see Gombrich, E. H., Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), especially 123–91Google Scholar.

6 Fox, , The Search for Society, 8690, 8Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., 115–22.

8 Ibid., 53–76. Pico, 's “Oration on the Dignity of Man” (1486) can be found in Gundesheimer, Werner L., ed., The Italian Renaissance (Englewood-Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 93111Google Scholar, among other places. Degler, Carl L., In Search of Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

9 Two extensive critiques of sociobiology are Lewontin, R. C., Rose, S., and Kamin, L., Not In Our Genes (New York: Pantheon, 1984)Google Scholar, and Kitcher, Philip, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985)Google Scholar, commented upon below. Gray, J. P. and Wolfe, L. D., “Sociobiology and Creationism: Two Ethnosociologies of American Culture,” American Anthropologist, 84 (09, 1982), 580–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Fox, , The Search for Society, 212–39Google Scholar. Maclntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, 1988)Google Scholar. Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols (New York: Pantheon, 1970)Google Scholar discusses Basil Bernstein's concept of “restricted codes” which reject category-violation, but the possibility of open codes is not denied.

11 Lasch, Christopher, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991)Google Scholar.

12 Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition, especially the extended discussion of inclusive fitness and more specific hypotheses drawn from it; the quotation is from page 435. Greenwood, Davyyd J., The Taming of Evolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

13 Longino, , Science as Social Knowledge, 3947, 5457Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., 71–73.

15 Ibid., 76–81.

16 Ibid., 86–90, 103–4; Economist 4 04 1992, 107Google Scholar.

17 Longino, , Science as Social Knowledge, 8698Google Scholar.