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Humanism and Embodiment

Author: Susan E. Babbitt

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2014-06-19

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1472531922

A live issue in anthropology and development studies, humanism is not typically addressed by analytic philosophers. Arguing for humanism as a view about truths, Humanism and Embodiment insists that disembodied reason, not religion, should be the target of secularists promoting freedom of enquiry and human community. Susan Babbitt's original study presents humanism as a meta-ethical view, paralleling naturalistic realism in recent analytic epistemology and philosophy of science. Considering the nature of knowledge, particularly the radical contingency of knowledge claims upon causal mechanisms, religious thinkers like Thomas Merton and Ivan Illich offer more scientific conceptions of practical deliberation than are offered by some non-religious ethicists. Drawing on philosophical sources such as Marxism, Buddhism and Christianity, this original study considers implications of an embodied conception of reason, revealing philosophical, practical and political implications.

Embodiment and the Meaning of Life

Author: Jeff Noonan

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2018-03-21

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0773553932

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The long tradition of pessimism in philosophy and poetry notoriously laments suffering caused by vulnerabilities of the human body. The most familiar and contemporary version is antinatalism, the view that it is wrong to bring sentient life into existence because birth inevitably produces suffering. Technotopianism, which stems from a similarly negative view of embodied limitations, claims that we should escape sickness and death through radical human-enhancement technologies. In Embodiment and the Meaning of Life Jeff Noonan presents pessimism and technotopianism as two sides of the same coin, as both begin from the premise that the limitations of embodied life are inherently negative. He argues that rather than rendering life pointless, the tragic failures that mark life are fundamental to the good of human existence. The necessary limitations of embodied being are challenges for each person to live well, not only for their own sake, but for the sake of the future of the human project. Meaning is not a given, Noonan suggests, but rather the product of labour upon ourselves, others, and the world. Meaningful labour is threatened equally by unjust social systems and runaway technological development that aims to replace human action, rather than liberate it. Calling on us to draw conceptual connections between finitude, embodiment, and the meaning of life, this book shows that seeking the common good is our most viable and materially realistic source of optimism about the future.

Embodied Humanism

Author: Jeff Noonan

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-08-16

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1793636958

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There are many answers to the question of why life is worth living, but they all presuppose that good lives are sensuously enjoyable. Time seems to stand still in the moment when we enjoy food and drink, peaceful, laughing relationships with friends, or lay quietly, allowing the beauty of nature and human creations to unfold before us. Embodied Humanism: Toward Solidarity and Sensuous Enjoyment explores ways that enjoyment is also political. The history of political struggle is a history of fighting back against silencing, hunger, and violent domination, but also fighting for social peace, need-satisfaction, voice, and democratic power. Tracing the values of embodied humanism across history and across cultures and identities, the book finds a more comprehensive universal humanist ethic around which old and emerging struggles can be unified. Ultimately, Jeff Noonan argues, these struggles can be directed towards creating institutional structure and individual dispositions that will secure the social conditions in which our capacities for receptive openness and delight are satisfied for each and all.

Embodied Humanism: Toward Solidarity and Sensuous Enjoyment

Author: Jeff Noonan

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2022-09-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9781793636942

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Jeff Noonan traces the development of humanist values from the ancient philosophies of India, China, and Greece, to contemporary struggles against oppression. Embodied Humanism argues that humanism is a critical social philosophy in which need-satisfaction and life-enjoyment have always been paramount.

In Defense of the Human Being

Author: Thomas Fuchs

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0192898191

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With the progress of artificial intelligence, the digitalization of the lifeworld, and the reduction of the mind to neuronal processes, the human being increasingly appears to be just a product of data and algorithms. That is, we conceive ourselves in the image of our machines, and conversely, we elevate our machines and our brains to new subjects. At the same time, demands for an enhancement of human nature culminate in transhumanist visions of taking human evolution to a new stage. Against this self-reification of the human being, this book defends a humanism of embodiment: our corporeality, vitality, embodied freedom are the foundations of a self-determined existence, which uses these new technologies only as a means, instead of letting them rule us. In Defence of the Human Being offers an array of interventions directed against a reductionist naturalism or transhumanism in various areas of science and society. As alternative it offers an embodied and enactive account of the human person: we are neither pure minds nor brains, but primarily embodied, living beings in relation with others. Fuchs applied this concept to issues such as artificial intelligence, transhumanism and enhancement, virtual reality, neuroscience, embodied freedom, psychiatry, and finally to the accelerating dynamics of current society which lead to an increasing disembodiment of our everyday conduct of life. Cutting across neuroscience, philosophy, and psychiatry, this important new book applies cutting-edge concepts of embodiment and enactivism to the current scientific, technological and cultural tendencies that will crucially influence our society's development in the 21st century.

Beyond Posthumanism

Author: Alexander Mathäs

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2020-02-01

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1789205638

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Kant, Goethe, Schiller and other eighteenth-century German intellectuals loom large in the history of the humanities—both in terms of their individual achievements and their collective embodiment of the values that inform modern humanistic inquiry. Taking full account of the manifold challenges that the humanities face today, this volume recasts the question of their viability by tracing their long-disputed premises in German literature and philosophy. Through insightful analyses of key texts, Alexander Mathäs mounts a broad defense of the humanistic tradition, emphasizing its pursuit of a universal ethics and ability to render human experiences comprehensible through literary imagination.