The Epistemology of the In/Human

The long-term research project The Epistemology of the In/Human takes an epistemological perspective on the historical and contemporary negations of the human. It aims to understand two related but distinct phenomena: dehumanization and inhumanity.

Dehumanization – that some people are regarded, depicted and treated as not human or less human – has often been taken to account (in part at least) for the inhuman - hatred, violence and atrocities. At issue in Phase I (2017-2023) of the project was how knowledge about individuals 'being human' (or not) was established in the history of ideas and what contemporary research on social cognition tells us about dehumanization, as a phenomenon in its own right.

Questions dealt with were: How can one make sense of dehumanization across disciplinary boundaries of the humanities, the social sciences and technological fields? Is the epistemological status of dehumanization explanatory or only descriptive? How do we include and exclude people (and animals or machines) from the diversity of social categories used in social interaction? Is essentialism grounding dehumanization? What is (if there is) the justification to deny full human status to some people, animals and machines? How have the boundaries of humanity shifted in the past and how will they shift in the future? Which role do the animal/human and the machine/human divide play in our social ontology? How does dehumanization connect to the explanation and prevention of violence, prejudice and discrimination? What does research on dehumanization tell us about the entanglements between science and society? Are scientists and scholars sometimes complicit in dehumanization as a social wrong in its own right, and what follows from that for the ethos of science, scientific freedom, and epistemic responsibility?

Research on these aspects continues, but focus will shift very likely to the more general relevance of the concept of the human, and the inhuman itself, as the phenomenon that is sometimes (and in part) explained by dehumanization. Stay tuned ... news to come here.

The overall aim is to openly develop pioneering philosophical ideas via an intellectually rigorous but open interdisciplinary process and to contribute to the understanding and dissolution of key social problems that relate to the inhuman, most of them perennial (e.g., human rights in migration and armed conflicts; animal ethics; disability ethics; ethics of killing; scholars participating in atrocities), others emerging (e.g., machine intelligence, roboethics).

The project uses an embedded and reflective historical and philosophical methodology. On the one hand, the project aims at a substantive scholarly contribution to understanding dehumanization and the inhuman more generally by using an embedded historical and philosophical approach towards the social sciences, humanities and technological research. Such an approach is oriented at problems that scientists and scholars studying a specific phenomenon themselves have (e.g. in social psychology, robotics, literary studies, nationalism studies, gender studies, animal studies, etc.) without losing its philosophical core. Therefore, close collaboration with the scientists and scholars concerned is integral to such an approach. With respect to its philosophical core, the project aims at a unique and rather reflective contribution to genuinely philosophical issues related to dehumanization and the inhuman. That reflective part of the project concerns epistemological and ontological issues, in particular a philosophical reflection on the values, purposes, methods and standards in the respective scientific fields (e.g., aggression research, social psychology). Even though these issues are highly releveant for practicing scientists and scholars, the latter usually do not work on these issues directly, except if they are active in methodological discussions or discussions on how science and society relate. Since both parts, the more embedded and the more reflective part, are critical in spirit, the overall aim is – in a nutshell – to take a critical epistemological stance on dehumanization and the inhuman, the negations of the human in sciences and societies.