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Document Details : Title: Evolutionair revisionisme en de integriteit van het manifeste zelfbeeld Author(s): BUEKENS, Filip Journal: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie Volume: 72 Issue: 1 Date: 2010 Pages: 101-129 DOI: 10.2143/TVF.72.1.2047019 Abstract : Four revisionistic proposals derived from evolutionary explanations of cognitive and moral attitudes are discussed: psychological revisionism, explanatory revisionism, meta-ethical revisionism and justificatory revisionism. I defend principled limits to evolutionary revisionism based on an argument that more or less follows P.F. Strawson’s defense of compatibilism in ‘Freedom and Resentment’: our concepts of what is right and wrong, true or false, apt (appropriate) or not, derive from assessing our own attitudes and those of others. A key feature of our mental economy is that interpretation reveals that our attitudes are mostly adequate and that the abnormal is identifiable only against a background of normality. I use Peter Strawson’s observation as a crucial premise in an argument for the claim that there is no important and interesting sense in which our manifest psychological scheme could be drastically revised on the basis of evolutionary considerations. Insights from evolutionary psychology and biology are relevant when explaining patterns of abnormal or deviant attitudes, but they do not justify (or rationally undermine) adequate manifestations of our mental economy. Our manifest scheme is compatible with evolutionary insights and explanations, and the coherence of the latter even depend on the global integrity of the manifest scheme. |
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