Dennis Weiss

Naturalist views of persons, such as those of the philosophers Annette Baier and Marjorie Grene, emphasize that human persons are cultural animals: We are living, embodied, organic beings, embedded in nature, the product of Darwinian evolution, but dependent on culture. Such naturalist views of persons typically eschew science fiction and look askance at the philosophical fantasies and thought experiments that often populate philosophical treatments of personal identity. Marge Piercy’s dystopian, cyberpunk, science fiction novel He, She and It weaves a complex tale around the debate over the status of its central character Yod, a cyborg created in a lab but humanized through the efforts of two women, Malkah Shipman and her granddaughter Shira Shipman. Is Yod a person, despite having been engineered in a lab for a specific purpose? Piercy’s tale both challenges and ultimately supports a naturalist view of persons while simultaneously forewarning us of possible new styles of persons to come.

This essay examines Don Ihde’s postphenomological philosophy of technology through the lens of philosophical anthropology, that sub-discipline of philosophy concerned with the nature and place of the human being. While Ihde’s philosophical corpus and its reception in Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde indicate rich resources for thinking about human nature, several themes receive too little attention in both, including the nature of the human being, the emergence of the posthuman, and the place of the human being in our contemporary pluriculture.

This essay examines Don Ihde’s postphenomological philosophy of technology through the lens of philosophical anthropology, that sub-discipline of philosophy concerned with the nature and place of the human being. While Ihde’s philosophical corpus and its reception in Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde indicate rich resources for thinking about human nature, several themes receive too little attention in both, including the nature of the human being, the emergence of the posthuman, and the place of the human being in our contemporary pluriculture.

Courses in the philosophy of law provide philosophy departments an opportunity to focus on timely and relevant questions affecting the lives of undergraduates as well as attract students interested in the legal profession to the study of philosophy. This review article examines four recent texts in philosophy of law, three anthologies and a single-authored introductory text, and discusses their suitability to the classroom. After an overview identifying key features of each text, several comparative points are made relevant to teaching philosophy of law. The diversity of issues, cases, and approaches to philosophy of law evinced by these textbooks suggests that the faculty member selecting texts should choose carefully.

Critical posthumanists have observed that technoscientific developments are in the process of rewriting human ontology, fundamentally changing what it means to be human. While they argue that the posthuman breaks with the Cartesian liberal subject and embraces a more decentered ontology, their analyses remain firmly situated in a Cartesian world that marginalizes if not completely ignores questions about natality. This essay examines two filmic texts, Blade Runner 2049 and the AMC television show Humans, that are situated firmly in a posthuman environment in which technoscience is seemingly rewriting the conditions of being human and blurring the boundary between human and machine, but which focus on natality and childhood and emphasize themes of parenting and growth and development. In doing so, they disclose shortcomings in critical posthumanism that can only be addressed when we give more serious attention to how natality shapes being human.

Star Trek becomes an ideal vehicle for modern narratives exploring the nature of being human in a technological age. In its fifty years of robots, androids, cyborgs, and alien others on the small and big screens, Star Trek has played a function not unlike that of Greek myth. Whether dealing with Greek gods such as Apollo, salt‐craving beasts and Hortas, or hive minds and androids, Star Trek fashions moderns’ myths that provoke reflection on what it means to be human and transformations that either preserve or destroy one's humanity. It is seen that the feminist model in the long processes of development of the android Data, liberated Borg drone Seven of Nine, and Voyager's holographic Doctor, and their struggle to understand, if not finally attain, humanity. As children who were insufficiently socialized into their own families, these three characters face the difficult task of reconstituting families aboard Enterprise or Voyager.

Within contemporary Western philosophy, the issues of human nature and our place in the cosmos have largely been ignored. In the resulting vacuum, the various subcultures that have grown up around the digital computer have been actively defining and shaping popular conceptions of what it means to be human and the place of humanity in the digital era. Here one finds an implicit view of human nature that includes recurrent themes such as: an emphasis on mind as information independent of the physical body, the obsolescence of the human body, the elimination of human particularity, the malleability of human nature, and the logic and orderliness of the computer as a metaphor for the cosmos. This view of human nature shares important characteristics with Cartesian and Christian views of human nature long rejected by philosophers. A renewal of the philosophical anthropology movement — devoted to the issues of human nature and humanity's place in the cosmos — permits us to see the inadequacy of the conception of human nature implicit in the digital culture.

The proper goal of a philosophical anthropology is to provide a unified view of the whole human being. An analysis of the philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler, as set forth in his Man's Place In Nature, discloses both that an adequate philosophical anthropology must account for the human being's world openness while avoiding Scheler's dualistic metaphysical scheme. The framework of a philosophy of culture, as explicated in Ernst Cassiere's An Essay on Man, provides the best means for meeting the goal of a philosophical anthropology. Cassirer's account of the symbolic animal allows us to comprehend the human being's biological and cultural nature in a single synoptic vision. This account of the human being is then defended against two contemporary challenges. Daniel Dennett's mechanistic physicalism, elaborated in his Brainstorms and The Intentional Stance, treats the human being as a complex physical mechanism substantially similar to other mechanisms, such as thermostats. Dennett's account of the human being, though, is unable to account for the cultural, social, and intersubjective dimensions of human life and so, it is argued, fails. Michel Foucault's poststructuralism is then analyzed. Foucault's archaeology of the human sciences, The Order of Things, and his genealogy of disciplinary practices, Discipline and Punish, potentially undermine the project of a philosophical anthropology by radically historicizing human nature, arguing that the human being is the determined product of shifting structural forces. An analysis of these works, though, together with Foucault's work on technologies of the self, discloses that Foucault presupposes a substantive vision of human nature. This account of human nature is consistent in many respects with Cassirer's account of the symbolic animal. Dennett's and Foucault's common mistake is to offer an account of human nature that begins, not with an anthropological perspective, but from a position that objectifies the human being. We conclude that contemporary philosophy is insufficiently anthropologically informed and argue for a renewal of the anthropological question