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Human Universals is a book by Donald Brown, an American professor of anthropology who worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was published by McGraw Hill in 1991. Brown says human universals, "comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception."
In Aristotle's view, universals are incorporeal and universal, but only exist only where they are instantiated; they exist only in things. [1] Aristotle said that a universal is identical in each of its instances. All red things are similar in that there is the same universal, redness, in each thing.
A cultural universal (also called an anthropological universal or human universal) is an element, pattern, trait, or institution that is common to all known human cultures worldwide. Taken together, the whole body of cultural universals is known as the human condition .
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the basic structure of reality. It is traditionally seen as the study of mind-independent features of the world, but some theorists view it as an inquiry into the conceptual framework of human understanding.
In his best-known work, Human Universals (1991), he says these universals, "comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exceptions." He is quoted at length by Steven Pinker in an appendix to The Blank Slate (2002), where Pinker cites some of the hundreds of universals listed by Brown.
Moral universalism (also called moral objectivism or universal morality) is the meta-ethical position that some system of ethics applies universally.That system is inclusive of all individuals, [7] regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, or any other distinguishing feature. [8]
When used in the context of ethics, the meaning of universal refers to that which is true for "all similarly situated individuals". [3] Rights, for example in natural rights, or in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, for those heavily influenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment and its conception of a human nature, could be considered universal.
Whether universal values exist is an unproven conjecture of moral philosophy and cultural anthropology, though it is clear that certain values are found across a great diversity of human cultures, such as primary attributes of physical attractiveness (e.g. youthfulness, symmetry) whereas other attributes (e.g. slenderness) are subject to ...