Are Human Beings Part of the Rest of Nature?
Christopher Lang*, Elliott Sober*, and Karen Strier†
*Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
†Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Abstract: The issue we want to address is not whether human beings should be understood naturalistically or supernaturalistically. Rather, our question concerns the kinds of naturalistic explanations that are needed to account for the features that human beings exhibit. If a factor C helps explain some feature E of nonhuman organisms, should we infer that C also helps explain E when E is present in human beings? The choice that interests us is between unified and disunified explanations. Do human beings fall into patterns exhibited by the rest of nature, or are we the result of fundamentally different causal processes?
This paper was published in Biology and Philosophy 17 (5): 661-671, 2002