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ARISTOTELIAN NATURALISM VS. MUTANTS, ALIENS, AND THE GREAT RED DRAGON
Abstract
In this paper I present a new objection to the Aristotelian Naturalism (AN) defended by Philippa Foot. I describe this objection as a membership objection because it reveals the fact that AN invites counterexamples when pressed to identify the individuals bound by its normative claims. I present three examples of agents for whom the norms generated by AN are not obviously authoritative: mutants, aliens, and the Great Red Dragon. Those who continue to advocate for Foot’s view can give compelling replies to the first two of these examples, but their replies drive the view into an unwelcome result when it faces the last example. I conclude that the concept of being human, on which AN crucially depends, is not as straightforward as Foot’s advocates presume.
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“The membership objection that Woodcock presses against Aristotelian naturalism is a trilemma composed of three counterexamples-mutants, aliens, and the Great Red Dragon.”
From Can a MacIntyrian Care about Severely Disabled Strangers? (2022) · cites this paper as Woodcock 2018
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Cited by
Can a MacIntyrian Care about Severely Disabled Strangers?
McCracken, G. (2022) · The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine · doi:10.1093/jmp/jhac029
Metadata
- Authors
- Woodcock, S.
- Venue
- American Philosophical Quarterly
- Publisher
- University of Illinois Press
- Published
- 2018-10-01
- Volume
- 55
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 313-328
- ISSN
- 0003-0481
- 2152-1123
- Cited by
- 3
- References
- 0
- Language
- en
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: ARISTOTELIAN NATURALISM VS. MUTANTS, ALIENS, AND THE GREAT RED DRAGON. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/45128627
- The paper
- Woodcock, S. (2018). ARISTOTELIAN NATURALISM VS. MUTANTS, ALIENS, AND THE GREAT RED DRAGON. American Philosophical Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.2307/45128627
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Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
