PAUL SHEEHAN is a writer and researcher based in Sydney, Australia. The author of Modernism, Narrative, and Humanism, he has also published articles on subjects ranging from postmodernism to Samuel Beckett.

Foreword by Steven Connor
Introduction: Contingencies of Humanness by Paul Sheehan
The Backgrounds of Human Being
Humanism and Human Being: Beyond Essentialism by Tom Rockmore
The Rehumanization of Art: Modernism, Technology, and The Crisis of Humanism by Michael Hollington
Is Humour Human by Simon Critchley
Naturalising Human Dominion
Philosophie au Naturel by John Mullarkey
Culture and Nature: The Mythic Register by Kate Soper
The Way of the World: Nature, History, Human Ontology by Joseph Margolis
Screen Narratives of Human Becoming
Death 24 Times a Second: The Inorganic Body and the Cinema by Laura Mulvey
Towards a New Demonology by Steven Connor
Rights of Sacrifice by Richard Kearney
The Project of Humanity by Zygmunt Bauman
Value, Justice, and the Wilderness Ideal by John O'Neill
On Critical Humility by Thomas Docherty
Further Reading
Selected Bibliography
About the Contributors

The postmodern condition has delivered us into a world where our humanity can no longer be taken for granted. Whether his place is ceded to nature or technology, man is no longer the measure of all things, rather, he is locked into processes in which the only permanence is change. Becoming Human offers a sustained engagement with these and other paradoxes about human being and its nature in the 21st-century world. Beginning with the notion that the human is not an immutable given but rather an ever-changing entity, this collection of essays considers our multifarious condition through the perspective of a variety of fields, including philosophy, sociology, literature, and film studies.
In this book, the authors make coherent and accessible a sprawling field. The diversity of writers and approaches challenges current thinking about humanity, providing material for future scholars and researchers and prompting us to ponder these questions more deeply, while at the same time offering the reader a comprehensive, intelligible survey of recent inquiries into a potentially bewildering field.