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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Fred Matthews
Fred Matthews
Affiliation:
York University
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Abstract

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Type
CSSH Discussion
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , July 1993 , pp. 647 - 662
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1993

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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, 96–100Google Scholar; and Mayr, Ernst, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), especially 38, 45–51, 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, 58–59 (Fall 1982–Winter 1983), 89–113Google 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, 86–90, 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), 93–111Google 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, 39–47, 54–57Google 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, 86–98Google Scholar.