Being a Human

Foster, Charles

£16.99

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 non-human 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.

Out of stock

Publish Date: 26/08/2021

Description

A New Statesman Essential Non-Fiction Book of 2021What 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 non-human 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.

Additional information

Weight 506 g
Dimensions 218 × 142 × 42 mm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Hardback

Pages

320

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

301 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K