What Will Become of the Human Being? A Plea for a Humanism of Embodied Personhood
Please note: this event will be held off-site.
The Houston Centre invites you to join Psychiatrist and Philosopher Dr. Thomas Fuchs on Thursday, September 25, for a lecture on What Will Become of the Human Being? A Plea for a Humanism of Embodied Personhood. The event will take place at 1 pm at Green College on the UBC campus.
About the Event
The current self-image of the human being is marked by a deep ambivalence. On the one hand, humans believe they possess god-like powers, enabling them to create superior intelligence, artificial life, or even artificial consciousness. On the other hand, there is a profound pessimism, coupled with a sense of human self-contempt. Posthumanism, for example, in its more radical variants, calls for the abdication of humanity, which is ideally to be dethroned by its own artificial offspring.
In this lecture, Dr. Fuchs traces the development of this ambivalence, beginning with the early modern period, back to a vacillation between feelings of omnipotence and experiences of powerlessness—an oscillation ultimately rooted in a collective narcissism: We attempt to compensate for an inner void by constructing an idealized self-image and by mirroring ourselves in anthropomorphic machines, in digital intelligence, and in virtual images. In light of this development, Dr. Fuchs advocates for a new humanism of the person—one grounded in our embodied existence, our intercorporeality with others, and our embeddedness in an ecological life-world.
About the Speaker
Dr. Thomas Fuchs, psychiatrist and philosopher, is Karl Jaspers Professor of the Philosophical Foundations of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, where he is the head of the section on Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy in the university’s Department of Psychiatry. His research lies at the intersection of phenomenology, psychopathology, and cognitive neuroscience, with a main emphasis on embodiment, enactivism, temporality, and intersubjectivity. In addition, he is interested in the theory and ethics of psychiatry and neuroscience.
Dr. Fuchs is the author of In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Ecology of the Brain: The Phenomenology and Biology of the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Location
The Coach House at Green College (6201 Cecil Green Park Rd, Vancouver)
Parking
The event will be held off-site. Paid parking is available in the UBC Rose Garden Parkade.