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Oct 18, 2026
In Defence of the Human Being
Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology
Summary
At a time when artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and digital technologies increasingly shape our understanding of what it means to be human, Fuchs argues that we need to recover a richer conception of the human person. Rather than viewing ourselves as information-processing systems or collections of neural mechanisms, he develops a philosophical vision centred on embodiment, relationality, and lived experience. The result is a compelling defence of human agency, dignity, and freedom against contemporary forms of reductionism and transhumanism.
Today we'll be discussing In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology (Oxford UP, 2021). We discuss central arguments and their implications for philosophy, psychiatry, technology, and the future of human self-understanding.
Prof. Thomas Fuchs holds the Karl Jaspers Professorship for Philosophical Foundations of Psychiatry and is head of the section “Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy” at Heidelberg University Psychiatric Hospital. He is also coordinator of the Marsilius Project “Embodiment as a Paradigm of an Evolutionary Cultural Anthropology” as well as research unit leader of the Karl Jaspers Edition. His main scientific interests include phenomenological anthropology and psychopathology on the one hand, and the theory and ethics of psychiatry and neuroscience on the other.
Dr. Anya Daly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics in the School of Arts and Society, University of Tasmania. Interdisciplinary collaborations are at the core of Anya’s research interests. She investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, ethics, aesthetics and Buddhist Philosophy.
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