Dr. Alexander Pruss: Marriage Is A Natural Kind
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- Опубликовано: 3 окт 2016
- Notes for the lecture can be found here: bit.ly/2dWDbwG.
Dr. Alexander Pruss is a Canadian philosopher, Professor of Philosophy and the Co-Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. His best known book is The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Reassessment.
Dr. Pruss gave a keynote address at the 2016 Society of Christian Philosophers Conference at Evangel University.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by Dr. Pruss are his alone and do not necessarily represent the views, opinions or positions of Evangel University. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
(1) I’m not sure what natural kinds are if ‘being married’ is possibly one. SEP’s opening definition takes natural kinds to be properties independent of human behaviors and interests. So by definition, marriage isn’t a natural kind.
(2) Given his characterization of natural kinds, I don’t see any opposition between a socially constructed kind and a natural kind. Just as ‘being married’ figures in explanations, allows for inductive reasoning, and captures similarities, the same might very well be said of kinds which are clearly socially constructed. ‘Being classmates’, for example.
(3) I don’t see any reason whatsoever that anyone would accept his premise that ‘if marriage is a social construction then it’s defined in terms of the rights and responsibilities society ascribes to it’ (19:30). It seems obviously false. ‘Society’ isn’t some homogeneous entity which has assigned a fixed set of necessary and sufficient conditions for ‘being married’. In fact, his example of the pair of individuals, legally spouses who’s only interaction consists in throwing dishes at each other should work as a counterexample to his thesis. It is exactly because there’s room for disagreement as to whether they are married that marriage isn’t a natural kind.
(4) His clearest case is probably the critique one. We can criticize bad spouses. But he hasn’t argued, and I don’t see how he would, that such criticism isn’t reducible to regular ethics.
All wrong
He looks like Gregg Turkington.