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Nature and the Natural

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2008

Evelyn Fox Keller
Evelyn Fox Keller
Affiliation:
Program in Science, Technology and Society, Building E51 Room 171, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139USA E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

As part of my interest in the persistence of unproductive debates about the relative importance of nature and nurture, I focus here on the especially problematic relation between nature and the natural. For if the definition of nature is problematic, its semantic relation to ‘natural’ is even more so. I explore some of the problems that arise from slippage between substantive and normative conceptions of ‘natural’ (inviting collateral slippage between is and ought), from the bifurcatory structure of its negation and from changing assumptions about nature’s domain.

Keywords

Human BehaviorIsNatureNurtureOught
Type
Lecture
Information
BioSocieties , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , June 2008 , pp. 117 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © London School of Economics and Political Science 2008

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