After the Human

Mark C. Taylor asks the biggest questions of our time—or any time. After the Human is far-ranging, deeply informed, clarifying, and provocative. -- Elizabeth Kolbert, author of <i>The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History</i> If humans could really see themselves as part of something larger, it would dramatically increase our chances for survival. The way we think about things, as this wide-ranging book makes clear, matters mightily! -- Bill McKibben, author <i>The End of Nature</i> After the Human is a boldly conceived, elegantly rendered, and magisterial book from the most important American philosopher of his generation. He is the Nietzsche we need right now. Staring directly into the abyss, Taylor offers a philosophy of living and a welcome survival guide in these dark times. -- John Lardas Modern, author of <i>Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain</i> A vast and daring reflection on the relational nature of reality from the quantum and cellular levels through plants, animals, and humans, to emerging artificial intelligences. -- Carlo Rovelli, Centre de Physique Theorique, Aix-Marseille University Drawing on episodes of his own life as preludes for a series of scintillating chapters, this book is a moving testament of fifty years of teaching and writing on the part of one of the premier thinkers of our time. Mark Taylor presents a masterful analysis of such basic and diverse themes as death, quantum theory, the thinking of plants, cognition, and artificial intelligence. In each case, he demonstrates how “radical relationality” underlies all that human beings and other inhabitants of the life-world do and experience. -- Edward S. Casey, coauthor of <i>Plants in Place: A Vegetal Phenomenology</i>