What, if anything, is the Human? Posthumans, Antihumanism, AI, and the Anthropocene

4 credits · Graduate

Since the mid-twentieth century, the notion “the human” has become highly contested: Do we have an essential nature, or are all such definitions historically contingent and exclusionary, shaped by power relations, colonial histories, and the legacies of Western humanism? Can we still speak meaningfully of “humanity” in an age of ecological crisis and artificial intelligence, or is the very category of the human dissolving in the face of these challenges? This class approaches these questions through several frameworks: German philosophical anthropology, French antihumanism, and contemporary posthumanism.