Document Type

Presentation

Publication Date

3-22-2024

Subjects

History -- Personalism, Philosophy -- Personalism

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a short excerpt:

I shall speak today, generally and just within my 15 minutes, about the problems of personalism today—that is, its current position in philosophy and its internal stresses that must be addressed to improve that situation. My comments are the first fruits of my next book, now under way, which will develop a renewed humanism on a personalistic basis by reformulating a foundation for personalism. The book will also apply this personalism to the challenges of the Anthropocene and particularly of transhumanism. For reasons I will explain, no one has yet examined these challenges via frank personalism, though it would seem apt to the task. I do not intend or pretend to solve the difficulties that transhumanist technologies and ideologies present to us. I shall try only this: to give a defensible account of a virtuous self-regard that humankind can maintain in the course of seeking those solutions. 2 To do this we must avoid both prideful anthropocentrism and self-destructiveness arising from our deep drive for self-destruction, exacerbated by shame and guilt for the wrongs we now well and unavoidably understand that we do unnecessarily to one another and, less unavoidably, to the Earth.

This book project advances the personalist view of history as the sum of human behavior, with consequences for our understanding of time, that I presented in my first book, A Personalist Philosophy of History, published by Routledge in 2019, and the intense endeavor to bend philosophy of history and moral philosophy toward each other on that personalist basis to which my fourth book, to be published by Amsterdam University Press late this year, is devoted. Its title is What Are We Worth? Humanity's Value in an Age of Trans-Humanist Challenges.

Description

Paper read at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division annual conference, Portland, Oregon, March 22, 2024.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/41455

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