Publication:
Debunking Fake Humanities. Critical Reasoning from Ovid to Roboethics

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Date
2019
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EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste
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Abstract
We assume that the sense of being human involves our critical attitude of reasoning, but when we come across the roots of this capability, we get lost in logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, neurobiology and ethics. Nowadays, the expression “debunking fake news” is the practice of calling into question or denying false, exaggerated or unscientific statements. In accordance with that definition of debunking, is it possible to debunk fake humanities? And, above all, which are the fake humanities we are referring to? Our proposal aims to discuss this foundation of common reasoning – which relies on the “human measure” - through ancient myths and the idea of Metamorphoses, that the Roman poet Ovid delivered to us in his poem as a kind of predisposition to debunking; then moving forward in the article, we will look through the hermeneutic lens of one of the latest debates between the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the neuroscientist Jean Pierre Changeaux about human being’s identity, which will help us to engage critically the ethical aspects of upcoming metamorphoses such as Robotics.We assume that the sense of being human involves our critical attitude of reasoning, but when we come across the roots of this capability, we get lost in logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, neurobiology and ethics. Nowadays, the expression “debunking fake news” is the practice of calling into question or denying false, exaggerated or unscientific statements. In accordance with that definition of debunking, is it possible to debunk fake humanities? And, above all, which are the fake humanities we are referring to? Our proposal aims to discuss this foundation of common reasoning – which relies on the “human measure” - through ancient myths and the idea of Metamorphoses, that the Roman poet Ovid delivered to us in his poem as a kind of predisposition to debunking; then moving forward in the article, we will look through the hermeneutic lens of one of the latest debates between the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the neuroscientist Jean Pierre Changeaux about human being’s identity, which will help us to engage critically the ethical aspects of upcoming metamorphoses such as Robotics.
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Debunking, Metamorphoses, Identity, Roboethics, Hermeneutics
Citation
Fabrizia Abbate, "Debunking Fake Humanities. Critical Reasoning from Ovid to Roboethics", in "Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2019) XXI/2", Trieste, EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2019, pp. 113-120