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Article contents
Why Persons Matter: A Jewish Defense
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2016
Extract
Anyone who has struggled to navigate the challenges that evolutionary and other natural sciences pose to a rich religious sense of the importance of human dignity will enjoy reading this book. Alan L. Mittleman gives the reader more than a robust understanding of the sciences; he also probes carefully their philosophical premises and makes a case for why a detailed engagement with Jewish sources in particular allows one to construct a reasonable and intellectually satisfying alternative to a purely naturalistic account based on the sciences. In the course of his investigation Mittleman deals skillfully with popular scientific motifs that were in the air half a century ago and that remain remarkably persistent today, such as the reductionist view, stemming from well-known writers like Desmond Morris, that humans are little more than naked apes; even at the height of Morris's popularity that view clashed with other philosophical perspectives that were equally prevalent and that stressed the existential alienation of human beings in the world.
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- Review Essay*
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2016
Footnotes
*
Alan L. Mittleman, Human Nature and Jewish Thought: Judaism's Case for Why Persons Matter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Page references to Mittleman's book appear in the text.
References
1 See, for example, Jablonka, Eva and Lamb, Marion J., Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral and Symbol Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
2 Fuentes, Agustin, “Naturecultural Encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, and Ethnoprimatology,” Cultural Anthropology 25 (2010) 600–624CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Nagel, Thomas, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Goodman, Lenn E. and Caramenico, D. Gregory, Coming to Mind: The Soul and Its Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Scruton, Roger, The Soul of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 See Francione, Gary L., Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; see also the collection edited by Jewish ethicist Crane, Jonathan K., Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical Agents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Jon Marks, “Tales of the Ex-Apes” (public lecture at the Center for Theology, Science and Human Flourishing, University of Notre Dame, IN, 26 June 2015).