Natural Human Philosophy as a Scientific Philosophical System: Human Questions, Evolutionary Foundations and Framework-Level Assessment
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Arguments in human philosophy—philosophical questions concerning humanity—require premises about human beings: their tendencies, origins, capacities and the consequences of their actions. These arguments confront two logical obstacles. First, valid deduction cannot itself establish the truth of empirical premises; natural science supplies true or approximately true premises through evidence, testing and correction. Second, moving from facts to action requirements requires distinguishing objective action requirements conditional on goals from normative action requirements under the Six-Level Framework of Good and Evil, explicitly stating goals, facts, evaluative standards, normative premises and ends–means relations as appropriate. Over two millennia, philosophy has advanced in argumentative methods and some local questions, and strong majority positions have emerged on a few major issues. Yet on core questions of what humans are, how freedom and responsibility are grounded, and the bases of morality and justice, major explanations persist without answers capable of jointly adjudicating disputes. These disagreements enter psychology, education, law and public institutions. The extent to which they result from the absence of shared adjudication of factual premises is an empirical question requiring dedicated testing. The main argument has three steps: premises about actual Homo sapiens are tested by sciences studying the species; reasoning and concepts are examined through logic and philosophical analysis; scientific principles supply objective action guidance, while normative requirements are derived under existing six-level premises and ends–means relations. Homo sapiens is an evolved species. Premises about its origins, nature, capacities and social formation must be established within the evolutionary research trajectory opened by Darwin and developed through the modern synthesis, Mayr and Wilson; outside this trajectory, even scientific methods can address the wrong explanatory level. NHP organizes its questions around who we are, where we come from and where we are going. Transgression, Third Nature and the Cultural Cloud are its three cornerstones; Human Superposition names its framework. Its answers concern, respectively, the three natures and acquired layer; the two transgressions and the Cultural Cloud's trial-and-error development; and superpowers and Principle-Derived Ought. This article proposes system evaluation through problem coverage, proposition dependencies, independent evidence, comparison at the same level and failure propagation, illustrating every link with a complete evaluation chain. Using common fields, it records definitions, statuses and dependencies for fourteen groups of load-bearing propositions across the series (§5.6; Appendix A4). Statements of each proposition correspond across papers; claims support one another logically and explanatorily, while each paper bears its own evidential burden. This consistency, together with the empirical research connected to each topic, constitutes current framework-level support; explanatory advantage over whole-framework rivals at the same level remains under comparison. The article also distinguishes existing arguments for a unified foundation for the social sciences and humanities from subsequent disciplinary responsibilities, and specifies interfaces for research on truth and preference, freedom and responsibility, equality and justice, aesthetics, religion and institutions.
Authors: Yuan, Xihao, Yuan, Haidan
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222893014
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