Human Nature
Notes
What are humans like before culture, circumstance, and choice shape them? Human nature asks what is wired in, what is learned, and what emerges from the collision of both.
What We're Built With
Innate Human Disposition traces the structural features present at the biological baseline: a prosocial default that precedes deliberation, and a compulsive pattern-seeking that is adaptive but produces systematic errors in noisy environments.
Nature and Nurture
Nature vs nurture challenges the binary. Genes are not fixed — environmental cues switch them on or off, and habits can even alter heritable expression. Culture, meanwhile, can be as rigid as DNA. The real question is not which force dominates, but whether we can free ourselves from either.
We Are Social Beings
Social Nature makes the deeper point: sociality is not a preference but a constitutive feature of being human. Language is not a learned tool but a natural expression of how we relate. Norms and social environments don't merely influence us — they partly constitute who we are.
The Terms of Living Together
Social Contract takes human nature into the political domain: what would people agree to if society were designed from scratch? The answer depends entirely on the starting assumptions about human nature — Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau reach radically different contracts because they begin from radically different pictures of what humans are like.
Philosophers
Books
The Four Agreements (book) Theory of Moral Sentiments (book) Behave (book)