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In this talk, Edouard Machery will defend the notion of human nature against the criticisms put forward by evolutionary biologists and philosophers of biology, and put forward a new notion of human nature: the nomological notion of human nature.

He will argue at this notion is a better reconceptualization of human nature in light of modern biology than several other new ways of characterizing human nature.

Edouard Machery, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh as well as a resident fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science (University of Pittsburgh) and a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh). His research focuses on the philosophical issues raised by the cognitive sciences. He has published on a wide range of topics in the philosophy of psychology, including the nature of concepts, racial cognition, evolutionary psychology, innateness, and moral psychology. He is the author of Doing without Concepts (Oxford University Press, 2009) and co-editor of The Compositionality of Meaning and Content: Foundational Issues (Ontos, 2005),The Compositionality of Meaning and Content: Applications to Linguistics, Psychology and Neuroscience (Ontos, 2005), and Arguing About Human Nature: Contemporary Debates (Routledge, 2013). He is also a leading contributor to the development of experimental philosophy.