다윈 인문학과 인문학의 진화

Abstract

We live in the era of biology. We have heard of obesity genes, homosexuality genes from daily news papers almost every week. Such terms as Stem cell and GMO are no longer biological jargons. If contemporary science and technology have changed our lives for the past centuries, biology has been a center of the stage. Interesting enough, biology has changed not only our lives but also our thinking. Rapid development of reproductive technologies made us revisit our received view of the birth, genetic engineering led to safety problems of GM foods, and news of homosexuality genes evoked nature vs nurture debates again. Besides, recent development of neurosciences makes us think seriously if the brain is me. For the past two centuries, we have undertook three important revolutions: Darwinian, molecular, and cognitive revolution. They have changed our thinking of our selves dramatically. So it is valuable to discuss the humanistic meaning, issues and implications of the three revolutions. In this review paper, among the three I focus on the Darwinian revolution and its implications for humanities. Firstly, I discuss philosophical implications of Darwinian theory, reviewing its anti-essentialistic metaphysics and ethical ramifications. Secondly, I review Darwinian approaches to understanding of the human mind (especially for inference, emotion, and social cognition) and compare them with traditional conceptions of mind. Thirdly, I review two major theories of language evolution critically in order to explore the influence of Darwinian revolution on linguistics. Finally I argue for evolutionary theories of culture which has been hardly discussed in Darwinian senses. Through these discussions, I reveal that we can have interesting Darwinian views of ontology, morality, inference, emotion, social cognition, language, and even culture. So this paper can be a primitive review of Darwinian Humanities The Darwinian Humanities conflict with traditional ones in some cases, while they can do a complementary cooperation in others.