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April 6-8, 2006
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April 6-8, 2006
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The Inhuman Paul C. Santilli
Siena College
Paul C. Santilli
Dr. Paul Santilli is a Professor of Philosophy and former Chair of the Philosophy Department at Siena College in Loudonville (Albany), New York. He received his doctorate from Boston College in 1976. He has been a recipient of the Siena College Teacher of the Year Award and the American Philosophical Association’s Certificate of Teaching Excellence. He has also been nominated for the Carnegie-Mellon United States Professor of the Year for 1994-95. His writings on the philosophical aspects of the films of Polish director, Krzysztof Kieslowski have been published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2005) and in Film and Philosophy (2004). Other recent publications include a book chapter on genocide in Genocide and Human Rights, John Roth, ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and an article on “Culture, Horror and Evil” (forthcoming in the American Journal of Economics and Social Sciences, Blackwell, 2006). Professor Santilli has been happily married for thirty-one years to Kristine Santilli, with whom he co-authored the article, “On the Strange Relation Between Heroic Socrates and Wise Achilles” (Rodopi, 2004). He is also proud of his two year association with Professor Douglas Shrader of Oneonta, which was spent designing a standardized test and study guide in ethics.
-- Abstract -- The Inhuman
Sadly, the poet Robert Burns’ haunting phrase, “man’s inhumanity to man,” expresses too well decades of genocides, war crimes, and other terrible atrocities, horrors so awful that the worst to be said of them is that they are “inhuman.” But what does it mean for acts and event to be inhuman, when such things are so much a part of the human condition? For any honest, impartial observer of our history it would look as though the human has always been inhuman, or, to paraphrase Bruno Latour, that we have never been human!
This talk proposes to examine the idea of the inhuman and its rhetorical power to condemn evil deeds. I suggest three ways of looking at the inhuman: first, the inhuman as a constitutive element of the human being itself, as seen, for example, in horror movies; second, the dehumanization of the human being in various “crimes against humanity;” third, the replacement of the human by the inhuman through robotic, reproductive, and other technologies. I conclude that we cannot simply equate the inhuman with evil, but must learn to evaluate it thoughtfully as a defining feature of our humanity.
Website constructed and maintained by Douglas Shrader / Department Chair Philosc@Oneonta.edu December 12, 200
