This chapter explores the development of debates on the moral among theologians from the mid twelfth century to the first half of the thirteenth century. It identifies a crucial turning point in the early decades of the thirteenth century, when interest in understanding the very nature of the human being and its faculties paved the way for a general reassessment of the issue of the different kinds of law.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce dehumanization and humanness. It begins with the story of Carmelita Torres, a seventeen-year-old adolescent girl from Juárez, Mexico. In January 1917, she was asked to get naked, shave her hair, and take a kerosene bath by US immigration authorities when she was coming to work as a maid in El Paso, Texas. The story of Carmelita illustrates dehumanization, the denial of people’s full humanity. This chapter examines popular myths and different forms of dehumanization, such as treating people like animals (animalistic dehumanization), objects (mechanistic dehumanization), and supernatural beings (mystic dehumanization). To confront dehumanization, we need to affirm our humanness, the dignity and wholeness of all human beings that makes them unique, free, and entitled to rights. Carmelita and others affirmed their humanness by protesting in the 1917 Bath Riots. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on Halloween, blackface, and redface. It ends with a discussion of Carmelita Torres and the affirmation of our humanity.

The concern of this chapter is with varieties of philosophical humanism and their own conceptions of the nature and significance of science. After an initial characterization of major themes in Renaissance humanism, it describes three main varieties that are evident in twentieth-century European philosophy – humanism as essentialism, humanism as rational subjectivity, and existential humanism. Different varieties of humanism are associated with different conceptions of science, some allied to the sciences, others antipathetic to them, while yet others offer subtler positions. The upshot is that there are different tales to tell about the relationship of (varieties of) philosophical humanism to (conceptions of) science, only some of which fit popular modern celebratory claims about a necessary alliance of humanism and science. If we take a wider look at the history of philosophy, we find ongoing experimentation with forms of humanism and explorations of diverse ways of understanding and evaluating scientific knowledge and ambitions. What we find is what we ought to expect of social, creative, epistemically sophisticated, self-expressive creatures: endless variety.

The final chapter entitled Conclusions contains a summary of the findings of the study, explaining the key motivations and claims behind the Galenic understanding of bodily unity.

In acts that are properly acts of justice (rather than, say, compassion or generosity), what is good for people is sought under the mediating description what is due them. The virtue of justice is the generalized concern that people get what is due them. Objective justice is the property of states of affairs, actions, institutions, and personal relationships in which people tend to get what is due them. So the virtue of justice is the concern that such objects have that property. When is some good or evil due a person? It is due on at least eight kinds of basis: desert, status, need, current possession, agreement, legality, parity, and freedom. We appeal to these conditions in justifying justice claims. The person who has the virtue of justice is one who is consistently and intelligently concerned that states of affairs, actions, institutions, and personal relationships be objectively just.

This chapter considers the presentation of virtue and happiness in the Meditations and asks how far this matches the distinctive features of Stoic thinking on these topics. The main topics considered are (1) the virtue–indifferents distinction, (2) the presentation of the virtues as forming groups or as unified in some way, (3) the virtue-happiness relationship and the idea of happiness as ‘the life according to nature’, meaning according to human or universal nature (or both). Overall, it is suggested that, although Marcus’s focus in the work is on the contribution of these ideas to his overall project of ethical self-improvement, his presentation largely reflects the ideas and connections between them that we find in the standard ancient accounts of Stoic ethics.

Most scholars assume that the Islamic concept of created human nature (fiṭra) indicates the natural religiosity of all human beings as created by God, and that, therefore, provides the basis for a kind of equality among humans – whether religious in nature or about gender and sexuality. While this is one interpretation of fiṭra, primarily found among scriptural commentators and theologians, this book highlights a far more diverse and contested tradition of interpretation and use of this concept. To demonstrate fiṭra’s rich use as a hierarchical, political, and ethical concept, the author introduces different philosophical engagements with the concept by al-Fārābī (d. 339/950); Ibn Bājja (d. 533/1139) and Ibn Ṭufayl (d. 581/1185); and Ibn Rushd (d. 595/1198). In the Introduction, she sheds light not only on the contemporary literature on created human nature and its roots in the scriptural sources but above all the importance of approaches to Islamic ethics that highlight the richness of the Islamic intellectual tradition and the complexity of its fundamental ethical concepts.

The book has shown that, like any other concept, fiṭra has a complex history. And like any concept with a lively history, fiṭra needs to be interpreted. The philosophers’ ethics and politics, and particularly their commitment to intellectual, social, and political hierarchies, do not map onto our ethics or politics. However, that does not mean that their engagement with fiṭra is not crucial in the current moment. Working through fiṭra among the philosophers creates tensions – among them, and between them and other Islamic interpreters such as the scriptural commentators. In these tensions the ethical work lies, opening space for both a more robust conception of Islamic intellectual history and more informed debates in the present. The possibilities of what it means to be human in Islamic thought are so much more diverse and contextual and signal that if one of our most foundational concepts, human nature, is under contestation, then so is our moral life. In fact, this contestation is necessary, deeply human, and traditional.

Urges psychiatry to get back to human nature because the concept, together with the idea of human freedom and classic and romantic perspectives, is required to calibrate the normal and the pathological in psychiatry. Highlights balance by showing how ‘sickly’ (Goethe) pictures of human nature and human freedom have adverse effects on psychiatry, including its interface with political life. Revisits the classicl and romantic perspectives, considering them in and out of balance in different ways. Distils a tripartite picture of the relationship between human nature, human freedom and mental disorder relevant to future research and teaching on psychiatric formulation and psychiatric ethics.

This chapter is partly about how actions are executed and how the details of people’s behavioral performance should be explained. But it also introduces some classes of action that find no place within the standard belief-desire model. These include habitual actions as well as speeded skilled actions, including many speech actions. To the extent that philosophers have addressed these kinds of action at all, their theories have run the gamut from complete mindlessness to full-blown intellectualism. The chapter critiques some influential accounts of the latter sort, after emphasizing that skilled actions are as distinctively human as are our rational capacities.