1 What Is Natural About Human Nature? Deutsches Jahrbuch Philosophie 2, Lebenswelt und Wissenschaft, Proceedings of the XXI German Congress for Philosophy. Duisburg University, Essen, 15-19 September 2008, .ed. Carl Friedrich Gethmann. Pp. 160-174. 2011. John Dupré Egenis, University of Exeter One important response to the question in my title is that, of course, everything about human nature is natural. Humans are part of nature and whatever they do is thereby natural. ‘Natural’ here is thought of in contrast to outside or above nature. God, immortal souls, angels, and so on, are the kinds of things I have in mind as lying outside of nature. And if, like myself, you are a naturalist in the very minimal sense of denying that there is anything outside of a nature (I prefer to call myself an anti- supernaturalist than a naturalist), then everything is natural. A fortiori so is human nature, whatever it may turn out to be. This is perhaps a trivial sense of human nature, but it makes a non-trivial point. One of the deep problems in discussion of human nature is that this sense, in which only a supernaturalist could deny that human nature is part of nature, part of the natural world, is never far from the discussion. What is really at stake in discussions over human nature is now more often a quite different sense of ‘nature’, but this first sense is often available as a rhetorical device to convict one side in the more serious debate of anti-scientific, obscurantist or mystical views. The more important sense of my question, of course, has to do with a contrast not with what is outside nature, but with what is cultural, or artificial; with what is produced by the distinctive capacities of human society. An immediate point about