Rethinking the Human and the Non-Human in the Age of the Anthropocene

Research Leader, Professor Nikolas Kompridis

We are in the midst of a massive sea change in our understanding of what it means to be a human being. Propelled by dramatic developments in the sciences that promise to give human beings control over their own biological destiny, and by virulent anti-humanist and posthumanist challenges to the “human” and “humanism” in the social sciences and humanities, it is a change that has implications for the future of “humanity” that most of us can barely imagine, let alone comprehend. It is the aim of this research project:

1) to make sense of the complex factors driving this change through a critical examination of the underlying but insufficiently interrogated assumptions about what “human” means in the discourses about the human in the sciences and in the anti-humanist and posthumanist critiques of the “human” and “humanism”;

2) to determine its implications for the future of humanity by testing whether the application of anti-humanist and posthumanist concepts of the human can actually function in the context of our understanding of human rights practices;

3) to reflect anew on the question of what it means to be human, by rethinking and reformulating concepts of the human that are constitutive of what it means to be human – concepts such as freedom, agency, the person, and human – that respond to but are not bound by the narrow assumptions of the various “posthuman” challenges to the human and to “humanism”;

4) to articulate, thereby, a constructive ontology of the human and non-human that is human-related but not human-centred.

• Listen to a talk by Nikolas Kompridis on the meaning of human being, democracy, and the new technologies
• Technology's challenge to democracy: what of the human, by Professor Kompridis
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