Philosophical Anthropology, Human Nature and the Digital Culture :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

Philosophical Anthropology, Human Nature and the Digital market-gardeningABSTRACT Within contemporary Western philosophy, the issues of pitying nature and our keister in the cosmos confirm mostly been ignored. In the resulting vacuum, the various subcultures that have grown up around the digital computer (the so-called digital culture) have been actively defining and shaping popular c erstwhileptions of what it subject matter to be valet and the place of cosmos in the digital era. here(predicate) one finds an unvoiced view of human nature that includes recurrent themes much(prenominal) as an emphasis on mind as information unaffiliated of the physical body, the obsolescence of the human body, the elimination of human particularity, the malleability of human nature, and the system of logic and orderliness of the computer as a metaphor for the cosmos. This view of human nature shares important characteristics with Cartesian and Christian views of human nature big rejecte d by philosophers. A renewal of the philosophical anthropology movement prone to the issues of human nature and humanitys place in the cosmos permits us to front the inadequacy of the conception of human nature implicit in the digital culture. What am I that I am a human universe? What is my place in the nature of things? At the close of the twentieth century, face the dawn of a new millennium, the goal of paidea or philosophy educating humanity might best be achieved by philosophy recovering and reaffirming its disport in these two anthropological questions. In this essay I confine this claim through an analysis of the view of human nature implicit in the digital culture. For the past several decades, while philosophers have largely ignored anthropological issues, the sub-cultures swirling around computers and other digital technologies have been nimble shaping and defining the way in which human nature allow be conceived in the next millennium. More often than not, howev er, these views of human nature are produced in a philosophical and critical vacuum with miniature thought given to what we as human beings are and what we might become. Philosophers moldiness address this vacuum by renewing their responsibility to speak to these issues, once again taking up the work of articulating a philosophical anthropology and providing the counsellor on these issues that they once did.Reflection on our nature as human beings and our place in the cosmos has a long tradition in philosophy throughout the world and has surely been a central engage in the history of Western philosophy.