Humans

Abstract

There is no smooth path from amoeba to Einstein; many holes wait along the way. The biggest among them concerns the place humans have in the living world. Focused mainly on the general model of knowledge-gaining process and the evolution of cognitive apparatuses, evolutionary epistemology is almost bound to search for a description of the unique human position on the evolutionary tree in cognitive terms. Thus bounded it cannot break properly with the orthodox characterisation of the human being as animal rationale or Homo sapiens sapiens. But if the characterisation of humans is given in terms like ratio or sapientia, then the circle closes rather quickly. The existence and to some extent even the character of human knowledge are then stipulated and used to uphold the privileged position rather than the other way round, that is, inferred from the unique place humans occupy in nature. Such an approach, traditional as it is, fully concurs with the belief in our divine ancestry and the divine origin of ratio or sapientia, in the context of which belief no further explanation is needed. On the other hand, the Darwinian view of humans as beings that are merely one among many products of blind haphazard evolution defies likeness to God and privileged kinship. All living beings are cognising beings, and the nature of cognition of each species depends on its design and its mode of autopoiesis. If the evolution of Homo sapiens obeys the same evolutionary principles, as the evolutionary epistemology assumes, then the nature of human cognition also stems from the human mode (or modes) of existence, not the other way round. Hence, if naturalistic epistemology aspires to break with the tradition, endorse the modern Darwinian synthesis, and avoid the circle, then it must put forward such an account of the humans’ peculiar position in the organic world and such a description of the uniqueness of the human mode of existence which will evade using cognitive terms.