Naturalism and Self-Interpreting Animals Sample Clauses

Naturalism and Self-Interpreting Animals. In his writings on human agency Xxxxxx advances his own version of the philosophical hermeneutics developed in the work of thinkers like Dilthey, Heidegger, and Xxxxxxx.132 He encapsulates the central insight of this tradition in the thesis that “Human beings are self-interpreting animals.”133 By this he means that our interpretations play a deep, constitutive role in making us the kind of beings that we are. He writes, “To say that man is a self-interpreting animal is not just to say that he has some compulsive tendency to form reflexive views of himself, but rather that as he is, he is always partly constituted by self-interpretation, that is, by his understanding of the imports which impinge on him.”134 The implication of the self-interpreting animal thesis is that we cannot properly understand human beings without taking into consideration the meanings that constitute their worlds. That is to say, explanations that have no place for these meanings fail to explain what we are as human beings. Xxxxxx deploys the “self-interpreting animals” thesis to halt what he sees as the overextension of natural scientific explanation.135 Xxxxxx’x bugbear is the relentless spread of a reductive variant of naturalism that grants “the natural sciences a paradigm status for all forms of knowledge.”136 This amounts to “the belief that we ought to understand human beings in terms continuous with the sciences of extra-human nature.”137 It is, in other words, “the belief that humans as part of nature are in the end best understood by sciences continuous in their methods and ontology with modern natural science.”138 The issue here isn’t whether human beings can be understood in terms of, say, chemistry, evolutionary biology, the cognitive sciences and so on—an 132 For a detailed account of how Xxxxxx fits into this line of philosophy see Xxxxxxxx X. Xxxxx, “Xxxxxx and the Hermeneutic Tradition,” in Xxxxxxx Xxxxxx, ed. Xxxx Xxxxx (New York: Cambridge UP, 2004), 29-51. Xxxxx rightly emphasizes that Xxxxxx’x unique contribution to philosophical hermeneutics is his explicitly ethical character. 133 Xxxxxxx Xxxxxx, “Self-Interpreting Animals” in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1985), 45. 134 Xxxxxx, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” 72. 135 See Xxxxxxx Xxxxxx, “Introduction,” “Self-Interpreting Animals,” and “The Concept of a Person” in Human Agency and Language, 1-12, chapter 2 and chapter 4. 136 Xxxxxx, Sources of the Self, 79. 137 Xxxxxx, S...