The Human Animal

Why We Still Don't Fit into Nature

Markus Gabriel (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

292 Seiten

2024
Polity Press (Verlag)
978-1-5095-5803-2 (ISBN)

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The climate crisis has forced us to recognize that we are not separate from nature but are part of the natural world on which we depend: human beings are animals and we must understand much better our place in nature and our impact on our environment if we are to avoid our own annihilation as a species. And yet we feel nevertheless that we do not entirely fit into nature, that we stand apart from other animals in some way – in what way, exactly?

Markus Gabriel argues that what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans are minded living beings who seek to understand the world and themselves and who possess ethical insight into moral contexts. Mind is the capacity to lead one’s life in the light of a conception of who or what one is. The undeniable difference between us and other animals defines the human condition and places a special responsibility on us to consider our actions in the context of other living beings and our shared habitat. It also calls on us to cultivate an ethics of not-knowing: to recognize that, however much we may seek to understand the world, we will never completely master it. Our grasp of reality, mediated by our animal minds, will always be limited: much is and will remain alien to us, lending itself only to speculation – and to remember this is to stand us in better stead for carving out an existence among the environmental crisis that looms before us all.

Markus Gabriel holds the chair for Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Bonn and is also the Director of the International Center for Philosophy in Bonn.

Introduction

First Part: We and the Other Animals
The Logical Animal – How Humans Became Animals The Specific Something   Nature is not a Safari   The Anthropocene as Hybris The Network: Plants, Bats, Fungi   Continuity, Discontinuity, or Somehow Both?   Shadowboxing   What Does it Actually Mean to Understand Oneself as an Animal?   Why We are Not Amphibians   The Animal Word: Why the Zoo does not Exist   Animalism, The Prestige, and The Anomaly   The Human Animal as Machine?   Animals Like Us? Korsgaard’s Values   Alice Crary – Inside Ethics   Subjectivity and Objectivity – Why We Aren’t Strangers in Nature   The New Enlightenment in the Age of Living Beings   Kant’s Four Questions – Being Human is an Answer to a Question   The Human Being as the Animal Who Doesn’t Want to Be One

Second Part
Social Freedom and the Meaning of Life
The Basic Idea of Liberal Pluralism   The History of Life   The Idea of Life   To Live and to Survive – The Basic Form of Human Society   Do We Want to Live Forever?   The Meaning in Life   The Meaning of Life [pg. ] is Not Nonsense   Nonsense is Sense-deprivation   Limits of Liberal Pluralism?   Who We Are and Who We Want to Be – Radical Autonomy and the New Enlightenment   Social Freedom and the Meaning of Life   Why Science Has Not Discovered that Life Has No Meaning   From Mind Back to Nature

Third Part
Towards an Ethics of Not-Knowing
Nature, Environment, Universe   In-itself and For-itself…   Is Science Fiction?   Limits of Scientific Knowledge   Otherness – Towards an Ecological Ethics   Under-complex, Complex, Hyper-complex   Homo sapiens, Or, The Wise Words of Socrates   Opinions, Knowledge, and the Idea of the Good   Moral Reality and Ethical Facts   Not-knowing   Towards An Ethics of Not-knowing

Acknowledgments
Glossary
Notes
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	29.11.2024
Übersetzer	Karl von der Luft
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Maße	162 x 236 mm
Gewicht	680 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie
ISBN-10	1-5095-5803-9 / 1509558039
ISBN-13	978-1-5095-5803-2 / 9781509558032
Zustand	Neuware