The human and its limits

This collection of essays brings together a wide range of approaches to the changing notions of the human and its limits in Western thought. In a time often referred to as 'post-human', the long history of fascination with the origins and potential ends of the 'specifically human' continues to intrigue, developing in complexity and changing in actuality along with current advances in science and technology. Today's intelligent machines serve as means as well as models in attempts at understanding and controlling biological and cognitive processes. In the age of cyborgs and neuro-implants, experiments in cybernetics and bio-cybernetics are producing entirely new modes of being: a post-humanist community of humans, animals and machines that nonetheless remains a site of ethical and emotional dilemmas. The fundamental question is still with us: how to think (and rethink) the limits of the human in the wake of the post-humanist critique?