What is ‘the Human’ about the Humanities today?
Chairperson: Theo Wubbels, EERA Treasurer
Place: FFL - Aula Magna
Date/ Time: 19 September, 14:00 - 15:00
This paper starts from the assumption that we need to sharpen the academic awareness of the public perception of the Humanities in society today. My aim is to compare notes on different and new concepts of ‘the Human’, developed both within disciplinary and interdisciplinary academic scientific research and in broader social practices. The main focus will be on the shifting relationship between the ‘two cultures’ of the Humanities and Science in the light of contemporary developments, such as the sophisticated forms of interdisciplinary research that have emerged in the fields of bio-technologies, neural sciences, environmental and climate change research and Information and Communication Technologies. These rapid changes affect the very definitions of the human and of human evolution. The question is how and to what an extent they have an impact on both the practice of the Humanities and on their self-representation. Is Humanism challenged or strengthened by these developments? To what an extent is anthropocentrism called to task by what is becoming known as post human theory?
Besides tracking these new developments in the relationship between the Humanities and the exact sciences in the twenty-first century, the paper will also interrogate some of the ways in which ‘the human’ is being debate in society at large, in issues related to the construction of new, globalised notions of ‘humanity’, ‘human interest’ and ’human values’ in debates about humanitarianism and humanitarian intervention, including our technologically mediated wars.
Biographical Note
Rosi Braidotti (B.A. Hons. Australian National University, 1978; PhD Cum Laude, Université de Paris, Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1981; Senior Fulbright Scholar, 1994; Honorary Degree ‘Philosophiae Doctrix Honoris Causa’, University of Helsinki, 2007; Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion, 2005; Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2009) is Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University.
Her books include Patterns of Dissonance. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991; Nomadic Subjects, New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994; Metamorphoses, Polity Press, 2002; Transpositions.Polity Press, 2006 and La philosophie, lá où on ne l’attend pas, Larousse, 2009. In 2011 a thoroughly revised second edition of Nomadic Subjects was published by Columbia University Press in New York. Since 2009 she is a board member of CHCI (Consortium of Humanities Centre and Institutes).
