Debating humanity

This book explores a number of anthropological dimensions that contemporary sociology and philosophy have used to define notions of ‘the human’, ‘human being’, ‘humanity’ and ‘human nature’. Rather than declaring the death of the human, or that it incarnates everything that is wrong with ‘the West’, I contend that we need to look closely at a variety of ways in which these conceptions have been more or less explicitly articulated in the work of a number of leading theorists of the past sixty or so years. I call this project philosophical sociology and organise it around three main pillars:
1. The anthropological features that define us as human beings are to a large extent independent from, but cannot be realised in full outside.
2. Given that in contemporary societies humans themselves are ultimate arbiters of what is right and wrong.
3. Normative ideas are therefore irreducible to the material or sociocultural positions that humans occupy in society.
[UK: 2017]

Compartir: