Darwinian Conservatism by Larry Arnhart

Traditionalist conservatives and classical liberals need Charles Darwin. They need him because a Darwinian science of human nature supports Burkean conservatives and Lockean liberals in their realist view of human imperfectibility, and in their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments. Arnhart's email address is larnhart1@niu.edu.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Natural Family Values in Darwinian Liberalism

One criticism of classical liberalism is that it ignores the importance of family life for social order, because the liberal reliance on th...

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Testosterone and Thomistic Natural Law

As we have seen in some recent posts, Thomas Aquinas roots natural law--and particularly the natural law of marriage--in Aristotle's bio...

Friday, September 16, 2011

The Social Science of Happy Atheism

Against my claim that human beings show an evolved natural desire for religious understanding, some of my critics have argued that the moder...

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Thomas Aquinas and the Christian Uncle Tom Problem

Does Thomas Aquinas have a solution for the problem of the Christian Uncle Tom? (This is a good question to raise on the 10th anniversary o...

Monday, September 05, 2011

Darwin Does Not Love You

Although it's not as popular as the bumper sticker that reads "Jesus Loves You," one occasionally sees the contrasting bumper ...

Sunday, August 28, 2011

The Aristotelian Biology of Thomistic Natural Law (2)

Eric Johnston's dissertation is a valuable study of how Aristotelian biology supports Thomas Aquinas's account of the natural law of...

Saturday, August 27, 2011

The Aristotelian Biology of Thomistic Natural Law

In some of my recent posts, I have argued that Thomas Aquinas's teaching on natural law is rooted in Aristotle's biology, that this ...

Friday, August 19, 2011

Tomasello on the Chimpanzee Theory of Mind and Social Ontology

In an email message responding to my previous post, Michael Tomasello has observed that it's not quite true that his research produces m...

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

More on the de Waal/Tomasello Debate in Primate Research

In my previous post, I briefly surveyed some of the issues in the debate between Frans de Waal and Michael Tomasello in comparing the social...

Friday, August 12, 2011

The de Waal/Tomasello Debate in Primate Studies

As hard as it is to read the minds of our fellow human beings, it is even harder to read the minds of other animals. Aristotle's bio...

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Thomistic Natural Law as Darwinian Natural Right: An APSA Paper

On September 1, at 2:00 pm, I will be on a panel ("Biology and Rights") at the 2011 Meetings of the American Political Science Ass...

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

Mind Is Not the Only Possible First Cause of All Things: Hume, Darwin, and Strauss

The most common objection to my arguments for Darwinian natural right is that Darwinian science fails to see that the only possible first ca...

Friday, July 29, 2011

John Locke's Biological Naturalism

Leo Strauss and many of those influenced by Strauss have assumed that John Locke's political philosophy rejected the rule of nature in f...

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