Human Animal

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.

• IntroductionFirst Part: We and the Other AnimalsThe 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 OneSecond PartSocial Freedom and the Meaning of LifeThe 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 NatureThird PartTowards an Ethics of Not-KnowingNature, 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-knowingAcknowledgmentsGlossaryNotesIndex

"The unstoppable Markus Gabriel is back in action, this time tackling the status of humans with respect to animals. This book offers a powerful critique of naturalism and scientism while mounting an original defence of the centrality of human being amidst the brewing ecological crisis. No philosopher today writes more clearly than Gabriel."Graham Harman, Southern California Institute of Architecture"The Human Animal is an epoch-making book to radically transform our social imaginary in which we project human animality onto the animal and marginalize it in an unethical way. This transformation of our social imaginary comes from the New Enlightenment. It asks us a new way of being ethical insofar as we are human."Takahiro Nakajima, The University of Tokyo