Prof. Dr. Thomas Fuchs, Karl Jaspers Professor of Philosophical Foundations of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Heidelberg, has released a new book: In Defense of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology. Originally published in German by Suhrkamp in 2020, the book is now available in English via Oxford University Press.
With the progress of artificial intelligence, the digitalization of the lifeworld, and the reduction of the mind to neuronal processes, the human being appears more and more as a product of data and algorithms. Thus, 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, aliveness, and embodied freedom are the foundations of a self-determined existence, which uses the new technologies only as means instead of submitting to them.
