Beyond Blood Identities

Posthumanity in the Twenty-First Century

Jason D. Hill

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2009
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780739138441
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

Beyond Blood Identities uncovers the social psychology of those who hold strong blood identities. In this highly original work, Jason D. Hill argues that strong racial, ethnic and national identities, which he refers to as "tribal identities," function according to a separatist logic that does irreparable damage to our moral lives. Drawing on scholarship in philosophy, sociology, and cultural anthropology, Hill contends that strong tribalism is a form of pathology.

Beyond Blood Identities shows how a particular understanding of culture could lead to a new theoretical approach to enriched human living. Hill develops a new version of cosmopolitanism that he calls post-human cosmopolitanism to solve a number of challenges in contemporary society. From the problem of defining culture, the failure of multiculturalism, the question of who owns native culture, the identification of Jews as post-human people and the problem of their status as "chosen people" in a modern world, the author applies a cosmopolitan analysis to some of the major problems in our global and interdependent world. He posits a world in which community has been dispensed with and replaced by its successor term sociality-the broad unmarked space in which creative social intercourse takes place. Hill applies a new cosmopolitanism to ideate a new post-humanity for the twenty-first century.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Moral Reasoning from a Cosmopolitan Perspective: The Problem of Culture
• Chapter 2: Who Owns Culture? A Moral Cosmopolitan Inquiry
• Chapter 3: Moral Culture Is Public Culture: Cosmopolitanism and Culture Warfare
• Chapter 4: The Psychopathology of Tribalism
• Chapter 5: Theorizing Posthumanity: Radical Inclusion, Jews as the Chosen People, and the Identity Politics of St. Paul
• Appendix: Conscientious Objections to Cosmopolitanism: A Response
• Bibliography
• About the Author