What is the Human Being?

What is the Human Being?
Author: Patrick R. Frierson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2013
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0415558441

Philosophers, anthropologists and biologists have long puzzled over the question of human nature. In this lucid and wide-ranging introduction to Kant's philosophy of human nature - which is essential for understanding his thought as a whole - Patrick Frierson assesses Kant's theories and examines his critics.

In Defense of the Human Being

In Defense of the Human Being
Author: Thomas Fuchs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0192898191

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.

The Way of the Human Being

The Way of the Human Being
Author: Calvin Martin
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1999-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780300085525

In this volume, Calvin Luther Martin proposes that the Europeans learned what they wished to learn from the native Americans, not what the Americans actually meant. Drawing on his own experience with native people and on their stories, he offers the reader a different conceptual landscape.

A Philosophy of the Human Being

A Philosophy of the Human Being
Author: Julian A. Davies
Publisher: University Press of America
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2009
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780761845164

This book is an accessible text that explores what it means to be human. It is designed for an introductory course in Philosophy of the Human Being and contains an abundance of current examples, with embedded quotations from philosophers and selections from contemporary writers following the chapters. The author provides an introduction to philosophy, then discusses the topics of human sociability, intelligence, freedom, duality, individuality, and immortality. He concludes by highlighting the contrast between realism and materialism. This systematic approach focuses on issues, with a minimum of metaphysical superstructure and jargon, and provides connections between the readings. Book jacket.

Psychology as the Science of Human Being

Psychology as the Science of Human Being
Author: Jaan Valsiner
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2015-09-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 3319210947

This book brings together a group of scholars from around the world who view psychology as the science of human ways of being. Being refers to the process of existing - through construction of the human world – here, rather than to an ontological state. This collection includes work that has the goal to establish the newly developed area of cultural psychology as the science of specifically human ways of existence. It comes as a next step after the “behaviorist turn” that has dominated psychology over most of the 20th century, and like its successor in the form of “cognitivism”, kept psychology away from addressing issues of specifically human ways of relating with their worlds. Such linking takes place through intentional human actions: through the creation of complex tools for living, entertainment, and work. Human beings construct tools to make other tools. Human beings invent religious systems, notions of economic rationality and legal systems; they enter into aesthetic enjoyment of various aspects of life in art, music, and literature; they have the capability of inventing national identities that can be summoned to legitimate one’s killing of one’s neighbors or being killed oneself. The contributions to this volume focus on the central goal of demonstrating that psychology as a science needs to start from the phenomena of higher psychological functions and then look at how their lower counterparts are re-organized from above. That kind of investigation is inevitably interdisciplinary - it links psychology with anthropology, philosophy, sociology, history and developmental biology. Various contributions to this volume are based on the work of Lev Vygotsky, George Herbert Mead, Henri Bergson and on traditions of Ganzheitspsychologie and Gestalt psychology. Psychology as the Science of Human Being is a valuable resource to psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, biologists and anthropologists alike.​

Being Human Being

Being Human Being
Author: Molefi Kete Asante
Publisher:
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2021-11-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781942774099

Being Human Being express the power in ending the language of race entirely, bringing forth a new era in which the term "human", robust and newly re-envisioned, eradicates the need for the illusion of categorical racial boundaries.

The Subject of Human Being

The Subject of Human Being
Author: Christopher W. Haley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2018-10-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317283171

The Subject of Human Being presents a sweeping account of the nature of human existence. As a work of philosophical anthropology, the analysis ranges from the basic powers emerging from the mind, to our extraordinary psychological capacities, to the shared sociocultural worlds we inhabit. The book integrates different perspectives on social ontology from a selection of philosophers and theorists, whose advances toward understanding the relationship between individuals and society ought to revolutionize social theory as understood and practiced in the social sciences and humanities. Although grounded in critical realist philosophy of Roy Bhaskar and the social theory of Margaret Archer, the book also draws from philosophy of mind, phenomenology of consciousness, psychoanalytic theory, virtue ethics, and personalism to support and extend its arguments. Four elements of human existence are examined: the nature of consciousness, agency, subjectivity, and the social world. Thus, it addresses related issues of power, the agent-structure problem, the formation of beliefs and desires, human universals, and human rights. Portraying a unified social theory that is materialist, realist, dialectical, and centered on emergence, and offering a comprehensive and progressive theory of human being, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of critical realism, philosophy, and the social sciences.

Optimal Human Being

Optimal Human Being
Author: Kennon M. Sheldon
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2004-09-22
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1135636257

The phrase "optimal human being" is used to refer to the empirically documented features that tend to characterize high-quality human functioning. "Optimal human being" is a profile that is developed within this book by consulting what contemporary theorizing at different levels of analysis might have to say about what causes a optimal functioning

Kant's Human Being

Kant's Human Being
Author: Robert B. Louden
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2011-07-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199877580

In Kant's Human Being, Robert B. Louden continues and deepens avenues of research first initiated in his highly acclaimed book, Kant's Impure Ethics. Drawing on a wide variety of both published and unpublished works spanning all periods of Kant's extensive writing career, Louden here focuses on Kant's under-appreciated empirical work on human nature, with particular attention to the connections between this body of work and his much-discussed ethical theory. Kant repeatedly claimed that the question, "What is the human being" is philosophy's most fundamental question, one that encompasses all others. Louden analyzes and evaluates Kant's own answer to his question, showing how it differs from other accounts of human nature. This collection of twelve essays is divided into three parts. In Part One (Human Virtues), Louden explores the nature and role of virtue in Kant's ethical theory, showing how the conception of human nature behind Kant's virtue theory results in a virtue ethics that is decidedly different from more familiar Aristotelian virtue ethics programs. In Part Two (Ethics and Anthropology), he uncovers the dominant moral message in Kant's anthropological investigations, drawing new connections between Kant's work on human nature and his ethics. Finally, in Part Three (Extensions of Anthropology), Louden explores specific aspects of Kant's theory of human nature developed outside of his anthropology lectures, in his works on religion, geography, education ,and aesthetics, and shows how these writings substantially amplify his account of human beings. Kant's Human Being offers a detailed and multifaceted investigation of the question that Kant held to be the most important of all, and will be of interest not only to philosophers but also to all who are concerned with the study of human nature.

What is a Human Being?

What is a Human Being?
Author: Frederick A. Olafson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 1995-07-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780521479370

Olafson develops Heidegger's philosophy and yields a distinctive new alternative in the philosophy of mind.