What Does It Mean to Be Human?
Will be published approx. on 19. February 2027
Book
Paperback/Softback
236 pages
978-1-4399-2782-3 (ISBN)
Description
What does it mean to be human? It has long been a tantalizing question for religious figures, scientists, political leaders, artists, and autocrats, among others. Noted philosopher Elizabeth Minnich claims, "There are no answers to such a question (although we all have favored responses)."
In What Does It Mean to Be Human?, Minnich invites us to reclaim our freedom from the dangerously distorted rationales for supremacism. She explores how the simplest mistakes in responses to "what does it mean to be human?" have enabled deadly historical errors, totalizing regimes, colonialisms, genocides, and enslavement. Paying close attention to the languages, logics, and nonsense of authoritative pronouncements, Minnich considers ways of thinking that affect and reflect meaning. She offers a fresh understanding of how mistakenly limited definitions of "human being" can be.
What Does It Mean to Be Human? emerges from Minnich's ongoing effort to find, think through, and dissolve past mistakes that keep resurfacing to disastrous effect.
In What Does It Mean to Be Human?, Minnich invites us to reclaim our freedom from the dangerously distorted rationales for supremacism. She explores how the simplest mistakes in responses to "what does it mean to be human?" have enabled deadly historical errors, totalizing regimes, colonialisms, genocides, and enslavement. Paying close attention to the languages, logics, and nonsense of authoritative pronouncements, Minnich considers ways of thinking that affect and reflect meaning. She offers a fresh understanding of how mistakenly limited definitions of "human being" can be.
What Does It Mean to Be Human? emerges from Minnich's ongoing effort to find, think through, and dissolve past mistakes that keep resurfacing to disastrous effect.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Philadelphia PA
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4399-2782-3 (9781439927823)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Elizabeth K. Minnich is Distinguished Fellow with the American Association of Colleges and Universities. She has been Core Professor at the interdisciplinary Union Graduate School; Visiting Scholar at The Getty Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities; and the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair, Philosophy and the Humanities at Scripps College. In 2011, the California Senate passed a resolution commending her "tireless work to end genocide, both now and in the future." She is the author of Transforming Knowledge (Temple) and The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking. She has chaired the North Carolina Humanities Council and the Committee for Public Philosophy of the American Philosophical Association and serves on the executive board for the Society for the Study of Women Philosophers.