In his recent book, P.M.S. Hacker paints with broad strokes the frieze of human nature that has emerged as increasingly apparent to his experienced and well-schooled eye.
Human Nature: The Categorial Framework
by P.M.S. Hacker
published by Wiley-Blackwell (August 24, 2007)
Hdbk., 344 pgs.
ISBN-10: 1405147288
ISBN-13: 978-1405147286
P. M. S. Hacker’s book, Human Nature: The Categorical Framework, is a type of book we don’t often see anymore and especially in the human sciences. In an age of expertise, authors write about a narrow range of defensible theory well-buoyed by empirical data, cognitive or neural modeling or pristine logic. Of course there are popularizers who write in sweeping fashion, yet having demonstrated no prior investigatory skills themselves their products are pleasant to the eye but lacking both depth and resiliency to criticism.
Hacker’s Human Nature is different from either genre. Hacker spent most of his professional career as a specialist’s specialist. Along with his co-investigator, G. P. Baker, Hacker produced what remains the most extensive and definitive analysis of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Inevitably Hacker was drawn to do further specialist work on mind, philosophy of language and philosophy and neuroscience.
But here Hacker steps back as only a truly serious researcher can and attempts, as it were, a theory of everything; well everything, that is, that explains distinctly human nature, but as he explains, “As I near the end of my academic career . . . (p.xi)” he intends to paint with broad strokes the frieze of human nature that has emerged as increasingly apparent to his experienced and well-schooled eye.
People like David Chalmers, Reiland Dawkin, and Noam Chomsky are mentioned only in passing. One gets the feel that cursory treatment of such giants, along with the complete omission of researchers such as Stephen Pinker, Marc Hauser, Stephen Stitch, the Churchlands and so on is no accident. Hacker writes Human Nature not so much from data but rather in light of generalizations reached by many thinkers from antiquity to the present. Aristotle in particular seems to be his favorite muse. Certainly that is not all bad.
In fact by taking the broad view Hacker lays open the door to positive psychology at the same time he urges further cognitive modeling and genetically driven development of human nature. Imagine, for example, a true cognitive scientist leaping into speculative summaries such as Hacker does when he writes, “A human being . . . may thrive and flourish without being happy. Happiness, Aristotle urged is the Summum bonum of mankind . . . Only creatures with reason can be blessed with happiness (p.176).” Only “creatures with reason?” Such phrase reflects his unguarded tendency to write without the constraints of self-consciously imposed constraints of physicalism or strong naturalism. It would even be difficult to tag Hacker as a mysteryism though that probably comes closest in the contemporary scientific vernacular. Meanwhile locutions such as “blessed with . . .” tell of a writer relaxed and at ease with telling a story of human nature and not defending a scientific account.
Having said all of the above, the reader should expect a pleasant read, a journey but never a flight of speculative fantasy or ego-gratifying conclusions about who we are as humans and as persons. Hacker in one book gives us reason to take all of psychology and much of social theory seriously. In Human Nature one finds convincing grounds for studies in positive psychology and happiness every bit as much as for genetic determinism, evolutionary psychology, and formal syntactic modeling and Grecian semantics.
From any branch of the human sciences one can benefit by taking a pause to read Hacker and think again how one’s own work might fit into the big picture.
Human Nature: The Categorial Framework is available on Amazon.com.
wagner@uhcl.edu
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