Anagrafe della ricerca

What is natural history? Recent years have seen a powerful new wave of studies labelled “natural histories”: from The Natural History of Morality or The Natural History of Economics to the very controversial Natural History of Rape and Natural History of Earth and its Future. These studies attempt to discuss numerous human traits and phenomena. But what does it mean to call something a natural history? What is the conceptual anatomy of such study? What are the general philosophical stakes of a paradigm that unifies “history” and “nature”—two apparently opposed notions—within the same conceptual domain? This project puts the concept of “natural history” under a critical lens to closely assess its structure, import, and theoretical consistency. Despite the variety of their explananda, all recent natural histories share an explanatory framework premised in evolution and rely on an array of cross-disciplinary knowledge (paleontology, climate developments, comparative psychology, etc.) to construct broad evolutionary scenarios for the emergence of certain phenomena. This has made them very attractive: their naturalistic take on a variety of complex issues has made them influential in domains extending beyond biology to philosophical debates in ethics, social ontology, and ecology. However, despite the unprecedented surge of interest in mobilizing “natural history” to address problems related to the constitution of the human, no detailed, comprehensive investigation of the anatomy of this narratives has been conducted. Yet natural histories are fraught not only with potentiality but also with conceptual issues that call for serious philosophical clarification. This applies to both (i) the specific conceptual, epistemic, and methodological issues involved in these accounts, and (ii) their broader impact on our notions of “nature” and “sociality”. For instance, (i) how do such studies conceptually define their objects? To what extent can one provide a satisfactory naturalistic definition of an explanandum that is often normatively constituted? How do the disciplines upon which these accounts rely gain insight into our evolutionary past? (Reference to comparative psychology, for instance, has been accused of “chimpocentrism"). Moreover, what kind of explanatory import should we expect from these narratives? Such problems need to be explored if we are to better understand the potential and limits of natural-historical accounts. Further questions emerge related to (ii) what kinds of conceptions of “nature”, “naturalness,” and “historicity” these histories convey: how do they conceive normative phenomena? What are the broad consequences of adopting a historical perspective on nature or a natural perspective on history? Motivated by such questions, our project will critically investigate the notion of “natural history” to develop a comprehensive conceptual framework for (i) and (ii) and test its theoretical reach by applying it to a specific case study.