While the pages of IAI News are updated daily, we also group our articles around monthly themes. Until now we have not made these explicit, but we are introducing this 'Note from the Editors' because we think readers will benefit from having a clearer sense of the underlying theme we are addressing in each issue, and the topics that we are seeking to uncover and address.
Our last issue addressed the theme Truth, Evidence and Lies and sought to explore the concealed bases of our beliefs and actions. The theme for the current issue is the Natural and the Unnatural. What makes a characteristic or trait natural, and how do we determine it as unnatural? What do we mean by nature, and how is it distinguished from ourselves? The distinction between the natural and the unnatural, at once so commonplace, is puzzling and problematic once it is explored. Is it a moral distinction, or a metaphysical one? And how is it to be decided?
Nor is the question of how to understand the natural and the unnatural something that we can put in the philosophical box of interesting conceptual issues but which has no great consequences. Deciding what is natural, is also to decide how to act and how to intervene in the world. It influences not only how we think society should be run but also how we understand ourselves and the world.
Philosophers, Graham Harman and Hilary Lawson explore the essential character of the natural. Speculative realist, Graham Harman, in his article, The Unnatural Divide, sets out a history of the distinction and sets about flattening the divide. Critic of realism, Hilary Lawson, in On the Cusp of the Unnatural argues that the natural can never be uncovered.
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