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

Abstract

This essay discusses how medieval authorsfrom the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries dealt with aphilosophical problem that social institutions pose for theAristotelian dichotomy between natural and artificial entities.It is argued that marriage, political community, andlanguage provided a particular challenge for the conceptionthat things which are designed by human beings areartefacts. Medieval philosophers based their argumentsfor the naturalness of social institutions on the anthropologicalview that human beings are political animals bynature, but this strategy required rethinking the borderlinebetween nature and art. The limits of nature were extended,as social institutions were considered to be naturaleven though they are in many ways similar to artificialproducts.