Daniel Chernilo: Debating Humanity. Towards a Philosophical Sociology

This presentation introduces my new book, Debating Humanity. Towards a philosophical sociology (CUP 2017). It explores sociological and philosophical efforts to delineate key features of humanity that identify us as members of the human species. After challenging the normative contradictions of contemporary posthumanism, I look back to the foundational debate on humanism between Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger in the 1940s. I then re-assess the implicit and explicit anthropological arguments put forward by seven leading postwar theorists: self-transcendence (Hannah Arendt), adaptation (Talcott Parsons), responsibility (Hans Jonas), language (Jürgen Habermas), strong evaluations (Charles Taylor), reflexivity (Margaret Archer) and reproduction of life (Luc Boltanski).