scholarly journals The Birth of the Idea of Perfectibility: From the Enlightenment to Transhumanism

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 113-131
Author(s):  
O. A. Vinogradova ◽  
A. V. Ugleva (Yastrebtseva)
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Historical Science ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment ◽  
Human Feature ◽  
Favorable Conditions ◽  
Modern Technologies

Starting from the Age of Enlightenment, a person’s ability of self-improvement, or perfectibility, is usually seen as a fundamental human feature. However, this term, introduced into the philosophical vocabulary by J.-J. Rousseau, gradually acquired additional meaning – largely due to the works of N. de Condorcet, T. Malthus and C. Darwin. Owing to perfectibility, human beings are not only able to work on themselves: by improving their abilities, they are also able to change their environment (both social and natural) and create favorable conditions for their existence. It is no coincidence that perfectibility became the key concept of the idea of social progress proposed by French thinkers in the Age of Enlightenment, despite the fact that later it was criticized, above all, by English authors, who justified its organic and biological nature and gave a different evolutionary interpretation to this concept, without excluding perfectibility from the philosophical vocabulary. In this article, we address the opposition and mutual counterarguments of these two positions. Beyond that, we draw a parallel with some of the ideas of S. Kapitsa, who proved to be not only a critic of Malthusianism but also a direct disciple of Condorcet. In the modern age, the ideas of human self-improvement caused the development of transhumanist movement. Condorcet is more relevant than ever, and today his theory of the progress of the human mind, which influenced the genesis of modern historical science, needs a re-thinking in the newest perspective of improving the mental and physical human nature with the help of modern technologies.

Solidarity and Social Justice in the European Union Seventy Years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: The Role of European Judges

2019 ◽  
Vol 76 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 138-148
Author(s):  
Francesco Zammartino
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Universal Declaration ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
International Level ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Government Programs ◽  
Binding Force

Seventy Years after its proclamation, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, despite not having a binding force for the states, still provides at international level the fundamental text from which the principles and the values for the preservation of liberty and right of people are taken. In this article, the author particularly underlines the importance of Declaration’s article 1, which states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. With these words the Declaration presses states to undertake economic policies aimed at achieving economic and social progress for all individuals. Unfortunately, we also have to underline the lack of effective social policies in government programs of the E.U. Member States. The author inquires whether it is left to European judges to affirm the importance of social welfare.

Kants kritische Psychologie als Aufklärung

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-273
Author(s):  
Hyeongjoo Kim ◽  
Carina Pape
Keyword(s):  
Important Change ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Ongoing Process ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Complete Rejection ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment

In his famous essay from 1784, Kant denied that we "live in an enlightened age"; yet he claimed that we "live in an age of enlightenment". If we should answer the question if we live in an enlightened age now, we could basically give the same answer. The enlightenment as an ongoing process can be found throughout Kant's whole work. This article focuses on how the concept of enlightenment can be applied to the Kantian psychology, which marks an important change of theory of the soul within modern western metaphysics. Kant's idea of enlightenment and 'critique' will be illustrated with reference to the "Paralogisms" of the Critique of Pure Reason. Finally, an analysis of some passages of the "Paralogisms" shall demonstrate that Kant's critique of the previous metaphysical doctrine of the human soul should not be understood as a complete rejection of this doctrine; rather, Kant's critique of what is called rational psychology should be understood as a critical transformation.

Religion and Toleration from the Enlightenment to the Post-Secular Era

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer Forst
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Pierre Bayle ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter addresses the classical question of the relationship between enlightenment and religion. In doing so, the chapter compares Jürgen Habermas's thought to that of Pierre Bayle and Immanuel Kant. For, although Habermas undoubtedly stands in a tradition founded by Bayle and Kant, he develops a number of important orientations within this tradition and has changed his position in his recent work. The chapter studies this change to understand Habermas's position better. It also draws attention to a fundamental question raised by the modern world: what common ground can human reason establish in the practical and theoretical domain between human beings who are divided by profoundly different religious (including antireligious) views?

Humanity as Homo Culturus

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-102
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Dhaouadi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Homo Oeconomicus ◽  
Ibn Khaldun ◽  
Collective Behaviors

This paper claims that human beings are first of all Homo Culturus and only then Homo Politicus, Homo Sociologus, or Homo Oeconomicus. Human beings are distinguished from all other species by what I call human symbols (HS), namely, language, thought, religion, knowledge/science, myths, laws, and cultural values and norms. As such, they are central to the human identity of individuals, groups, and societies and therefore basic keys for understanding and explaining individual as well as collective behaviors in human societies. The theoretical framework/paradigm of Homo Culturus also helps to explain the phenomenon of the human mind in its various forms: the illiterate mind, the educated mind, and the highly intellectual minds of scientists and scholars such as Ibn Khaldun.

The Quest for a Global Age of Reason. Part II: Cultural Appropriation and Racism in the Name of Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-155
Author(s):  
Dag Herbjørnsrud ◽  
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Global Age ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment is more global and complex than the standard Eurocentric Colonial Canon narrative presents. For example, before the advent of unscientific racism and the systematic negligence of the contributions of Others outside of “White Europe,” Raphael centered Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in his Vatican fresco “Causarum Cognitio” (1511); the astronomer Edmund Halley taught himself Arabic to be more enlightened; The Royal Society of London acknowledged the scientific method developed by Ibn Al-Haytham (Alhazen). In addition, if we study the Transatlantic texts of the late 18th century, it is not Kant, but instead enlightened thinkers like Anton Wilhelm Amo (born in present-day’s Ghana), Phillis Wheatley (Senegal region), and Toussaint L’Ouverture (Haiti), who mostly live up to the ideals of reason, humanism, universalism, and human rights. One obstacle to developing a more balanced presentation of the Age of the Enlightenment is the influence of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and methodological nationalism. Consequently, this paper, part II of two, will also deal with the European Enlightenment’s unscientific heritage of scholarly racism from the 1750s. It will be demonstrated how Linnaeus, Hume, Kant, and Hegel were among the Founding Fathers of intellectual white supremacy within the Academy. Hence, the Age of Enlightenment is not what we are taught to believe. This paper will demonstrate how the lights from different “Global Enlightenments” can illuminate paths forward to more dialogue and universalism in the 21st century.

scholarly journals INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM ON THE REPORT OF THE INTERNATIONAL PANEL ON SOCIAL PROGRESS (IPSP) 2018

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-441
Author(s):  
Alexander Raubo ◽  
Alex Voorhoeve
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Theoretical Knowledge ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Historical View ◽  
International Panel ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
Social Scientific

The publication of the first Report of the International Panel on Social Progress is a significant intellectual event, both because of its hugely ambitious aim – of uniting the world's leading researchers from social sciences and the humanities to develop research-based, multi-disciplinary, non-partisan, action-guiding solutions to the central challenges of our time – and because it represents the completion of a mammoth effort in the service of this aim by a diverse set of 269 authors. In its attempt to synthesize and render accessible to social actors a broad range of the latest social scientific knowledge, as well as in its confidence that knowledge can empower those actors to make progress, it recalls D'Alembert and Diderot's famous Encyclopédie. Indeed, one can say that the Report is a quintessential Enlightenment project (cf. Bury 1920). For example, in his famous Outlines of a Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (1796), Condorcet asserts the possibility of an accumulation of empirical and theoretical knowledge and the concomitant expansion in our capacities to alleviate social and natural evils. And Condorcet and many of his contemporaries were motivated to propose political institutions that would enable such an indefinite increase in knowledge so as to bring about the attendant improvement to people's lives.

Hyper-Generalization by the Human Mind

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaan Valsiner
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Cultural Psychology ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Board Of Trustees ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
The Social ◽  
Keynote Speech

Jaan Valsiner shows how human beings create cognitive and affective orders through constructions of meaning that allow them to move safely in highly complex situations and environments. He sees the human being as an “animal symbolicum” with performative needs and driven by the desire to communicate. He shows how processes of interpretation, understanding and ordering are structured and how a combination of approaches from social anthropology, semiotics, cultural psychology and psychoanalysis can contribute to a more appropriate representation of these processes and their functions. The Hans Kilian Award for the Research and Promotion of Metacultural Humanisation honours excellent achievements in interdisciplinary research and teaching in the social and cultural sciences. In addition to the keynote speech by cultural psychologist Jaan Valsiner in English, there is a foreword by Heinz-Rudi Spiegel, chairman of the board of trustees for the Hans Kilian Award, and a laudatio by Pradeep Chakkarath, co-director of the Hans Kilian and Lotte Köhler Centre for Social and Cultural Psychology and Historical Anthropology.

Control, Alt, Delete? Information Technology and the Human

2019 ◽  
pp. 249-269
Author(s):  
Jeanne Gaakeer
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
And Control ◽  
Modern Technologies

With the German jurist-philosopher-author Juli Zeh chapter 13 asks the jurist to consider the effects of contemporary information technologies on the human. It discusses topics such as privacy, surveillance and control societies in relation to individual autonomy and free will. With Zeh’s novel The Method it shows the consequences of state ideology writ large and it asks the reader to consider in which ways humans are being nudged into complacency by modern technologies that provide all our modern conveniences. It shows that as a result of modern technologies human beings run the risk of being reduced to objects ready to be used for further ordering by others.

Threshold

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emanuele Castrucci
Keyword(s):  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Basic Material ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human History ◽  
Biological Basis ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Mind

The human mind has phased out its traditional anchorage in a natural biological basis (the «reasons of the body» which even Spinoza’s Ethics could count on) – an anchorage that had determined, for at least two millennia, historically familiar forms of culture and civilisation. Increasingly emphasising its intellectual disembodiment, it has come to the point of establishing in a completely artificial way the normative conditions of social behaviour and the very ontological collocation of human beings in general. If in the past ‘God’ was the name that mythopoietic activity had assigned to the world’s overall moral order, which was reflected onto human behaviour, now the progressive freeing of the mind – by way of the intellectualisation of life and technology – from the natural normativity which was previously its basic material reference opens up unforeseen vistas of power. Freedom of the intellect demands (or so one believes) the full artificiality of the normative human order in the form of an artificial logos, and precisely qua artificial, omnipotent. The technological icon of logos (which postmodern dispersion undermines only superficially) definitively unseats the traditional normative, sovereign ‘God’ of human history as he has been known till now. Our West has been irreversibly marked by this process, whose results are as devastating as they are inevitable. The decline predicted a century ago by old Spengler is here served on a platter....

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