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In this essay, Prof. Dr. Thomas Fuchs examines the relationship between linear time, measured primarily by the progression of events, and the cyclical time of the body. He places the two in tension, positing that the embodied experience of lived time does not cohere with the linear understanding privileged by Western societies.
This presentation argues that a Christian incarnational response to posthumanism must recognize that what is at stake isn’t just whether belief systems align. It seeks to relocate the interaction between the church and posthumanism to how the practices of posthumanism and Christianity perform the bodies, affections and dispositions of each.
Jens Zimmermann shows how transhumanism, in its pursuit of a humanly engineered evolution that will eventually leave the body behind by uploading our digitized brains to computing platforms, a vision that includes merging human with artificial machine intelligence, is merely the extreme edge of a techno-reasoning that increasingly forms our collective social imaginary.
In December of 2018, several scholars met at Oxford to discuss what it means to “be a person.” The conference featured international perspectives from five participants all of whom reflected on contemporary discourses and technological advancements that have destabilized traditional definitions of human being, human dignity, and personhood. Drawing from a range of modern, premodern, and more recent thinking on the subject, the scholars in question formed theological and philosophical arguments for an historically aware and thus integrated and complex notion of the human person in this age of rapid scientific and technological change. See the descriptions and videos below for their takes on “being human-being a person.”
Project Director Jens Zimmermann reflects on the recent year and looks toward the future of the Christian Flourishing project. The purpose of the first year was to define an underlying theory of the human person. With this in mind, Zimmermann codifies the various insights from our several scholars into a coherent summary of the first year, before moving on to the project’s vision for 2018.
