Thesis title: Rational Life - On the Concept of Nature in Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics (in progress; due 2020)
Abstract:
My thesis focuses on the various concepts of nature at play in the debate surrounding Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism. I maintain that much of the opposition to the Neo-Aristotelian project is motivated by a scientistic conception of nature, which simply offers no space for the essentialist and teleological concept of lifeform that is central to the views of Foot and Thompson. Defenders of the Neo-Aristotelian project, however, typically reject scientism and instead embrace a broadly idealist conception of nature, where huma…
Thesis title: Rational Life - On the Concept of Nature in Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics (in progress; due 2020)
Abstract:
My thesis focuses on the various concepts of nature at play in the debate surrounding Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism. I maintain that much of the opposition to the Neo-Aristotelian project is motivated by a scientistic conception of nature, which simply offers no space for the essentialist and teleological concept of lifeform that is central to the views of Foot and Thompson. Defenders of the Neo-Aristotelian project, however, typically reject scientism and instead embrace a broadly idealist conception of nature, where human nature in particular is not discovered via natural scientific methods but subject to a largely autonomous and culturally mediated self-positing. In different ways, this is equally true of McDowell, Hursthouse, Foot, and Thompson. I argue that this idealist approach runs into its own problems, and that ultimately a truly Aristotelian ethics can be based neither on scientism nor idealism. Instead, it requires what at present remains a desideratum: a genuinely Aristotelian realist epistemology.
