Nicholas Musings

I’m a writer, philosopher, social critic, and teacher. The social critic must use his writing and teaching to promote the ultimate goal of human society: the fullest development of the human person in all of her dimensions. Philosophy aids in highlighting the logic of thought and structures of oppression and domination that prevent the development of the human person. Speculative fiction aids this goal by shedding light on the human person and imagining the ultimate logic of the current social situation as well as the promise of freedom in that situation. I’m a convert to Roman Catholicism, but find in its social teachings much that illuminates principles of justice that can guide human beings as active designers of their local, national, and global world. This teaching begins with the understanding of natural law, based on the dignity of the human person, as aimed at human fulfillment in this life as preparation for blessed life in the next. Love underlies all. This site is dedicated to exploring the promise and peril in contemporary understandings of human nature, society, culture, and politics for the future development of the human person.

Bodies and Practices: Understanding Our Human Nature
Jeffery Nicholas

Problem: What is the good life for human beings? What is human nature such that it provides a key for overcoming the modern loss of freedom, of ends, and of meaning, and provides a recipe for a just society for the expansion of humanity? What understanding of ourselves will return us to a balance between the drive for self-preservation and the pull of an objective reality?

Thesis: We are living bodies seeking the meaning of our lives through our everyday practices that are constituted by traditions.

OUTLINE

I. Section 1: Setting the Ground

a. Introduction
i. Spiritual Ailments of the Modern Age
1. Disenchantment
2. One-Dimensionality
3. Loss of Freedom
ii. Statement of the problem: Dominance of Self Preservation
1. Objective Reason in the Ancient and Medieval Period
2. The Rise of Self Preservation
3. Dominance, Fascism, and Environmental Collapse
iii. Statement of the solution: Bodies and Practices
1. Why bodies are important
2. What traditions are important
3. Practices: where reason and need meet
iv. Disciplinarity and the Study of Human Nature
1. Current Books on Human Nature
2. Ancient and Medieval Approaches
3. The Modern University
4. Why we need multi-disciplinarity
v. Brief outline of book

b. Traditions
i. Fact and Value
1. Examples
a. A Time to Kill
b. LOTR
2. Fact and Value in Science
a. Aristotle versus the Moderns
b. Contemporary Critiques of Fact and Value Distinction
ii. Tradition
1. Examples
a. Lakota Sioux
b. Roman Catholicism
c. American Liberalism (?)
2. Defining Tradition
a. Cosmology
b. Concepts
c. Practices
d. Reason
e. Forms of Life
iii. How the study of traditions will help us understand human nature
iv. Aristotelian Tradition and Post-Modernism
1. Aristotelian Tradition
2. Souls
3. Post-Modern Insights


II. Section II: Bodies

a. Bodies
i. Non-living and Living Bodies
ii. MacIntyre’s look at Bodies
iii. Physical Reality
iv. Dualism and Manicheanism: Why Augustine Sucks
v. Vulnerability and Independence

b. Evolution
i. Evolution, Creationism, Catholicism
1. Why Faith accepts Evolution
a. Catholic Church
b. Thomas and Realism
c. Why Creationism doesn’t matter
2. Evolution
a. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
b. Punctuated Equilibrium
c. Species or Not
ii. Hominid History
1. Brief Overview
2. Different From versus Different Among
3. Understanding Differences
4. Symbolic Representation
a. Language and Morphology
b. Art and Neanderthals
c. Story Telling

iii. Sociobiology
1. Classic Discussions
2. Selfish Gene
3. Midgley’s Critique
4. Moving Beyond Sociobiology

c. Animals
i. Altruism and Aggression
ii. Sex and Gender
iii. Consciousness
iv. Intelligence
1. Ravens
v. Language
1. Chimps and Kanzi
2. Dolphins and Whales
3. Pre-linguistic Nature: MacIntyre versus Tattersall
vi. Practices?


III. Section III: The Human Animal

a. Practices
i. Examples
ii. Definitions: Ideal and Material
iii. Importance of Practices

b. Human Powers
i. Self
ii. Individuality
iii. Free Will and Agency
iv. Reason and Tradition
v. Emotions and Love

c. Tradition Redux
i. Historicity and Facticity
ii. Re-examining Human Powers
iii. Truth, Reality, and the Limits of Human Nature


IV. Section IV: Freedom and Culture

a. Critiques of the Idea of Human Nature
i. Biological Critiques
ii. Political Critiques
1. MacIntyre: For and Against
2. Stout
iii. Foucault and Chomsky
iv. Tradition as middle ground: Solving the dispute

b. Culture
i. Variability in Culture
ii. Relativism
iii. Freedom: promise for more
iv. Work and Creativity


V. Conclusion: The Ends of Humanity

a. How Tradition Leads out of Spiritual Ailments

b. Transcendent Reality
i. Reincarnation and Resurrection
ii. Grace and Sin

c. The Meaning of Life and Expansion of Humanity

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