Extending the Limits of Nature. Political Animals, Artefacts, and Social Institutions

Abstract

This essay discusses how medieval authors

from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries dealt with a

philosophical problem that social institutions pose for the

Aristotelian dichotomy between natural and artificial entities.

It is argued that marriage, political community, and

language provided a particular challenge for the conception

that things which are designed by human beings are

artefacts. Medieval philosophers based their arguments

for the naturalness of social institutions on the anthropological

view that human beings are political animals by

nature, but this strategy required rethinking the borderline

between nature and art. The limits of nature were extended,

as social institutions were considered to be natural

even though they are in many ways similar to artificial

products.