Description:

Steve Crowell (Rice University)

Title: "We Have Never Been Animals: Heidegger’s Posthumanism"

Abstract: The relation between Dasein and the human being was never adequately characterized in Being and Time. In the decade following that publication, Heidegger explored this problem as he tried to work out a phenomenologically based metaphysics. A key moment in this attempt is found in his discussion of the animal in his 1929/30 lecture course, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. I will explore Heidegger’s treatment of the difference between the animal (including homo sapiens) and the “Dasein in us” against the background of recent attempts at what I call “bio-posthumanism” -- the view that there is no normatively meaningful distinction to be drawn between human beings and other animals. A picture of Heidegger’s phenomenological posthumanism emerges.

Bio: Steven Crowell is Mullen Professor of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Rice University. He works in the phenomenological tradition. Recent publications include Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge 2013) and The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (2012). He is currently working on Heidegger’s reading of Leibniz in 1928-1936.