Preface

Over the past twenty years, two motivations have driven the ideas that Kin Matters develops, the first (and earlier) abstract and general, and the second (and more recent) more concrete and specific. The first motivation has been to extend into the domain of sociality a line of thinking about individuals and individualism that I initially pursued with respect to the domains of mind and life. Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences: Cognition (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Genes and the Agents of Life: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences: Biology (Cambridge University Press, 2005) were the results of that pursuit. This first motivation is rooted in the general view that there should be much more fluidity between the cognitive, biological, and social sciences—the fragile sciences—than one typically finds both in those sciences and in philosophical reflection on them. This motivation builds on the hopeful hunch that the anti-individualistic, non-reductive views of the mindful and living worlds that emerged in Boundaries and Genes are pre-adapted, as it were, for use in reflecting on the conceptions and roles of the individual in the social world.