The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520072073 ISBN 13: 9780520072077

Publisher: University of California Press, 1991

Synopsis

To the age-old debate over what it means to be human, the relatively new fields of sociobiology and artificial intelligence bring new, if not necessarily compatible, insights. What have these two fields in common? Have they affected the way we define humanity? These and other timely questions are addressed with colorful individuality by the authors of The Boundaries of Humanity.

Leading researchers in both sociobiology and artificial intelligence combine their reflections with those of philosophers, historians, and social scientists, while the editors explore the historical and contemporary contexts of the debate in their introductions. The implications of their individual arguments, and the often heated controversies generated by biological determinism or by mechanical models of mind, go to the heart of contemporary scientific, philosophical, and humanistic studies.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"An excellent interdisciplinary collage . . . of considerable interest to philosophers, psychologists, computer scientists (of a theoretical stripe), sociologists, and others. . . . Rethinking our relationship to animals is very relevant, I believe, to thinking clearly about our current relationships to current (and future) machines."-Keith Gunderson, University of Minnesota

About the Author:

James J. Sheehan is Dickason Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. Morton Sosna is a Fellow of the Stanford Humanities Center.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0520072073
• ISBN 13: 9780520072077
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264
• Editor: Sheehan James J., Sosna Morton