Lars Fr. H. Svendsen: Being Human

Sammendrag

"Kant famously claimed that philosophy in a cosmopolitan spirit could be summarised by three questions: (1) What can I know? (2) What should I do? (3) What can I hope for? He then argued that these three questions are contained in a fourth: What is man? However, giving a plausible answer to this fourth question is no small feat. The fact that we are humans is clearly of great importance to us, and it lies at the foundation of our self-understanding and social practises. Yet, it is notoriously difficult to explicate what this alleged fact consists in. On the one hand, there is the problem of demarcation against all other animals: What if anything is the distinguishing mark or marks of humans? On the other hand, current debates on posthumanism seem to indicate that human nature can in some sense be transcended, that we can evolve by technological means to such an extent that the resulting creature is no longer, properly speaking, human. What would it take to be "posthuman"?"