After the Human - by Mark C Taylor

About the Book

After the Human is an ambitious and audacious grand synthesis that weaves together philosophy, theology, quantum mechanics, relativity theory, information theory, ecology, plant and animal cognition, and artificial intelligence to forge a new philosophical vision for the future.

Book Synopsis

The world is on fire and time for avoiding impending disaster is rapidly running out. This catastrophe has deeply entrenched foundations: a belief in human exceptionalism and human mastery over the Earth. Accelerating technological changes ranging from genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology to biobots, neuroprosthetics, and artificial intelligence are creating new worlds in which human beings will either be radically transformed or become extinct.

After the Human is an ambitious and audacious grand synthesis that weaves together philosophy, theology, quantum mechanics, relativity theory, information theory, ecology, plant and animal cognition, and artificial intelligence to forge a new philosophical vision for the future. Mark C. Taylor calls for replacing human exceptionalism with a theory of radical relationalism, an account of the world in which everything is interrelated and codependent. People, in this telling, are not isolated individuals separated from each other and set apart from the complex world they are destined to dominate but integral parts of a vital web, where differences enrich each other and nourish the greater whole. Ranging from the grounded worlds of dirt and soil to the most abstract realms of quantum ecology, After the Human reveals the alternative intelligences and transformative possibilities that provide hope for life beyond our perilous moment.

Review Quotes

It's a sweeping, sometimes dizzying book. One that moves from Hegel to quantum physics, to the antics of soil and fungi... Somehow all this coalesces into a uniquely ambitious attempt to explain what it is to be human and what it could mean. [After the Human] is about the myths that shaped us, the ideas that trapped us and the need for a new story, a new self, and really a new way of thinking and being in the world. I think people will be reading this book for years.--Sean Illing "Vox's The Gray Area"

The sun will die and, in its death throes, incinerate the earth on which the human depends. The techno-saviors do not believe there will be an end, and I believe they are driving us to destruction before our end arrives. Others think the end is already here and have given up on a future when it will arrive. Mark Taylor's After the Human calls us to ask another question, a more hopeful one: what is to be done so that human being can make it to its end?-- "LA Review of Books"

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 The End of Nature

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 Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain

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 Plants in Place: A Vegetal Phenomenology

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 The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

About the Author

Mark C. Taylor taught at Williams College and Columbia University. He is the author of more than thirty books, including most recently A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life, with Jack Miles (Columbia, 2022). Taylor lives in the Berkshire Mountains, where he is creating a philosophical sculpture garden named neχus.