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Philosophy
A radical work of nature writing and philosophical enquiry, resituating us in our real human skins.
A New Statesman Essential Non-Fiction Book of 2021
What kind of creature is a human? If we don't know what we are, how can we know how to act? In Being a Human Charles Foster sets out to understand what a human is, inhabiting the sensory worlds of humans at three pivotal moments in our history.
Foster begins his quest in a wood in Derbyshire with his son, shivering, starving and hunting, trying to find a way of experiencing the world that recognises the deep expanse of time when we understood ourselves as hunter-gatherers, indivisible from the nonhuman world, and when modern consciousness was first ignited. From there he travels to the Neolithic, when we tamed animals, plants and ourselves, to a way of being defined by walls, fences, farms, sky gods and slaughterhouses, and finally to the rarefied world of the Enlightenment, when we decided that the universe was a machine
and we were soulless cogs within it.
Charles Foster
Charles Foster is a writer, barrister and tutor in Medical Law and Ethics at the University of Oxford and sits as a part-time judge in the criminal and civil courts. He read veterinary medicine and law at the University of Cambridge and has written, edited or contributed to thirty books.
His three most recently published books are The Jesus Inquest (an inquiry into the historicity of the resurrection), Tracking The Ark Of The Covenant and The Selfless Gene. He writes regularly for many publications.Find a book you’ll love, get our Word Up newsletter!
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