Human Beings, Misc

The main question of this short monograph is how the existence, supremacy, and uniqueness of an almighty and immaterial God bear on our own nature. It aims to uncover lessons about what we are by thinking about what God might be. A dominant theme is that Abrahamic monotheism is a surprisingly hospitable framework within which to defend and develop the view that we are wholly material beings. But the resulting materialism cannot be of any standard variety. It demands revisions and (...) twists on the usual views. We can indeed learn about ourselves by learning about God. One thing we learn is that, though we are indeed wholly material beings, we’re not nearly as ordinary as we might seem. (shrink)

This is a long critical discussion of Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism, focusing primarily on Wilderson's claim that Blackness is equivalent to Slaveness. The article draws out some strengths of the book, but argues that the book's central arguments often rest on shaky methodological, metaphysical, epistemic, and political grounds. Along the way, we consider some complications endemic to the project of evaluating a text so clearly geared towards Black audiences from the perspective of a non-Black reader.

I propose a distinction between two concepts: affliction and atrocity. I argue that an ethical position with respect to history’s horrors can be understood as a practice of refusing to permit affliction to be seen as atrocity. This is a practice of resisting the urge to quantify or qualify affliction in subjecting it to a count of bodies, which would be taken to totalize all the suffering in a given situation. We should, I contend, resist thinking that affliction qualified as (...) atrocity, subject to a count of bodies or the like, captures affliction itself. I then discuss several instances of the qualification of affliction as atrocity, including the Sétif and Guelma massacre, the crucifixion of Christ, and the biblical story of the bondage of the Israelites in Egypt. I conclude by making a case that it’s ethically imperative that we recollect the self’s abnegation to those who aren’t counted, those who can’t be counted because they are afflicted without atrocity. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, Giorgio Agamben and Charles Taylor have produced important and influential genealogical works on the philosophical and political conceptions of secularity. Yet in their recent work, both of these thinkers have respectively returned to a prominent theme in their earlier works: Human life. This essay offers a parallel reading of Agamben and Taylor as post-Heideggerian critics of the modern conception of human subjectivity. Through examining these their respective characterizations of modern subjectivity — namely Taylor’s account of (...) the “disengaged self” and Agamben’s conception of the “excluded-included” bare life, this essay seeks to highlight not only the Heideggerian currents underlying the philosophical anthropologies of Agamben and Taylor, but also the ontological paradoxicalities they detect in the conception of human existence and subjectivity in politico-philosophical modernity. After reviewing the different aspects of Agamben’s and Taylor’s critiques of modern subjectivity as well as the traditional metaphysical conception of humans as “language animals”, this essay concludes by sketching a robust and affirmative “paradoxical” conception of human beings as “language animals” which simultaneously takes into account the insights from Taylor’s (post)analytic philosophical renewal of Aristotelianism and Agamben’s critical analysis of contemporary biopolitics in the continental philosophical tradition. (shrink)

While the Enlightenment promoted thinking for oneself independent of religious authority, the ‘Endarkenment’ (Millgram 2015) concerns deference to a new authority: the specialist, a hyperspecializer. Non-specialists need to defer to such authorities as they are unable to understand their reasoning. Millgram describes how humans are capable of being serial hyperspecializers, able to move from one specialism to another. We support the basic thrust of Millgram’s position, and seek to articulate how the core idea is deployed in very different ways in (...) relation to extremely different philosophical areas. We attend to the issue of the degree of isolation of different specialists and we urge greater emphasis on parallel hyperspecialization, which describes how different specialisms can be embodied in one person at one time. (shrink)

This paper explores the question: what happens to the ontology of the human individual if we take seriously the degree to which all life on this planet, including human life, is threaded through with relationships in which one creature sinks its ‘teeth’ into another and hangs on for dear life, deriving vital sustenance from that second creature, but sometimes imperiling the life of it as well? Or, to put the matter less colorfully, how ought we reconceptualize the human individual in (...) light of research into the complex relationships between humans and our resident colonies—relationships that run the gamut from mutualistic to parasitic? The relational conception of the human individual that emerges from my exploration is distinguished by two characteristics: its prioritizing of eating relationships, and its insistence on the role played by relationships that are harmful or destructive to the individual. (shrink)

A critical account of "Humanism" and some of its extreme forms and manifestations; reflection on some of the important challenges these raise in relation to higher education in the 21st century.

In this paper we take an approach in Humanoid Robots are not considered as robots who resembles human beings in a realistic way of appearance and act but as robots who act and react like human that make them more believable by people. Regarding this approach we will study robot characters in animation movies and discuss what makes some of them to be accepted just like a moving body and what makes some other robot characters to be believable as a (...) living human. The goal of this paper is to create a rule set that describes friendly, socially acceptable, kind, cute... robots and in this study we will review example robots in popular animated movies. The extracted rules and features can be used for making real robots more acceptable. (shrink)

Lynne Rudder Baker offers an account of what it is to be a human person, involving what she calls a “first person perspective,” that is separable from her constitution-view of human persons and adaptable to a variety of rival views of personal ontology. I argue that this account fails, no matter what view of personal ontology it is coupled with, on account of giving biological humanity an absurd role in determining the personhood of both possible human and non-human person-candidates. The (...) failure of Baker’s account suggests difficulties for any view that would grant personhood to marginal case humans while denying it to non-humans with relevantly similar psychological properties. (shrink)

Here's an interesting question: what are we? David Barnett has claimed that reflection on consciousness suggests an answer: we are simple. Barnett argues that the mereological simplicity of conscious beings best explains the Datum: that no pair of persons can itself be conscious. In this paper, I offer two alternative explanations of the Datum. If either is correct, Barnett's argument fails. First, there aren't any such things as pairs of persons. Second, consciousness is maximal; no conscious thing is a proper (...) part of another conscious thing. I conclude by showing how both moves comport with materialist theories of what we are and then apply them to another anti-materialist argument. (shrink)

In some quarters, it is held that Anscombe proved that a zygote is not a human being on the basis of an argument involving the possibility of identical twins, but there is surprisingly little agreement on what her argument is supposed to be. I criticize several extant interpretations, both as interpretations of Anscombe and as self-standing arguments, and offer a different understanding of her conclusion on which the non-specificity of creation processes and their goals is at issue.

In the sixteenth century, Sir Thomas More criticized Martin Luther’s purported denial of a conscious intermediate state between bodily death and bodily resurrection. In the same century, William Tyndale penned a response in defense of Luther’s view. His argument essentially defended the proposition: If the Intermediate State obtains, then bodily resurrection is superfluous for those in the paradisiacal state. In this article, I enter the fray and argue for the truth of this conditional claim. And, like William Tyndale, I use (...) the content and argument of a particular chapter in the Bible, namely, 1 Corinthians 15, to make the point. (shrink)

In order to understand humanity we must explore and understand our relation to the world, to God and to ourselves. This can be done, in part, by grasping the metaphors in religious texts. More specifically, the symbolism entrenched in Biblical passages and ideas are statements expressing aspects of the human being, the human condition, reality and the relation(s) among them. In this communication I explore these symbolisms following discussion of some preliminary ideas, and explain the former in terms of the (...) latter. Moreover, morality, meaning and purpose can be derived from an understanding of these symbolisms. Morality, love, reason, wisdom, creativity, reality, God and Truth are all interrelated. They help us to grasp what the human being is. I take the stance that humanity—or self-aware willful consciousness rational agents, more generally—holds a positive and unique position in the universe. A comprehension of the general idea(s), herein, is invaluable to the human being because it presents uplifting conceptions of humanity. The individual can (should) come to see themselves rationally as a source of great positive (good) potential within their local community and humanity as a whole. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that psychological states can be literally ascribed only to living creatures and not to nonliving machines, such as sophisticated robots. Defenders of machine consciousness do not sufficiently appreciate the importance of the biological nature of a subject for the psychological significance of its behavior. Simulations of a computer-controlled, nonliving autonomous robot cannot carry the same psychological meaning as animate behavior. Being a living creature is an essential link between genuinely expressive behavior and justified psychological ascriptions.

The central positoin of St. Thomas Aquinas in the pantheon of Catholic thinkers along with St. Augustine of Hippo more than justifies ongoing attention to his thought and contributions to philosophy, theology, and medieval culture. This volume is an anthology of the passages of his Summa Theologia on human nature or the "human constitution.".

I consider, and rebut, the argument from "twinning" - that zygotes can't be considered human individuals as two or more such individuals could be (sometimes are) produced from one zygote.

The subject we are discussing in this article is very complex, because it involves important questions about the method and the subject of Anthropology: what is the status of Anthropology as a philosophical discipline, that is, what is its place within philosophical knowledge, especially metaphysics, theory of knowledge and ethics? What is the most appropriate method for access to the study of the human person?

My hypothesis is that human personhood has ancient biological roots which make it possible for social reinforcers to contribute to the gradual construction of real persons who are always deeper than the stories about them. Multiple persons do sometimes emerge from one human organism. Rather than try to prove they are real, I explore the consequences of assuming them to be genuine emergentsthat become social environment to one another. I suggest that the multiple-persons phenomenon has profoundly influenced the development of (...) human ethics and the attainment of personhood through the pursuit of ideals. (shrink)

Eric Olson provides a compelling account for his Biological Approach to understanding the tangled web of personal identity. Olson, repeating John Locke’s distinction between the identity of living organisms and the identity of persons, argues that the central metaphysical issue concerns the identity of human organisms, not the identity of persons.

The subject of this dissertation is fetal ontology, not the morality of abortion. I try to show that zygotes are not human beings. ;Unlike many philosophers, I am unwilling to give 'human being' to the biologists. It should not be confused with 'Homo sapiens' or any other taxonomic term of biology. On the other hand, it should not be confused with 'person' either. ;I investigate a number of attempts to fix the point at which we first become human beings. None (...) of them, I try to show, support the conclusion that zygotes are human beings. The strongest argument for the humanity of the zygote, I believe, derives its conclusion from the premisses that we are essentially human beings and that we were once zygotes. While I mention some reasons for thinking that the first of its premisses may not be true, I am mainly occupied in challenging the second. I formulate and defend the idea that we come into existence gradually . At the time "our" zygotes existed, we did not fully exist. So either "our" zygotes did not fully exist then either, or else we were not then plainly identical with them. In the latter case either we were "indeterminately" identical with them or we were not identical with them at all . In any case we were once zygotes at best only to the extent that we then existed--i.e., hardly at all. ;The most likely view concerning our beginnings is that we both come into existence and come to be human beings gradually, during a period which corresponds at least roughly with our gestation. (shrink)

Much mischief concerning the concept of a human body is generated by the failure of philosophers to distinguish various important senses of the term 'body.' I discuss three of those senses and illustrate the issues they can generate by discussing the concept of a Lockean exchange of bodies as well as the brain-body switch.

In these William James lectures, Marcel traces the relationship between events in his life and his philosophical and literary works. Drawing largely on his dramatic works, he interprets and clarifies some of his key philosophical themes, such as "intersubjectivity," "participation" and "the mystery of Being."--A. B. D.

Science starts out with the idea of a person as billions of neurons housed in a body that is a cloud of particles. Common sense starts out with the idea of a person having capacities belonging to a single individual. The common sense person does not have parts. Our objectifying science slowly takes over the person as it tends toward physical materialism. Where will it end? What is being gradually pushed out of the world? If science had already taken over, (...) if the categories of neuroscience were complete, then it would be possible to speculate about its relation to earlier stages of thought. However, that is not the situation. The categories of science have yet to emerge. The puzzling character of new scientific objects reveals that we are on the threshold of profound conceptual change. The.. (shrink)

This paper is a shortened version of an invited lecture held at the University of Copenhagen (Department of Anthropology) on 28 March 2019.

Nicole Hassoun and Uriah Kriegel defend the position that infanticide is morally permissible because an infant a few days old does not have a self-concept and thus is not a person. I argue their position is flawed and cannot principally rule out the possible permissibility of slavery.