Becoming Human: New Perspectives on the Inhuman Condition

The postmodern condition has delivered us into a world where our humanity can no longer be taken for granted. Whether his place is ceded to nature or technology, man is no longer the measure of all things, rather, he is locked into processes in which the only permanence is change. Becoming Human offers a sustained engagement with these and other paradoxes about human being and its nature in the 21st-century world. Beginning with the notion that the human is not an immutable given but rather an ever-changing entity, this collection of essays considers our multifarious condition through the perspective of a variety of fields, including philosophy, sociology, literature, and film studies.

In this book, the authors make coherent and accessible a sprawling field. The diversity of writers and approaches challenges current thinking about humanity, providing material for future scholars and researchers and prompting us to ponder these questions more deeply, while at the same time offering the reader a comprehensive, intelligible survey of recent inquiries into a potentially bewildering field.