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What is a human being exactly?
This is a question that is answered, in one way or another, in the thinking and writing and doing that occurs within any particular cultural epoch. In this web presentation I want to set out what I think these answers have been in the sequence of periods in the West inaugurated by the rise of Modern science.
In speaking of ‘cultural epochs’ and ‘successive periods’ I am already committed to the idea that ways of thinking sort themselves into strata – as taught, in the stratum I belong to myself, by Thomas Kuhn, by Michael Polanyi and most influential as far as I personally am concerned, by Michel Foucault. The history of ideas is to be understood as a succession of paradigms or, for Foucault, épistèmes. There is much that is difficult with this fecund idea, not least the dramatic implication that different periods make little or no sense to each other, not an encouraging thought at the outset of such a project as this. My plan is to try it out nonetheless.
The cuts I think the meat falls into are these: following the Renaissance, the Early Modern, from Descartes to Kant; following the early Modern, the Romantic, from Herder to Hegel; thereafter the 19th Century, from Liebig to Bernard; and the twentieth from Cannon to Turing and beyond.
The borderposts in this periodisation honour a mix of disciplines, highlighted because the responsibility for thinking about the human being is one of the things that shifts. In the early modern period, theology and its secular form, philosophy, think of themselves as authoritative: then, under Romanticism, the poets and writers. After that it is the voice of science that is heard: chemistry, which tells us that the human being is a self-constructing self-maintaining chemical plant, and in the twentieth century the conception that we are flows of information, latterly conceived of as a ‘program’ in principle indifferent to the particular piece of hardware upon which it runs, and indifferent even to the type.
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Revised 07:05:05 Prepared by VP Home Page of Web Presentation: |