Human Nature

[midcan5]

"The lover of life knows his labour divine, And therein is at peace." George Meredith

On another site I have a thread on 'why study philosophy', it is over fifty thousand views which I find encouraging. Anyway thought I'd share a recent post here too, enjoy. Oh and study and read too.


Interesting read and Aeon is an excellent site for those who think.

"The meaning to life? A Darwinian existentialist has his answers"

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-meaning-to...as-his-answers



"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." Soren Kierkegaard

[donttread]

"The lover of life knows his labour divine, And therein is at peace." George Meredith

On another site I have a thread on 'why study philosophy', it is over fifty thousand views which I find encouraging. Anyway thought I'd share a recent post here too, enjoy. Oh and study and read too.


Interesting read and Aeon is an excellent site for those who think.

"The meaning to life? A Darwinian existentialist has his answers"

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-meaning-to...as-his-answers



"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." Soren Kierkegaard

Maybe as the song says "The secret to life is that there ain't no secret"

[Chris]

All the extraneous OP quotes seem to ignore the very article links, which, in part, says:

I come to my present state for two separate reasons. As a student of Charles Darwin, I am totally convinced – God or no God – that we are (as the 19th-century biologist Thomas Henry Huxley used to say) modified monkeys rather than modified mud. Culture is hugely important, but to ignore our biology is just wrong. Second, I am drawn, philosophically, to existentialism. A century after Darwin, Jean-Paul Sartre said that we are condemned to freedom, and I think he is right. Even if God does exist, He or She is irrelevant. The choices are ours.

Sartre denied such a thing as human nature. From this quintessential Frenchman, I take that with a pinch of salt: we are free, within the context of our Darwinian-created human nature. What am I talking about? A lot of philosophers today are uncomfortable even raising the idea of ‘human nature’. They feel that, too quickly, it is used against minorities – gay people, the disabled, and others – to suggest that they are not really human. This is a challenge not a refutation. If a definition of human nature cannot take account of the fact that up to 10 per cent of us have same-sex orientation, then the problem is not with human nature but with the definition.