Abstract
Abstract In this chapter, Jens Zimmermann argues that the implicit philosophical anthropology that undergirds transhumanist visions of an imminent post-human future is indicative of a more generally accepted reductive anthropology in modern culture. We believe, for example, in the superiority of Artificial Intelligence (and the implied threat of rendering human agents inferior or superfluous); in functionalist theories of the human mind; and in a quasi-mechanistic view of biological life itself only because we have become ignorant of the qualities that characterize a true human person. Drawing on the philosophies of Hans Jonas (The Phenomenon of Life), Paul Ricœur (Oneself as Another, Freedom and Nature), and Hermeneutic Theory (Heidegger, Gadamer), together with ancient and modern theological sources (Gregory of Nyssa, Dietrich Bonhoeffer) and personalist philosophy (Max Scheler, Jacques Maritain, Robert Spaemann), Zimmermann demonstrates that the embodied, relational, historical, and transcendent nature of human, indeed personal, consciousness reveals the stark reductionism and consequent misunderstanding of the person in contemporary views of human identity.
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