Beyond Nature and Nurture: Perspectives on Human Multidimensionality (Synthese Library, 497)

This book gathers several of the world’s leading scholars in the nature vs. nurture debate, offering a timely reconsideration of the dynamic interactions between physical, chemical, biological, social, and cultural factors that shape human multidimensionality. Emphasizing this multidimensionality, this edited volume seeks to bridge the divide between biology and social theory—two research communities that have too often overlooked each other. These disciplines, despite being central to understanding human nature, have long operated in isolation.

While some animal species exhibit higher degrees of phenotypic plasticity in specific traits, humans stand out as the most plastic species in both their neurological and sociocultural systems. This plasticity leads the contributors of this book to move beyond both biological reductionism and the blank-slate hypothesis. While biology undoubtedly plays a role in shaping and stabilizing human social and cultural processes, it does so only within the framework of an inherently social environment—one shaped by historically contingent and socially constructed realities, such as values, codes, and cultural perceptions. More importantly, cultural structures and social interactions actively shape and transform certain biological features that were once considered immutable.

This book lays the groundwork for a productive dialogue among biologists, psychologists, social theorists, and philosophers. It also highlights some of the moral and political consequences of different perspectives within the nature vs. nurture debate. Through updated scientific and philosophical theorizing, the chapters in this book aim to overcome, once and for all, the simplistic yet persistent opposition between nature and nurture, offering a far more complex and dynamic—yet richer and epistemologically manageable—picture of the human being.

Javier Pérez-Jara is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and East Asian Studies at the University of Seville and a Faculty Fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy with honors (cum laude) from the University of Seville in 2012. He then conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Sociology from 2013 to 2015. Following this, he joined Beijing Foreign Studies University’s International Business School as an Assistant Professor, where he taught Philosophy, Critical Thinking, and Sociology for eight years.

His work has appeared in many peer-reviewed journals, and, among his books, he is the author of Techno-Utopia and Techno-Apocalypse in Global Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell: A Cultural Sociology (co-authored with Lino Camprubí, Lexington Books/Bloomsbury, 2022), and La Filosofía de Bertrand Russell (Pentalfa, 2014). He also co-edited Dramatic Intellectuals (Palgrave Macmillan Series in Cultural Sociology, 2025) and Contemporary Materialism: Its Ontology and Epistemology (Springer’s Synthese Library, 2022).

Pérez-Jara has held visiting positions across the world, including at Stanford University, Yale University, the University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, Sangyo University of Kyoto, Tohoku University, the University of Gothenburg, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan, and Minzu University of China.

Íñigo Ongay has been teaching philosophy at the University of Deusto in Spain since 2013. Previously, he was an Associate Professor at the Facultad de Filosofía de León (Mexico) and a Visiting Professor at several universities, including Minzu University of China, Qingdao University, Shanghai Finance University, China Jiliang University in Hangzhou, Fu-Jen Catholic University in Taipei, the University of La Rioja, and the National University of Costa Rica.

His research covers a broad range of topics, from the general philosophy of science—focusing particularly on the philosophy of biology and life sciences—to the history of modern and contemporary philosophy. His recent publications include articles in Filozofia Nauki (The Philosophy of Science) and Science and Education, as well as book chapters in edited volumes published by Springer.