Human Being

In this summary, Professor Spitz discusses how the Douglas Treaties acknowledged Aboriginal title when negotiations with Indigenous populations when purchasing land. She looks at how what the definition of “human being” is during the 18th century and how Douglas’ respect of Aboriginal land title also indicated he was these people as people. This diverges from categorizations surrounding the term Indian, and its implication that populations were subhuman and/or a different species. Douglas is still embedded in a larger social and legal structure even as he understands indigenous populations as human when it comes to resources and allocations. Where the white, colonial legal field is assigning human-ness based on legal definitions, the Coast Salish nations understand human-ness as in yourself. Where those who are legally human believe they are owed something, the belief of innate human-ness corresponds to an obligation to all living things. View video on Vimeo

Liberation and passion: reconstructing the passion perspective on human being and freedom

Many contemporary philosophers tell us that we are essentially purposeful, independent, willing, and acting beings. The self is presented as a citadel defending itself against external, alien influences. Alternatively, some argue that we are the sum of a determined body and a free will. Are we really like that? And is personal liberation basically a matter of enhancing our capacity to will, to act, and to control ourselves? Is freedom necessarily a question of will and action?\ud \ud This book searches for alternative perspectives on human being and freedom, highlighting a different side of ourselves: openness, receptivity, dependency, being-in-relation. By articulating these aspects in the work of some key Western thinkers, including Euripides, Augustine, Eckhart, Dostoevski, and Heidegger, the author explores a different view of what liberation is and what it would be like to be fre

Borders of Human Being

Informatics in technical reality is coming nearer and nearer to the "biological" human being. It seems to be necessary to protect humans against excessive demands by hardware of Cyber world and especially against computers as machines and their software. The human being as evolutional species on one side is measured in a very long development time of thousands of years, the IT on the other side works with human creativity and in much faster time intervals of some years or - maximal - decenniums only. These times show a big difference in both areas. The execution-times of the biological human being and his general surroundings on one hand and the IT with her applications – in electronic speeds - on the other hand are an outstanding conflict of time. Humans don't act like computers! The structure of this work is given by the biological organism, but also the thinking and feeling of a human being. He has senses, instruments for movement and mental abilities as a whole. The human being in nature science is a biological object and in the human society an individual subject with own self awareness und personal intelligence. Compared with all living subjects he has the highest developed consciousness of his own person. The modern science seems to make them unimportant. The goal of this work is, to find the biological a n d psychological borders of the human being and protect him in a preventive medical kind against coming dangers like for inst. bad stress and following sickness. Theoretical Informatics has to find out principles, rules and ways of thinking for human-orientated IT to avoid this danger. There is no demand on finding out all at once but a beginning on a scientific level is intended. This work is thought as the first foundation and compendium for all main themes of HO (Human Orientation). Besides a speciality out of biology is described new - The Rules of Mendel, a biological stimulus for informatics

Understanding Morality in the Religion-and-Science Context

Recent developments in biotechnology require re/definition of human \"being.\" In this paper, the author suggests that the term \"human being \" is substituted with \"human betweenness.\" This substitution emerges from a philosophical/theological reading of biological texts, such as those by E. O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr, Richard Lewontin, and David Slan Wilson. The betweenness is possible only by the bodily integration (i.e., inclusive fitness or causal efficacy). Yet the need of the integration already presumes the complexity and overlap of the betweennesses (reciprocal altruism or presentational immediacy). The Confucian understanding of morality as the integration of Tao ( the Way) and Te (Virtue) shows the possibility of seeing human \"being\" as human \"betweenness,\"—that is, human \"being\" as the actualization of plural li in the bodiliness

From tissue treatment to human being treatment: Is radiotherapy ready to change?

The increasing request of radiotherapy in the next years, according to recent past trend, could be an opportunity to include new characters in the process of radiotherapy renewing that is involving all the modern medicine. "Tissue" has been till now the key word in radiotherapy, while scientists seem not to care about the fact that their real substrate is “humans”

The lady vanishes: what's missing from the stem cell debate

Most opponents of somatic cell nuclear transfer and embryonic stem cell technologies base their arguments on the twin assertions that the embryo is either a human being or a potential human being, and that it is wrong to destroy a human being or potential human being in order to produce stem cell lines. Proponents’ justifications of stem cell research are more varied, but not enough to escape the charge of obsession with the status of the embryo. What unites the two warring sides in ‘the stem cell wars’ is that women are equally invisible to both: ‘the lady vanishes’. Yet the only legitimate property in the body is that which women possess in their reproductive tissue and the products of their reproductive labour. By drawing on the accepted characterisation in law of property as a bundle of rights, and on a Hegelian model of contract as mutual recognition, we can lessen the impact of the tendency to regard women and their eggs as merely receptacles and women’s reproductive labour as unimportant

Pitch and yaw motions of a human being in free fall

Human limb motions for body orientation during free fal