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Human Nature and the Limits of Science
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Description| Publisher | Oxford University Press UK |
| Author(s) | John Dupré |
| Published | 1st December 2001 |
| Related course codes |
'excellent, clear, and helpful'
'His [Dupré's] criticisms are well made... His approach is certainly interesting and deserving of both scrutiny and elaboration... Dupré ends with the wonderful suggestion that his view leaves a role for philosophy as providing a 'synoptic and integrative vision', and so moving 'from underlabourer to Queen of the Sciences' -The Philosophers' MagazineJohn Dupré warns that our understanding of human nature is being distorted by two faulty and harmful forms of pseudo-scientific thinking. Not just in the academic world but increasingly in everyday life, we find one set of experts seeking to explain the ends at which humans aim in terms of evolutionary theory, and another set of experts using economic models to give rules of how we act to achieve those ends. Dupré demonstrates that these theorists' explanations do not work, and furthermore that if taken seriously their theories tend to have dangerous social and political consequences. For these reasons, it is important to resist scientism - an exaggerated conception of what science can be expected to do for us. Dupré restores sanity to the study of human nature by pointing the way to a proper understanding of humans in the societies that are our natural and necessary environments. Anyone interested in science and human nature will enjoy this book, unless they are its targets.
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