Humane Philosophy and Human Nature

Welcome to the 2015 Humane Philosophy Conference:
Humane Philosophy and Human Nature
Table of contents
Aims of the Conference 2
Abstracts of Keynote Speakers 3
Short papers timetable for Thursday 24th September 13
Short papers timetable for Friday 26th September 14
Parallel paper authors 15
Parallel abstracts 17
Space for Notes 25
This conference was organised by the Humane Philosophy Project with the generous support of the
Dalai Lama Centre for Compassion, the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, the
Institute of Philosophy, UW, and the University of Warsaw Foundation. For further information
please visit:
www.humanephilosophy .com
Aims of the Conference

It is often supposed that a sound understanding of human nature is a necessary condition for
success in much of our theoretical and practical reasoning. Philosophers have been concerned
with determining distinctive features of human nature, construing this in terms of reason,
language or some other faculty. Its fundamental moral character has also been deeply
controversial: Christianity has tended to understand post lapsarian humankind as essentially
sinful, whilst in the Buddhist tradition humans have been seen as essentially compassionate. On
the other hand various anthropological traditions have interpreted the moral character of
humanity as fundamentally relative.
In the twentieth century, many philosophers have put pressure upon traditional construals of
human nature. In the existentialist tradition, the very idea has been challenged, accused of
substituting an essence where there is really a free choice. Other commentators have disputed the
gulf traditionally supposed to exist between the nature of humans and that of animals, drawing
out close parallels in the evolutionary functions of animal behaviours with those of many spheres
of human life. We have also witnessed the development of transhumanist and post-humanist
movements, aspiring to radically alter our natures in years to come.
Further questions surround which discipline the study of human nature belongs to. Ought we to
favour physical sciences such as biology and neurology, social sciences like anthropology and
economics, or humanities such as history, theology and philosophy? Does the idea of human
nature pose a challenge to philosophical naturalism, and if it does, can we hope for an adequate
account of it by some other means?
The aim of the conference is to present, discuss and debate recent developments in our
understanding of human nature, and questions they raise from a variety of perspectives, crossing
interdisciplinary boundaries to elucidate the purported distinctiveness of the category of human
nature, and to explore its implications.
This conference is part of the Humane Philosophy Project, and was organised by members of the
Department for Philosophy of Culture at the Institute of Philosophy University of Warsaw, and
other organisers of the Humane Philosophy Project:
Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode (IF University of Warsaw, Blackfriars Hall Oxford)

Przemysław ”ursztyka (IF University of Warsaw)
Ralph Weir (Blackfriars Hall Oxford, Jesus College Cambridge)
“gata Łukomska (IF University of Warsaw)
Samuel Hughes (Selwyn College Cambridge)
Jonathan Price (Leiden University)
Humane Philosophy Project Conference, Warsaw 24 - 26 September 2015

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Abstracts of Keynote Speakers
Available information on Keynote presentations, and speakers is presented below in alphabetical

order. “ll plenary sessions will be held in the ”rudzińskiego Lecture Room in Pałac
Kazimierzowski.
Agata Bielik-Robson
Friday 25th September 2:45 PM
The Human Difference: Beyond Nomotropism
The main theme of my lecture will be finite life which, philosophically speaking, is the bedrock of
modern biopolitics. Michel Foucault defined biopolitics as a new system of governing the living
which is no longer concerned with the immortal souls of its subjects, but rather concentrates solely
on their natural well-being, spent within the mortal cycle of birth and death. Foucault accepts the
basic premiss of this biopolitics that life is reduced to the natural law of birth and death while
slightly correcting its naive liberal trust in the naturalness of human existence. Instead, he
advocates a return to the ancient techniques of self-discipline exercised within mortal and finite
life, thus inaugurating his influential late turn towards Neo-Stoicism.
This late turn epitomizes the minimalist postmodern ambition to take care of life as it is, without
either imposing excessive demands on it or luring it with false promises. The idea of such Neo-
Stoic biopolitics is to submit human finite life to the law of all natural things: nature, regulating
the flow of life from birth to death, appears as the ultimate lawgiver offering a model for self-
control, self-growth and self-preservation. The only answer to the original anarchy of human
drives is the discipline of self-control, offering a necessary lawful correction to their somewhat
deficient naturalness.
In my lecture, I would like to contextualise Foucault s Neo-Stoic project, and to sketch an

alternative based on a critique of the nomotropic desire, i.e. a tendency in human psyche to orient
itself according to the law. The idea of nomotropism was introduced by Eric Santner in his study
on Moses and the Mosaic Law, but I want to expand its use and show that human psyche is
predominantly nomotropic in response to its initial anarchy of drives: it seeks law, order, and

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disciplining structures in order to counteract the deficiencies and excesses of basic human
instincts. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, therefore, modern biopolitics is a result of the
nomotropic fixation on the legality of nature. In my critical approach to biopolitics, I would like to
show how we can still overcome the biomorphic fixation by venturing beyond nomotropism, i.e.
by trying to recover the lost anarchic dimension of the human psyche, and in the words of
Walter Benjamin achieve a happy lawless life .
Agata Bielik-Robson received her PhD in philosophy in 1995. She works as a Professor of Jewish
Studies at the University of Nottingham and at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the
Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. She has published articles in Polish, English, Russian and
German on philosophical aspects of psychoanalysis, romantic subjectivity, and the philosophy of
religion (especially Judaism and its crossings with modern philosophical thought). Her new book,
Philosophical Marranos: Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity was published with
Routledge in September 2014.
Jos de Mul
Thursday 24th September 10:00 AM
Human nature after Neo-Darwinism
The naturalization and mechanization of the world view that characterizes modernity has not only
lead to a disenchantment of living nature surrounding human beings, but has profoundly
affected human nature and the human place in the cosmos as well. Especially Neo-Darwinism,
which culminated in the 20th century in the so-called Modern Synthesis of evolutionary theory
and molecular genetics (popularized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, 1976), did not only
question the alleged gulf between human beings and other animals, but even the very gulf
between animate and inanimate nature. Darwin s dangerous idea that a simple mechanistic
algorithm of reproduction, variation and selection is responsible for the entire evolution of life on
earth unavoidably seems to lead to a reductionist , deterministic and even nihilistic image of man,
leaving little room for meaning, morality and art.
In the Western World, from the very beginning, the greedy reductionism of Neo-Darwinism has
met severe criticism, especially from representatives of Christian and humanistic traditions. As
these criticisms are often motivated by a no less greedy transcendentism , they fail to convince
those who adopt a modern, scientific world view. However, in the last decades there is also a
growing body of critique on Neo-Darwinism emerging from biology itself. Recent developments
in epigenetics and systems biology necessitate a fundamental reconsideration of some of the basic
presuppositions of Neo-Darwinism, including its so-called central dogma that genes are sealed

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off the outside world, so that the dna code is not affected by the organism and environment.
Although at first glance these discussions are quite technical and detailed, they have far-reaching
implications for human self-understanding. Taking The Music of Life. Biology Beyond Genes
(2006) of systems biologist Denis Noble as a starting point, the focus in this lecture the focus will
be on the evolutionary emergence of meaning, morality, and art.
Jos de Mul is a Professor of Philosophical Anthropology at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

Among his research interests are metaphysics, philosophy of science, and epistemology. His
publications include The Tragedy of Finitude. Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of Life, winner of the Praemium
Erasmianum, the Netherlands highest academic prize in human and cultural studies, and
Cyberspace Odyssey which won the Socrates Award for the best philosophical book of 2003. And
most recently Destiny Domesticated, The Rebirth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Technology.
Andreas Kinneging
Friday 25th September 1:30 PM
Democracy and aristocratic ethos
Many people in the West believe that democracy is like the sun. It will never go away. In truth of
course, democracy is a vulnerable plant, that needs to be taken care of thoughtfully. The question
of its preservation is always acute, because the possibility of its degeneration is always acute. Most
political philosophers argue that a proper democratic constitutional design is the primary
safeguard. “nd most would add that a democratic ethos is also necessary to assure democracy s
survival.
In my presentation I will maintain that all of this might be necessary, but is insufficient.
Paradoxically, the constitutional design of democracies needs to contain some aristocratic
elements to safeguard democracy. Also, a democratic ethos in the population needs to be
complemented by an aristocratic ethos in the democratic leadership, if democracy is to survive.
The big question, of course, is whether such a mix of democracy and aristocracy is feasible. If not,
the prospects of democracy are bad.
Andreas Kinneging is Professor of Legal Philosophy at the University of Leiden and a prominent
conservative philosopher in the Netherlands. His fields of expertise are jurisprudence, political
philosophy, ethics, axiology, deontology and constitutional theory.

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Alojzy Nowak
Friday 25th September 10:00 AM
Financialization as a moral problem
During the lecture I will present the problem of toxic financial assets and their influence on
stratification of income from the moral and ethical perspectives.
Alojzy Z. Nowak is Vice-Rector for Research and Liaison and Professor of Economics at
University of Warsaw. His main interests are banking, international economics, risk management
in financial markets and capital markets, macro and microeconomics, economic analysis of the EU,
moral foundations of economics. He is member of "Euro America North-Atlantic Association"
(Brussels), "European Alliance for Asian Studies Committee" (Singapur) and the Academy of
International Business. Editor-in-chief of "Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics" (London) and
vice editor-in-chief of "Interdisciplinary Journal of Economics and Business Law" (England),
"International Business" (FL, USA). He is the author of European Economic Integration. Chances
and Challenges (Warszawa, 2007).
Robert Piłat
Thursday 24th September 3:15 PM
Subjectivity as a Normative Concept
There is a striking discrepancy between the way we describe ourselves as agents and the way we
describe our actions: although agency is taken to be wholly an expression of oneself, we are only
partly prepared to avow our actions, while also ascribing them in some respects to external forces.
This discrepancy produces moral problems as it undermines two concepts, which are fundamental
to ethics: AUTHORSHIP OF ACTIONS (agency), and RESPONSIBILITY FOR ACTIONS. Modern
philosophy tackled the problem by coining a notion of subject, which was very different from the
older use of this term in ancient and medieval metaphysics.
A number of contemporary philosophers, most famously Michel Foucault, have voiced objections
against the notion of subject, dismissing it as loaded with unsupported assumptions and as
involving morally suspect constraints upon the justification of human behaviour. Criticism came
also from purely analytic studies of self-reference and self-knowledge. According to such

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philosophers as Paul Ricoeur, Roderick Chisholm and Richard Moran, it would be misguided to
search for metaphysical foundation of subjects in some essential and actual properties of persons.
In my talk I shall try to do justice to at least some of those objections while attempting to salvage
the normative function of the concept of subject. I am going to argue that subjects constitute
themselves prospectively - in decision-making processes, especially in those under uncertainty.
Subjects will be interpreted as correlates of ordered sets of preferences and probability
assessments. I draw upon the subjective approach to decision-making, represented by Frank
Ramsey, Bruno de Finetti, Leonard Savage and Richard Jeffrey, showing how certain features
traditionally supposed to constitute a weakness with this approach actually offer important
support to an account of selfhood in these terms.
Robert Piłat is a Professor of Philosophy and the chair of the Section of Epistemology at the
Faculty of Christian Philosophy at Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. His main
interests are philosophy of mind, philosophy of decision, phenomenology, philosophy of
language, epistemology. He is the former chair of the Polish Phenomenological Association. His
last books include: Experience and Concept (Warszawa, 2006), On the Nature of Concepts
(Warszawa, 2007), Aporias of Self-Knowledge (Warszawa, 2013).
Andrew Pinsent
Saturday 26th September 10:00 AM
Personhood and Humane Nature
Robert Spaemann has observed that human persons do not share personhood as a common
attribute in the way that they share humanity as a common attribute. Yet philosophical discourse
often treats personhood merely as supervenient to human nature, a convenient ascription for
signalling membership of a moral or intellectual constituency. The third-person forms of language
typical of scientific and philosophical discourse do not easily shed light on this discrepancy, given
that their grammatical structures fail to distinguish personal and impersonal beings. Since the
work of Martin Buber and others in the early twentieth century, however, attention has been
drawn to the binary relation of I and you and the irreducibility of what is denoted by these
terms to third-person descriptions. The existence of specifically second-person relatedness (SPR),
of I to you , has since been given empirical weight by studies involving persons for whom such
relatedness is atypical or inhibited. In this presentation, I review this research and its implications
for virtue ethics, social insight and the philosophy of humane nature. I conclude by proposing that

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SPR should be considered as integral to humane philosophy, augmenting the organism and the
machine as a third category of what Michael Ruse has called our root metaphors of the world.
FR Andrew Pinsent is a research fellow of Harris Manchester College, Research Director of the
Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, a member of the Theology and Religion Faculty at
Oxford University, and an Associate Research Fellow of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre. As a high
energy physicist, he is a named contributor to thirty-one publications of the DELPHI experiment
at CERN. He also has degrees in philosophy and theology from the Pontifical Gregorian
University and a second doctorate, in philosophy, from St Louis University. He is the author of
The Second-Person Perspective in “quinas s Ethics: Virtues and Gifts Routledge, and has a
variety of publications on virtue ethics, neurotheology, science and religion, the philosophy of the
person, divine action, and the nature of evil. In the media and at a great diversity of venues, he is a
regular contributor to public engagement with science and religion issues.
Marcin Poręba
Thursday 24th September 11:15 AM
Outline of a theory of freedom
The concept of freedom, metaphysically understood, makes sense only against the background of
necessity, i.e. of what is non-freedom. Freedom is an exception to necessity which, on purely
conceptual grounds, is the rule. Every philosophical theory of freedom has to meet at least these
two requirements: (1) it should decide whether exceptions to necessity are possible in the first
place; and (2) it should consider to what extent these exceptions correspond to our everyday,
intuitive understanding of freedom.
There are at least three different notions of necessity and three correspondingly different notions
of metaphysical freedom: (1) logical necessity given by the metalogical principle of excluded
middle: if every proposition at every point of time is determinately either true or false, then
freedom is illusory insofar as it entails that at least some propositions concerning future events are
undetermined as to their truth value. (2) Physical necessity understood in causal terms
philosophically the most widely used concept of necessity. On this notion, free events appear as
exceptions to the causal closure of the physical domain. (3) Necessity as symmetry breaking a
concept remotely indebted to Leibniz s principle of sufficient reason, and lying probably at the
heart of contemporary scientific theories. Freedom can be defined accordingly as symmetry
keeping or as delay in symmetry breaking.

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I discuss this third concept of freedom and show that it is in keeping with our intuitive notion
thereof. As such it seems to be a good candidate for a mediating factor between the scientific
description of the world and the way we experience ourselves in our everyday life-world.
Marcin Poręba is a Professor of Philosophy and the chair of the Department of Modern
Philosophy in the Institute of Philosophy at University of Warsaw. His main interests are the
classical German philosophy (Leibniz, Kant), pragmatism, metaphysics and philosophy of mind.
He is the author of: Transcendental Theory of Consciousness. An Attempt of Semantic
Reconstruction (Warszawa, 1999), The Possibility of Reason. Exercises in Metaphysics (Warszawa,
2008), The Limits of Relativity. The Metaphysical Description (Warszawa, 2014).
Zofia Rosińska
Saturday 26th September 3:15 PM
Axiological Sensitivity
In this paper I attempt to explicate our axiological sensitivity, by which I mean the faculty,
referred to in many ethical traditions, by which we become aware of values both moral values,
as philosophers have traditionally emphasized, but also other kinds of value such as the aesthetic.
That this axiological sensitivity is often held to be fading in the modern world makes its nature all
the more puzzling, and our understanding it all the more crucial. Drawing on a diverse range of
sources, including Kant, Ricoeur, Empedocles, James, Hume and Wedgwood, I argue for a
conception of values as neither an alien law nor a subjective feeling or choice, but as part empirical
and part transcendental, shaped through debate and discussion; it is values like these that are, not
learnt, but recognized through a quasi-perceptual faculty of axiological sensitivity, understood on
an analogy with aesthetic judgement.
Zofia Rosińska is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw, was a student of

Professor Stefan Morawski, and for many years the director of the Philosophy of Culture
Department which she took over after Professor Morawski. She engages with problems that arise
at the meeting point between Psychology and Philosophy. She introduced Psychoanalysis to the
Polish philosophical scene as a method of reflecting on culture and the human person. She is the
author of many books including Freud (1993), Jung (1982), Psychoanalytic Thinking about Art
(1985), Psychotherapy and Culture (1997), and recently Movement of Thought (2012).

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Line Ryberg-Ingerslev
Saturday 26th September 11:15 AM
Being with others: answerability and responsiveness
Revisiting Heidegger s notion of Mitsein, the two “merican philosophers Steven Crowell and
Stephen Darwall both argue that answerability is a fundamental way in which we are with other
people. Being with others commits us to dialogical accountability in such a way that we must
answer for our doings and can be held responsible for our actions. Whether this kind of
commitment builds on second personal empathy as Darwall argues or on the existential capability
for giving reasons as Crowell argues; interpersonal understanding is fundamentally tied to a
hermeneutics of dialogical co-existence. In this paper, I will suggest that being with others is first
and foremost a responsive phenomenon and as such it is a pre-normative structure that calls us
into the exposure of having to give out of nothing for the other.
Line Ryberg Ingerslev is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the university of Århus (Denmark)
where she is part of a research program entitled Existential “nthropology: Inquiring Human
Responsiveness . She holds a PhD. in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen Denmark .
From 2016-2018 she will be working in Vienna with prof. Matthew Ratcliffe. Her philosophical
interests include Philosophical Anthropology and phenomenology, with particular focus on the
expressive body, the hermeneutics of responsiveness and communication.Her recent publications
include: : Clinical Response to ”odily Symptoms in Psychopathology with Dorothée
Legrand, for Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology (forthcoming); : Why the Capacity to
Pretend Matters for Empathy in Topoi: “n International Review of Philosophy, vol. , pp. -
13; : My ”ody as an Object: Self-distance and Social Experience in Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences, Speical Issue: Psychosis, vol. 12 (1), pp.163-78
Anthony Steinbock
Saturday 26th September 4:30 PM
The role of moral emotions for our contemporary world
The moral emotions have far-reaching consequences for how we view our place in the world. In
this paper, I suggest the ways in which the emotions, especially, the interpersonal or moral
emotions, can and should be integrated into contemporary social and political discourse. I begin
by examining the problematic of our contemporary social imaginaries. I discuss this briefly in

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terms of what Claude Lefort has termed the era of Bouregois Ideology and Totalitarian Ideology,
and then in terms of what I have called the "homogeneit of power." But if there is a crisis today, it
is not because we need a new notion of reason (communicative or pragmatic) or must somehow
turn to aesthetics. Rather, the crisis is due to the division of the human person into either reason
or sensibility, and the relegation of the emotions either to instinct and sensibility or to their
rational control in order to be useful. Instead, I argue for the unique human and personal place of
the emotions, and suggest how the emotions (like trust, shame, repentance, loving, humility, etc.)
can play a role in shaping civic life and power relations, rather than being sidelined in such
discussions.
Anthony J. Steinbock is a Professor of philosophy and the director of the Phenomenology

Research Center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His main interests are primarily
contemporary German and French philosophy, especially, phenomenology and its development
in thinkers like Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Scheler, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Marion,
Waldenfels, and Lefort. The main thematic fields of his interest are the intersection of
phenomenology and social ontology, critical theory, and the philosophy of religion. He is the
editor-in-chief of Continental Philosophy Review and the author of Home and Beyond: Generative
Phenomenology after Husserl (Northwestern, 1995), Phenomenology and Mysticism: The
Verticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington, 2007) and Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the
Evidence of the Heart (Northwestern 2014).
Kenneth Stikkers
Friday 25th September 11:15 AM
Growth and Well-Being, Economic and Human
“s “ristotle taught, Oikonomia attends more to persons than to the acquisition of inanimate
things, and to human excellence (arête) than to the excellence of property, which we call wealth
Politics I, . Economies ought to serve human flourishing, and notions of economic growth
and well-being must be grounded in a proper understanding of human growth and well-being.
Therefore, any economic theory will only be as sound as the philosophical anthropology, that is,
the understanding of human well-being, that underlies it, and an economy built upon a distorted
understanding of the human can only stunt human growth.
However, as the founder of economic anthropology, Karl Polanyi, demonstrated, there is hardly
an anthropological or sociological assumption whether explicit or implicit contained in the
philosophy of economic liberalism that has not been [empirically] refuted. Liberal economic
theory rests upon a distorted understanding of the human, and hence it is no wonder that it often

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promotes today distorted economic policies whereby economic growth and development do
little or nothing to foster human growth and development.
The aim of this paper, then, is to trace how a perverted understanding of humanity came to
form the foundation for classical liberal economic thought and to identify some of the negative
consequences of this development.
Kenneth W. Stikkers is a Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at Southern Illinois

University Carbondale and Professor of Social Science at Autonomous University of Sinaloa
(Mexico). His main interests are philosophy of economics, moral foundations of economics, social
and political philosophy, American and African-American philosophy as well as contemporary
continental philosophy (Scheler, Foucault). He is the author of: Utopian Visions Past, Present and
Future: Rethinking the Ethical Foundations of Economy; Economics as Moral Philosophy and
many articles on philosophy of economics, American philosophy and contemporary continental
thought. Editor of Max Scheler's Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge.
Jerry Valberg
Thursday 24th September 4:30 PM
Deception
This paper considers the case of deceiving someone with whom we have a close personal
relationship, where the deceived never discovers the deception and never suffers in any way from
it (including damage to his/her reputation). Our intuition is that, nonetheless, something is wrong
with what we are doing and, more specifically, that we are doing something bad to the deceived -
in some way 'harming' him/her. Given the built-in stipulation that the deceived in no way suffers
from the deception (perhaps even benefits) it is not obvious what the harm might be. Yet (I would
say) our intuition is right. We are harming the person. But how?
Jerry Valberg received his PhD from the University of Chicago, and subsequently taught briefly at
the Universities of Illinois and Chicago. He then became senior lecturer in Philosophy at
University College London where he has taught until his recent retirement. His two most
important books, The Puzzle of Experience (1992), and Dream Death and The Self (2007), raise some of
the most perennial questions in philosophy in a novel way, and have been an important influence
not only in analytical philosophy, but also for many branches of continental thought,
phenomenology in particular.

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Short Papers Timetable
24th September 2015
Group A
1:30 Phanomkorn Yothasorn
p.m. “ Revisit to J.J. Rousseau’s Conception of Human Nature: an
Argument for Relevance
2:00 Przemysław ”ursztyka
p.m. The Primacy of the Possible. Imagination and the Subversive
Humanism
2:30 Gabriela Kurylewicz
p.m. Need for philosophy in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's
Thought
Group B
1:30 Agata Łukomska
p.m. The Nature of Moral Agents – Rational or Emotional? The
Lesson of the So-Called Agent-Regret
2:00 Jan Molina
p.m. Empathy, human nature and divine grace, or was Voltaire a
Jansenist
2:30 Thomas Pölzler
p.m. Moral by Nature? On the Difficulty of Determining the
Adaptedness of Moral Concepts

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Short Papers Timetable
26th September 2015
Group A
1:30 Jan Swianiewicz
p.m. Searching for human agency in population ethics
2:00 Ryan Meade

p.m. Law’s Insight into Human Nature: Conforming to Rules
2:300 Silvio Marino

p.m. Human Natures. The Relationship between Man, Polis, and
Environment in Plato and the Hippocratic Authors
Group B
1:30 Marija Selak
p.m. Enhancing What? Human Enhancement vs. Human Nature
2:00 Richard J. Elliott

p.m. The Impoverishment of Posthumanism
2:300 Marcin Rychter

p.m. Subliminal bleeps: is electronic music inhuman?

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Parallel Paper Authors
Przemysław ”ursztyka Ph.D. in philosophy, and Assistant Professor at the Department of

Philosophy of Culture, Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw. His main interests:
philosophy of culture, philosophical psychology, phenomenology, psychoanalysis,
existentialism, hermeneutics, the aesthetic and ethical aspects of the work of imagination.
Co-editor and co-author of three books: Schulz. ”etween Myth and Philosophy, Gdańsk
2014; Freud and Modernity, Kraków 2008 and 2009; Love and Loneliness. Around the
Thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Warszawa 2007 (all in Polish).
Richard Elliott is a Research Affiliate at Heythrop College, University of London. A friend

of the Humane Philosophy Project, his research interests lie in scholarship on Nietzsche,
Heidegger, the German idealist tradition and also more analytic endeavours. He has work
forthcoming in Journal of Nietzsche Studies.
Gabriela Kurylewicz is a philosopher, poet, president of the Fundacja Forma Teatr,

Instytut Sztuki i ”adań Filozoficznych, lecturer at the Institute of Philosophy, University of
Warsaw.
“gata Łukomska holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Warsaw. Her
dissertation focused on the ethical thought of Bernard Williams; accordingly, her main
interests are meta-ethics, moral epistemology and moral psychology. At the moment she's
tackling some problems from the borderland of meta-ethics and philosophy of politics,
while working on a Polish translation of Williams's Shame and Necessity.
Silvio Marino is Fellow of “ncient Philosophy at the University of Naples Federico II .

During his PhD at the same university (2008-11), he studied at the CNRS (UPR 76) for two
years and then had a post-doctoral position at the universities of São Paulo (USP) and
Campinas (UNICAMP) (2011-13). His research interests are Plato (dialogics, political
theory, epistemology), Hippocratics, ancient anthropology, and ancient aesthetics.
Ryan D. Meade is Director of Regulatory Compliance Studies at Loyola University

Chicago School of Law. Ryan teaches a variety of regulatory and administrative law
courses and oversees the compliance studies curriculum and graduate students. His areas
of specialty include administrative law, health care policy, and legal theory. He received a
B.A. from Northwestern University and a J.D. from Cornell University.

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Jan Molina is a graduate student at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw. His
main interest lie in the ontology of the subject in the philosophy of the Enlightenment and
the public role of intellecutals. In 2014 his MA thesis on the philosophy of Voltaire was
awarded by the Archive of Warsaw School of History of Ideas as the second best
dissertation on the history of ideas.
Thomas Pölzler works as a university assistant at the Philosophy Department of the

University of Graz, Austria. He received a MA in Philosophy, a MA in Political, Economic
and Legal Philosophy, and recently completed his PhD in Philosophy. His main area of
research is metaethics, in particular metaethics relation to the empirical sciences. Further
interests include the philosophy of Albert Camus and environmental ethics.
Marcin Rychter is a philosopher, translator, essayist and editor of philosophical quarterly

Kronos . He translated the works of Charles Taylor, Jonathan Lear, “gnes Heller, Stefan
Themerson, Graham Harman, W.K.C. Guthrie and many others.
Marija Selak finished her Postgraduate degree in Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities
and Social Sciences in Zagreb, receiving the title of doctor of philosophy in 2013. The title
of her thesis was Human Nature and New Epoch. In February 2010 she became research
fellow at the same University (Department of Philosophy). She is currently working as an
assistant professor. She was a visiting researcher at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and at IWE
Institut für Wissenschaft und Ethik (Bonn) and Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She is a member
of Croatian Philosophical Society, Croatian Bioethics Society and European Society for
Philosophy of Medicine and Healthcare. Her interests include: metaphysics, ontology,
philosophy of history and bioethics.
Jan Swianiewicz received his PhD degree in philosophy at University of Warsaw in 2013.
His thesis (published in 2014) concerned the philosophy and methodology of
contemporary macrohistorical studies of capitalism. He specializes in continental
philosophy and philosophy of history. Currently he is leading the project Population
Ethics and Theories of Biopolitics founded by National Science Center and teaching at
the Institute of Philosophy, UW.
Phanomkorn Yothasorn is a philosophy lecturer at College of Interdisciplinary Studies,

Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand. Phanomkorn received her MA in History of
Political Thought. Her research interests focus on early modern intellectual history and
philosophy of the Enlightenment.

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Parallel Abstracts
Przemysław ”ursztyka, The Primacy of the Possible. Imagination and the Subversive
Humanism
The aim of my paper is twofold. First, it is to re-examine the function and the ambivalent status of
imagination within the field of human lived experience. Second, to draw from this analysis some
meaningful implications of the anthropological nature.
It seems that there is a strict opposition between the imaginary and the real, and consequently
between the imaginative and perceptual experiences. This provisional conviction led some
thinkers to the more fundamental conclusions that imagination is nothing more but the power of
negativity and irrealization or fictionalization. Furthermore, in this perspective the imaginative
experience is seen as radically individual, private, solipsistic. Being the guarantor of purely
negative freedom it is, in fact, a flight from reality. Far from denying this negative aspect of the
work of imagination I will develop its broadened phenomenological conception. In this
perspective imagination essentially referred to the category of possibility is no longer opposed to
the perceptual apprehension of what is real but rather constitutively intertwined with it, or even
conditioning it. It appears as the power of modalization inscribed into the very structure of the
lived experience, as a creation of an affective texture of the worldly things, events and persons, as
the capacity of recognition of latent dimensions of our experience. It is the capacity of seeing and
experiencing otherwise, of seeing through or beyond what is directly given, of re-vision and re-
invention of the reality. As such, it should be characterized, from the very beginning, as: being
open to what is other and strange (and that makes it essentially inter/trans-subjective); as a
confrontation with different forms or shades of presence; as a creation of the potential space,
which is the original space of our primal and intimate contact with the life-world and with the
other people.
This phenomenology of the imaginative experience has profound anthropological consequences.

Human being as essentially capable of imagining should not be seen in terms of centralized,
(quasi-)substantial subject or ego determined by self-transparency, self-reliance and being present
to itself. I will argue that one should rather think about it in terms of the Self which is at once: de-
centralized, horizonal (or even vertical), potential, prospective and polyphonic.

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Richard Elliott, The Impoverishment of Posthumanism

A contemporary tendency in some fields within philosophy, as well as in other less
rigorous, arguably more doctrinal disciplines such as critical theory and gender studies, has been
a tendency towards a new ideological umbrella of positions, variously understood as
posthumanism , or transhumanism .
The exact definition of these movements is ill-defined, so some attempt at achieving an accurate
characterization of what it is, as well as its methodology and aims, will be the first task of my
paper.
I will argue that the philosophical roots of posthumanism are to be located in two places; first, in
Nietzsche s thought of the death of God and his ensuing diagnosis of nihilism, and second, in a
particular conception of the role of technology in human life. I will argue that both of these
presuppositions are either erroneous or flawed; why one is a misreading of Nietzsche s task
(indeed, is thoroughly anti-Nietzschean in its pronouncements), and the other dangerously
overstretches the role of technology from a merely functional to an essential position in human
life.
My central critique, building upon the exposition of these errors, will identify several arguments
to expose the flawed reasoning in posthumanism as a philosophical position. These arguments
will take place on a number of distinct but interrelated fronts; the first involving metaphysics
(where a particular kind of category error made by the posthumanist is discussed), ethics (where
an attribution of the possibility for humane ethical character is falsely extended to the post-
human , and the remit of values where a particular conception of authenticity is exposed as
erroneous).
Finally, my paper will offer an invitation to consider the dangers of this problematic conception of
posthumanism for the prospect of a truly humane philosophy, and why exposing its
impoverishment has a further ethical imperative.
Gabriela Kurylewicz, Human need for philosophy in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's
Thought
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola the 15th century Platonist, Aristotelian, Thomist and Christian
Cabalist argues that while being human in the state of deprivation of many goods is hard but
still achievable, to remain human without philosophy is impossible. He says (in his Letter to
Ermolao ”arbaro, that: probably we could live without language, although it would cause
discomfort, but without heart we could not live, by no means. Anyone who does not deal with
literature is not a humanist, but one who is not engaged in philosophy is not human . These

18
radical words may become clearer in relation to another fragment in Pico s Letter to “ldo
Manuzio, 1492) where he invites his friend to get involved in philosophy and read it,
remembering that it cannot be distractive from the mysteries of truth. Philosophy questions the
truth, theology discovers, religion possesses. “ssuming that the human being is an animal that is
rational and able to laugh, assuming that philosophy as a human love for divine wisdom, as a
questioning of truth, is in fact a principle of our humanity, we do need philosophy. Pico took into
consideration that philosophy should not be dogmatic, but plural and open for any aspect of
individual intellectual freedom. In his view even the smallest symptoms of wisdom, the smallest
evidence of esteem for wisdom, and the tiniest symptoms of philosophy are valuable. Ignorant
speech, ignorant science, ignorant art is like a destructive annihilating weapon in the lunatic s
hands. An effective defence against stupid speech, science and art can only be mounted through
that speech, science and art inspired by the authentic need for sapiential, philosophical, and
especially metaphysical, reflection.
“gata Łukomska, The Nature of Moral Agents – Rational or Emotional? The Lesson of
the So-Called Agent-Regret
A lot has been written in the last decades about moral emotions, and mostly pointing to their
importance for living a truly human life. However, much of that interest was precipitated by the
crisis of meta-ethical emotivism; as a result of which, moral philosophers have predominantly
concentrated not on emotions themselves but rather on proofs that it's in fact rational to experience
and act on them. That may be true with regard to many emotions, but there are some, like some
forms of regret, that seem important for morality, and yet resist any kind of simple rationalization.
In his essay Moral Luck ”ernard Williams argues that the possibility of experiencing a
special kind of regret for our actions, one that differs significantly from both remorse and by-
stander's regret about the past, speaks to the need to rethink the idea of moral responsibility as
depending entirely on the agent's intentions, and the quality of his or her deliberation. According
to Williams, practicing morality involves an element of risk: in some situations we can rightly
blame ourselves for our well-intentioned and well-informed actions. Naturally, this thesis defies
our established notions about moral responsibility and refutations have been attemted by a
number of critics, whose objections usually concentrate on the insidious character of guilty
feelings; for many of the skeptics about moral luck agent-regret, if it exists at all, is not a moral
emotion.
The aim of my paper is to defend the moral relevance of irrational agent-regret. I don't suggest
that there is a straightforward relation between experiencing (or not experiencing) agent-regret
and moral blameworthiness. However, I want to argue that the phenomenon of agent-regret
speaks in favour of the validity of a model of practical deliberation that allows for a radical

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retrospective re-evaluation of our own actions more importantly, one that escapes the rational /
emotional dichotomy.
Silvio Marino, Human Natures. The Relationship between Man, Polis, and
Environment in Plato and the Hippocratic Authors
This paper aims at showing the principle at the base of Platonic and Hippocratic relational
conceptions of human nature. In some Platonic and Hippocratic texts human nature is related
and determined by the political and environmental contexts where an individual is born and lives.
Indeed, he comes into contact with the several political and environmental dynameis (properties)
that act and react with each being. From a political standpoint the dynameis are those possessed
by each kind of constitution, which informs the souls of its citizens, whereas from a
physiological standpoint the dynameis are those of the different kinds of environment described
by medical authors.
From this perspective mankind is divided into different natures, which derive from different
environments. Both Plato and Hippocratic authors develop their analysis considering the nature of
a being as determined by its own physical and psycho-political environment. This remark shows,
first of all, that both Plato s philosophy and Hippocratic medicine analysed human nature from a
deterministic standpoint. Secondly, it shows that both Plato and Hippocratic authors considered
human nature as the relationship that an individual establishes with its environment.
Focusing especially on the Republic and on Airs, Waters, Places, this paper aims at showing that,
1) according to Plato and Hippocratic authors, the nature of mankind has different forms, 2) the
physical and psychical environments determine the nature of beings, 3) that from a logical
standpoint environment works as a semantic machine , which transmits its own nature physis
to each being.
Ryan Meade, Law’s Insight into Human Nature: Conforming to Rules

When a human person intentionally complies with a just law, the human is realizing a capacity for
justice. This is a virtuous act and assists in developing the person s human potential.
There are generally three types of compliance: accidental, reflexive, intentional. Of these, my
paper asserts that intentional compliance has the best opportunity to foster virtue, though
reflexive compliance when it becomes a habit through intention is also meaningful. Compliance
as an action is not human capacity-fulfilling unless it satisfies certain criteria. There are at least
three criteria that must be met for compliance to be virtuous: (a) the conforming action must be
intentional (it must not be accidental or reflexive); (b) the law to which the human conforms must

20
be just; (c) the instance of compliance must have as its end more than merely conforming to law as
an external command.
The paper explores in the context of law various questions including, but not limited to, whether
non-intentional actions can be virtuous, how one places compliance with illegitimate laws in the
context of a perceived good in abiding by the civil order, and whether conformance with law
solely because it is an external command is virtuous and human capacity-fulfilling. While this
paper treats compliance with law as a virtuous act, it also clearly sets out that under certain
circumstances non-compliance with law may also be a virtuous act.
”y law, the paper assumes a positive law and treats laws both of the state and private law-
making, such as contract theory and social conventions. The paper seeks to set a theoretical
foundation for compliance as virtuous and then identify practical points in contemporary life on
how virtuous compliance plays out.
Jan Molina, Empathy, human nature and divine grace, or was Voltaire a Jansenist
The paper is an attempt to analyze the complex relations between Voltaire's anthropological
theory and Jansenist theological concept of corrupted nature and divine grace.
The author claims that although Voltaire was openly very critical of Jansenist pessimistic view of
human nature and it's incapability of good, his own philosophical anthropology was also highly
influenced by the Augustinian tradition. In fact, according to the author, Voltaire's theory of
metaphysical foundations of moral aspects of human nature can be seen as a specific
reinterpretation of fundamental assumptions of Augustine's doctrine.
According to the interpretation proposed by the author, the idea of human subjectivity in the
thought of Voltaire has been deprived of its substantial nature and should be understood as the
property of substantial being associated with the being s agency. Thus it is an attribute that is not
essentially related to the metaphysical nature of the substantial being.
Understood in such a way, human subjectivity realizes itself on two levels: thought and organic
life. True realization of each of them is determined by different kind of natural order: physical or
moral one. “ccording to the author s interpretation, Voltaire's concept of moral Natural Law is
based on empathy and thus it is fundamentally incoherent with the natural order of physical and
biological principles determining the life of different species.
Finally, the author claims that, within the framework of Voltaire's philosophy, the transition from
one natural order of determination to another cannot be explained within the naturalistic
paradigm. According to the author, this transition, and so the very existence of rational and moral
subjectivity, should be understood as a permanent intervention of supernatural power into the

21
natural physical order. Thus, the proposed way of understanding of Voltaire's theory of human
subjectivity bears significant resemblance to the general structure of Jansenist theological
anthropology.
Thomas Pölzler, Moral by Nature? On the Difficulty of Determining the Adaptedness

of Moral Concepts
One of the most lively debates in evolutionary psychology concerns the hypothesis that moral
judgements are adaptations, i.e., that they have been shaped by natural selection. The truth of this
hypothesis would have important implications for our self-understanding as humans. Some
philosophers have argued that it would also support certain normative ethical or metaethical
claims, for example, that there are no objective moral facts, or that we lack any moral knowledge.
So is the hypothesis true? Do moral judgements really lie in human nature ? In my presentation I
will not attempt to answer this question. Rather, I will briefly explain four difficulties that anyone
who sets out to determine the adaptedness of moral judgements should be aware of. First, there is
reasonable disagreement about the workings of natural selection. Second, the hypothesis that
moral judgements are adaptations may be advocated in varying degrees of generality, with
varying scopes, and on different levels. Third, it is unclear what would constitute evidence for or
against this hypothesis. And fourth, there is reasonable disagreement about what moral
judgements essentially are. While some of these difficulties may be alleviated by greater
conceptual clarity or new empirical evidence, others (in particular points three and four) are
bound to persist. Any defensible stance towards the adaptedness of moral judgements must
therefore involve a significant degree of agnosticism which means that considerations about the
evolution of morality are neither likely to significantly advance our self-understanding as humans
nor to ground strong arguments in normative ethics or metaethics.
Marcin Rychter Subliminal bleeps: is electronic music inhuman?

Electronic music differs ontologically from music played on classical instruments. By this I mean
that the fundamental concepts and oppositions that we use to conceptualize music alter their
meaning when we use them to grasp electronic music. “mong them are: work of art , material
vs. form , performance vs. score , the original vs. copy , musical time or convention . These
changes are present due to the electronic devices enabling us to record, store, modify, play back
and create sounds. This equipment opened radically new ways for the musical imagination. Thus
the technology became an important factor of a cultural change. What does this situation tell us
about the human / inhuman opposition? Can we consider inhuman beings as active agents in the
cultural processes? Can we describe the cultural processes as networks that join together
ontologically different entities and processes?

22
Our listening habits are still shaped by the classical music with its tonal harmony, regular
rhythmical patterns and classical musical forms. The electronic music however introduces
completely different, previously unheard musical material and new ways of structuring it. The
computers can generate every possible sound and modify it in every possible way. Each
composer utilises these possibilities in their own, idiosyncratic way. Therefore the more or less
unified and organised world of classical music gave way to diversity of different experiments, of
which some are very radical. The artistic qualities of electronic music might be hidden in the
timbre, density of the texture, interplay of different sound layers or the spectral effects.
Accordingly the electronic work can at first glance seem as something alien, overwhelming and
formless. This can lead to developing the new aesthetics of electronic music based on the Kantian
opposition of beauty and sublime .
Marija Selak, Enhancing What? Human Enhancement vs. Human Nature

Technological development has enabled humanity to change (or, as it is often said, enhance) its
nature. The idea of human enhancement, as a contemporary theoretical example of human desire
to transcend itself biologically, poses the question of human nature. An anthropological insight
into the human nature from the beginning relied on the comparison or distinction between human
and non-human animal. Thus, the conception of man/woman as a defective being we can find
very early, even in pre-Socratic writings. Since human defectiveness searches for certain resolution
or compensation, Arnold Gehlen defined culture as a construction of particularly human world, as
a compensation for weakness of human nature. Thus, to be able to continue to cultivate the world
and ourselves, we should, in a certain sense, cherish our defectiveness. We should stay eternal in-
between in a biological sense, which is the opposite of what human enhancement promotors
believe. In this paper we will open the question of the existence of human nature and emphasise
some of the possible consequences of the contemporary attempts to overcome it.
Jan Swianiewicz, Searching for human agency in population ethics
Every ethical system implies a set of assumptions about human nature and relates these
assumptions to historically variable human practice. I will focus on a set of explicit and implicit
foundations of a new area of ethics which has become known as population ethics. Population
ethics is a young branch of not so much older discipline called bioethics. The history of population
ethics as an academic discipline dates back to s/ s publications of Derek Parfit s and David
Heyd s which brought to attention the problem of responsibility for future generations. Since then,
the last decades have witnessed an increasing interest in moral problems that arise when actions
or policies cannot be said to affect present individual persons but merely to substitute one future
group of people with another. I will try to show that there is a meaningful gap in most reasonings
within contemporary population ethics. Ethical theory should have a clear concept of a moral

23
agent, i.e. a being who is capable of acting with a reference to right and wrong. It seems to me that
population ethics in its present shape have a defined object (biologically perceived human
population), palpable concept of ethical subjects (individuals whose actions affecting the
development of population can be judged from the standpoint of given population axiology)
whereas it doesn t have any concept of a moral agent i.e. a subject who acts as a co-author of
population axiology and implements it). Practical examples provided in the literature concerning
population ethics usually invoke either parents wondering whether to conceive a child in a given
conditions or vague governments considering various policies affecting the composition of
populations. These two types of agents operate on very different levels, being guided by different
motives and rationalities that are never or rarely discussed. I believe that this lack delimits the
shapes of a uniquely modern form of humankind: population as collective political subject.
The study was financed by the National Science Centre, Poland as a part of the research project
#2014/13/D/HS1/01803.
Phanomkorn Yothasorn, A Revisit to J.J. Rousseau’s Conception of Human Nature:

an Argument for Relevance.
The idea of human nature bears great importance because mankind seem to have been in an
endless quest to understand himself and to determinate his place among all that surrounds him.
The quest for such knowledge has led to the growth of numerous fields of studies across history,
in which the concept of human nature continues to be the centre of discussion. However, in
present, the previous attempts to address the concept seem at best inadequate, or at worst
obsolete. This paper would like to argue for the relevance of such attempts by revisiting J.J.
Rousseau s view of human nature one of the most influential as well as controversial views of
human nature in history of Western tradition of thought. Firstly, it will be shown that the concept
of human nature is essential to Rousseau s system of thought, to the extent that it would not be
possible to understand his thought if his idea of human nature is omitted. Secondly, Rousseau s
inquiry is an attempt to thoroughly investigate the nature of and relations between humans,
human society and its culture, which is the very topic that never leaves academia. Thus, by
analysing the concept of human nature within his empire of thought and beyond, the paper will
try to show that the philosophical study of human nature not only has not lost its value, but
remained crucial to the intellectual realm.

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Welcome to the 2015 Humane Philosophy Conference:

Humane Philosophy and Human Nature

Aims of the Conference 2

Abstracts of Keynote Speakers 3

Short papers timetable for Thursday 24th September 13

Short papers timetable for Friday 26th September 14

Parallel paper authors 15

Space for Notes 25

Aims of the Conference

Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode (IF University of Warsaw, Blackfriars Hall Oxford)

Humane Philosophy Project Conference, Warsaw 24 - 26 September 2015

Abstracts of Keynote Speakers

Available information on Keynote presentations, and speakers is presented below in alphabetical

Friday 25th September 2:45 PM

The Human Difference: Beyond Nomotropism

In my lecture, I would like to contextualise Foucault s Neo-Stoic project, and to sketch an

Humane Philosophy Project Conference, Warsaw 24 - 26 September 2015

Thursday 24th September 10:00 AM

Human nature after Neo-Darwinism

Humane Philosophy Project Conference, Warsaw 24 - 26 September 2015

Jos de Mul is a Professor of Philosophical Anthropology at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

Friday 25th September 1:30 PM

Democracy and aristocratic ethos

Humane Philosophy Project Conference, Warsaw 24 - 26 September 2015

Friday 25th September 10:00 AM

Financialization as a moral problem

Thursday 24th September 3:15 PM

Subjectivity as a Normative Concept

Humane Philosophy Project Conference, Warsaw 24 - 26 September 2015

Saturday 26th September 10:00 AM

Personhood and Humane Nature

Humane Philosophy Project Conference, Warsaw 24 - 26 September 2015

Thursday 24th September 11:15 AM

Outline of a theory of freedom

Humane Philosophy Project Conference, Warsaw 24 - 26 September 2015

Saturday 26th September 3:15 PM

Zofia Rosińska is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw, was a student of

Humane Philosophy Project Conference, Warsaw 24 - 26 September 2015

Saturday 26th September 11:15 AM

Being with others: answerability and responsiveness

Saturday 26th September 4:30 PM

The role of moral emotions for our contemporary world

Humane Philosophy Project Conference, Warsaw 24 - 26 September 2015

Anthony J. Steinbock is a Professor of philosophy and the director of the Phenomenology

Friday 25th September 11:15 AM

Growth and Well-Being, Economic and Human

Humane Philosophy Project Conference, Warsaw 24 - 26 September 2015

Kenneth W. Stikkers is a Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at Southern Illinois

Thursday 24th September 4:30 PM

Humane Philosophy Project Conference, Warsaw 24 - 26 September 2015

Short Papers Timetable

24th September 2015

Humane Philosophy Project Conference, Warsaw 24 - 26 September 2015

Short Papers Timetable

26th September 2015

2:00 Ryan Meade

2:300 Silvio Marino

2:00 Richard J. Elliott

2:300 Marcin Rychter

Humane Philosophy Project Conference, Warsaw 24 - 26 September 2015

Parallel Paper Authors

Przemysław ”ursztyka Ph.D. in philosophy, and Assistant Professor at the Department of

Richard Elliott is a Research Affiliate at Heythrop College, University of London. A friend

Gabriela Kurylewicz is a philosopher, poet, president of the Fundacja Forma Teatr,