Many ethical questions about our future with intelligent machines rest upon assumptions concerning the origins, development and ideal future of humanity and of the universe, and hence overlap considerably with many religious questions. First, could computers themselves become moral in any sense, and could different components of morality – whatever they are – be instantiated in a computer? Second, could computers enhance the moral functioning of humans? Do computers potentially have a role in narrowing the gap between moral aspiration and how morality is actually lived out? Third, if we develop machines comparable in intelligence to humans, how should we treat them? This question is especially acute for embodied robots and human-like androids. Fourthly, numerous moral issues arise as society changes such that artificial intelligence plays an increasingly significant role in making decisions, with implications for how human beings function socially and as individuals, treat each other and access resources.

The Consolation defends many claims about human nature and personhood, and depicts an exemplary human person, Boethius the character. This chapter synthesizes the book’s often puzzling and apparently divergent claims, while illustrating them with the depiction of the character of Boethius. It begins by outlining Boethius’ account of human powers and human nature, and then considers the Consolation’s account of human personhood. While Boethius’ account of personhood in the Consolation lacks the technical precision found in his Trinitarian works, he does give an account of some fundamental characteristics of persons consonant with his more explicit treatment in other texts. Finally, the chapter considers three distinctive themes in the Consolation’s account of human persons. First, this text controversially depicts human nature as able to change into that of a god or of a beast. Second, the Consolation depicts all human persons as microcosms, including within ourselves all aspects of the cosmos. Third, Boethius, like many classical writers, depicts human persons as most understandable in relation to beauty. Since this theme sums up earlier ones, the chapter closes there.

This chapter explores images of plant life in philosophy and literature with particular focus on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. It pursues the question of what we can learn about the nature of the human being and its place in the world from plants and the way they are rooted in earth. Over the past half-century, many voices identify our disconnection from the earth with the centrality of technological progress, capitalist production, industrialization, and globalization that are essential to our modern self-understanding and way of life. What was supposed to be the root of human distinction has ended up uprooting us. Is this because we have a distorted view of what it means to be rooted in the first place, and our dependency on the rootedness of plant life? This chapter interrogates the metaphor of the root in Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous novel Nausea. Whereas Sartre considers the earth as an inert background in relation to human purposes: always there, meaningless, the earth is the static backdrop of our human drama, Nietzsche’s vegetal imaginary puts forward an idea of human life as deeply embedded in both earthly and planetary life.

150 words: The books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah contain oracles that address problems in and around ancient Judah in ways that are as incisive and critical as they are optimistic and constructive. Daniel C. Timmer’s The Theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah situates these books in their social and political contexts and examines the unique theology of each as it engages with imposing problems in Judah and beyond. In dialogue with recent scholarship, this study focuses on these books’ analysis and evaluation of the world as it is, focusing on both human beings and their actions and God’s commitment to purify, restore, and perfect the world. Timmer also surveys these books’ later theological use and cultural reception. Timmer also brings their theology into dialogue with concerns as varied as ecology, nationalism, and widespread injustice, highlighting the enduring significance of divine justice and grace for solid hope and effective service in our world.

50 words: This volume examines the powerful and poignant theology of the books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. Daniel C. Timmer situates these books’ theology in their ancient Near Eastern contexts and traces its multifaceted contribution to Jewish and Christian theology and to broader cultural spheres, without neglecting its contemporary significance.

20 words: This volume draws out the theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, attending to their ancient contexts, past use and reception, and contemporary significance.

This chapter addresses the limitations potentially placed on the success of revolutions by “human nature” - which in psychological terms are the hard-wired characteristics that limit change in behavior. It is argued that in the long term, even behaviors that we conceptualize as hardwired at present tend to change (particularly through changes in the environment). The avowed goals of the French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, and Iranian revolutions are examined, and it is concluded that none of these revolutions achieved their goals. Despite failure, the regimes that survive in China, Cuba, and Iran continue to use the rhetoric of revolution. Four ways in which human nature seems to doom revolutions are considered: extremists come to power; an “ends justify the means” approach is adopted and corruption results; the style of leader–follower relations persist after revolutions, with the result that one dictatorship replaces another; and revolutionaries typically fail to set up the necessary conditions to achieve the behavioral changes necessary to reach their revolutionary goals (such as collectivization).

The study of nature as an object of scientific interest matured through the investigations of Presocratic philosophers on the observable world. Herodotus is in dialogue with those expanding its domain into the spheres of natural science and the human. Physis embraces the interior and exterior regularities of subjects as diverse as landmasses, rivers, seas, elements, animals, and men. Unique to Herodotus, however, is the use of nature as a category of historical explanation; it is a standard of measurement that permits historical inference.

Chapter eight pays attention to some crucial questions concerning the encounter between biological and theological anthropogenesis, which have inspired very emotional reactions to evolutionary theory and posed a considerable challenge to several fundamental presuppositions of systematic and philosophical theology. A presentation and defense of the contemporary Thomistic approach to the question of the origin of our species is followed by an account of the complexity of the debate concerning the mono- versus polygenetic character of human speciation.

Constitutions are not mere sets of written words and letters: they, most of the time, touch upon deeper layers of human nature - our emotions. Constitutions are imagined worlds we use as an element to craft social reality. Cognitive sciences help us understand how we use emotional rationality to do this.

When a female Yahoo makes sexual advances to Gulliver in Part IV of the Travels, he is forced to acknowledge that he ‘was a real Yahoo’. This recognition has disturbed readers as much as it appalled Gulliver. Is Swift a misanthropist? Or does he recommend a middle ground between Yahoo and Houyhnhnm? So many people found the last part of Swift’s Travels both unfathomable and distasteful that it was frequently omitted from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editions, especially those intended for children. Part III suffered the same fate. Neither book seems to fit with Swift’s imaginatively appealing tales of little and large people. Yet it is likely that he conceived all four parts to work as a whole. This chapter argues that rather than being the spot of solid ground onto which the shipwrecked reader can crawl and from there look back over the rest of the text to find it resolves itself into an order that points at one clear meaning, Part IV leaves many readers baffled and discomforted – and that is the point. While animal fables generally end with an explanatory ‘moral’, Swift obliges readers to work through the complexities and conundrums of his text.

The paper examines the origins of the distinction between physis, “nature,” and nomos, “norm,” and the uses made of it during the period of the Sophists. The two terms did not originally lend themselves to being contrasted, but the contrast becomes natural in light of two mid-fifth-century developments: a growing interest in the different customs of different societies and a proliferation of accounts of the origins of human civilization. While the contrast is employed by others, such as Herodotus and the medical writers, it is the Sophists themselves, above all, who exploit it for sociological and philosophical purposes. Some, such as Protagoras, see nomos as building on physis – that is, on tendencies in human nature; others see an opposition between the two, and suggest that we would be better off ignoring nomos and attending to what our natures dictate. The contrast is also applied to religion, which some Sophists treat as nomos.

Our modern age has modified somewhat the definition of “family” as a way of thinking about relationships between men and women, parents and children, and brothers and sisters. Plutarch did not imagine these relationships in terms of sexuality and gender. Rather, affection, love, marriage, and the family were the key concepts in his study of “private life.” He also lived, however, during an era of change. This change had consequences for the idea of marriage, justifying a more in-depth analysis of Plutarch’s view of the subject. In order to distinguish between contemporary attitudes and original ideas in his works, we will clarify the notion of “private life,” the philosophical tradition, and contemporary idea(s) of the family before reintegrating familial relations into Plutarch’s view of human nature and code of ethics.

In book 1.11-20 of De Officiis, Cicero draws on the work of Panaetius to give an account of how the most basic, in-built features of human nature provide a foundation for the cardinal virtues. His account begins from the basic drive for self-preservation which is the usual starting point for the canonical Stoic doctrine of oikeiōsis. The developments that Cicero claims follow from this fundamental starting point are, however, quite different from those which ensue on the other preserved accounts of oikeiōsis, such as that reported for Chrysippus in Diogenes Laërtius 7.85-86, the account in Cicero’s De Finibus 3.16-25 and the one in letter 121 of Seneca. It is also importantly different from the more complex account attributed to Posidonius by Galen in On the Doctrines of Plato and Hippocrates 5.5.8-9. By comparing and contrasting Cicero’s theory in the De Officiis with these other accounts, this chapter will explore important facets of Cicero’s philosophical method, his originality in adapting Panaetius’ theory to his own purposes, and the merits of the novel doctrine he embraced in his final philosophical work.

It is standardly believed that Aristotle thinks that there are two kinds of happiness, one corresponding to intellectual contemplation and the other corresponding to ethically virtuous activities, and the former kind is superior to the latter. This is the Duality Thesis. It is notoriously problematic and does not follow from anything that Aristotle has said to that point. It also prevents solving the Conjunctive Problem of Happiness. Interpreters have felt forced to affirm the Duality Thesis by its apparent textual inescapability. However, the apparent claim depends on supplying “happy” or “happiest” from the previous sentence, as is standard among translators and interpreters. I argue for an alternative supplement that commits Aristotle to a much less problematic and unexpected position.

This chapter illuminates the irreplaceable value of poetry in cultivating a cosmopolitan and democratic imagination. The authors contend that poetry evokes unanticipated or overlooked ideas, emotions, and possibilities; it provokes people to look beyond their settled views. Poetry uniquely fuels their ability to engage new thoughts, values, and practices. This ever-renewing quality of mind can, in turn, help people reimagine the nature and value of education continuously as circumstances and the needs they call out evolve. The authors suggest that these imaginative capacities are significant given the cosmopolitan and democratic challenges, and prospects, generated by an intensifying process of political, economic, and cultural globalization. The chapter features a reading of Walt Whitman’s well-known epic poem, “Song of Myself” (first published in 1855), which the authors show both articulates and enacts the most profound promise in a cosmopolitan and democratic imagination.

In the Introduction the three interwoven theses of the book are presented. The first of these concerns the Anthropocene era and contends that a more accurate understanding of the history of natural law and its impact on the development of modern Europe, which, significantly, focuses and draws on previous transformations of the concept of nature, will facilitate the addressing of key current issues in respect of that era. The second concerns the metaphysics of human nature and nature more broadly and contends that the sceptical denial of the light of moral nature and of its epistemological freedom is related to the disappearance of nature as a sacred space. The third thesis concerns the modification of natural law in England during the seventeenth century and contends that the most important seventeenth-century scientists/natural lawyers buttressed their liberal politics by means of philosophical and ethical necessitarianism.

This chapter explores some philosophical quandaries facing the natural law outlook, with particular emphasis on the prospects for a natural law account of human rights. The chapter begins by considering challenges to natural law’s reliance on the notion of human nature. It then examines the role of time in natural law theories, focusing on the question of whether natural law changes. Next, the chapter looks at the place of rights in the natural law tradition, critically discussing the suggestion that the notion of rights is at odds with the core themes of the natural law outlook, before considering what natural law has to offer to human rights theory. Finally, I turn to the place of God within natural law theories, raising the issue of whether natural law assumes a theistic worldview. I argue throughout the chapter that a hermeneutic and historicised view of natural law, which sees it as shaped by and discovered through human social practices, holds important advantages in responding to each of these challenges.

This chapter focuses on Maritain’s analysis of the ontological and epistemological foundations of human rights, and his wider hope for ‘practical agreement’ on the content of those rights. On the ontological front, I argue that such agreement is not forthcoming on the basis of natural teleology or eternal law. Neither of these secures assent across the world’s major religious or philosophical traditions. On the epistemological front, neither rationalism nor naturalism holds great promise. While Maritain upholds the naturalist alternative, his efforts devolve into a performative contradiction. For he hopes to rest agreement about human rights on ‘natural inclinations’, which, at the same time, he confines to the realm of the non-conceptual, non-rational and pre-conscious. This constitutes a markedly weak, even incoherent basis for agreement. The stage is set, therefore, for ‘new’ natural law theory, which proposes a non-ontological, purely rationalist foundation. I conclude that this too is an unpromising basis for agreement on rights. Instead, we need a new approach, one that privileges the deliverances of the social sciences and does not strive for universal consensus.