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The Anthropological Difference: What Can Philosophers Do To Identify the Differences Between Human and Non-human Animals?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2012

Hans-Johann Glock
Hans-Johann Glock
Affiliation:
Glock University of Zürichglock@philos.uzh.ch
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Extract

This paper considers the question of whether there is a human-animal or ‘anthropological difference’. It starts with a historical introduction to the project of philosophical anthropology (sct. 1). Section 2 explains the philosophical quest for an anthropological difference. Sections 3–4 are methodological and explain how philosophical anthropology should be pursued in my view, namely as impure conceptual analysis. The following two sections discuss two fundamental objections to the very idea of such a difference, biological continuity (sct. 5) and Darwinist anti-essentialism (sct. 6). Section 7 discusses various possible responses to this second objection – potentiality, normality and typicality. It ends by abandoning the idea of an essence possessed by all and only individual human beings. Instead, anthropological differences are to be sought in the realm of capacities underlying specifically human societies (forms of communication and action). The final section argues that if there is such a thing as the anthropological difference, it is connected to language. But it favours a more modest line according to which there are several anthropological differences which jointly underlie the gap separating us from our animal cousins.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 70 , July 2012 , pp. 105 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2012

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References

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40 More recently, additional dimensions have been suggested. Thus Jablonka, E. and Lamb, M. (Evolution in Four Dimensions, (Cambridge/Mass.: MIT Press, 2005))Google ScholarPubMed distinguish four dimensions of evolution: genetics, epigenetics, which includes all characteristics of cells and organisms that are heritable without being written into the genome, behaviour (social learning) and symbolic inheritance systems, including language. But our comprehension of epigenetics is still in its infancy; in any event, it appears improbable that there is a particular epigenetic system that characterizes all and only human beings. And the other two mechanisms of transmission and variation do not apply at the level of individual organisms on which we are currently focusing. The social dimension will be discussed in the next section.

41 Hull, D.L., ‘On Human Nature’, in: Hull, D.L. & Ruse, M. (ed.) The Philosophy of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 591Google ScholarPubMed.

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48 For help of a philosophical or editorial kind I should like to thank David Dolby, Anita Horn, Constantine Sandis, and Markus Wild. This essay has also profited from comments by audiences in Toledo, Grenada, Oxford, Waldshut and Zurich. Finally I should like to record my profound gratitude to the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (Delmenhorst) for supporting this work through a fellowship.