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3 books match the query 'Be Human'
How to be Human*
*Though an EconomistDeirdre N. McCloskey
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Anyone can learn about the field of economics from How to Be Human. She can learn how economics works as a discipline and as a piece of sociology, who the heroes are and the villains, how a career in economics relates to matters of ethics and epistemology. She can learn what it is like to be a new woman in a boys' subject, a subject that avoids at all costs the word "love."
During the 1990s Deirdre McCloskey established herself as the main internal critic of the economic mainstream. Her quarterly columns in the Eastern Economic Journal, many of which are collected here, have become a handbook for reform. Trained in economics herself, she knows the normal science of the field from the inside: she has done it as a distinguished economic historian; and has watched it work from the faculties of Chicago (for twelve years) and Iowa (for nineteen), and now at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Her criticism from the inside is that the two methods on which economics has depended since the 1940s--existence-theorem mathematics and significance-testing statistics--are nonsense. They have, she claims, nothing to do with economic science, and have massively diverted economists from finding out how the economy works.
McCloskey's book is written for anyone interested in economics, whether trained in it or not--anyone who cares about the economy but is not taken in by the boys' game.
Deirdre McCloskey is University Professor of the Human Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Striving to Be Human
Jewish Perspectives on Twenty-First-Century ChallengesRabbi Leah Cohen Tenenbaum and Rabbi Douglas Kohn
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2025
In his clarion call for ethical behavior, Rabbi Hillel tells us, “In a place where there is no humanity, strive to be human.” But what exactly does it mean to be human, especially in an age of rapid transformation? Striving to Be Human: Jewish Perspectives on Twenty-First-Century Challenges confronts this question with boldness, hope, and a foundation of Jewish wisdom. The volume begins with “Challenges from Within Us,” addressing such topics as moral justice, belonging, queer theology, and good and evil. In part two, “Challenges from Beyond Us,” the authors delve into artificial intelligence, robotics, reproductive technologies, and the animal-human relationship. The result is a profound conversation about Jewish values and human dignity in our evolving landscape.
What Does It Mean to Be Human?
Elizabeth Minnich
Temple University Press, 2027
What does it mean to be human? It has long been a tantalizing question for religious figures, scientists, political leaders, artists, and autocrats, among others. Noted philosopher Elizabeth Minnich claims, “There are no answers to such a question (although we all have favored responses).”
In What Does It Mean to Be Human?, Minnich invites us to reclaim our freedom from the dangerously distorted rationales for supremacism. She explores how the simplest mistakes in responses to “what does it mean to be human?” have enabled deadly historical errors, totalizing regimes, colonialisms, genocides, and enslavement. Paying close attention to the languages, logics, and nonsense of authoritative pronouncements, Minnich considers ways of thinking that affect and reflect meaning. She offers a fresh understanding of how mistakenly limited definitions of “human being” can be.
What Does It Mean to Be Human? emerges from Minnich’s ongoing effort to find, think through, and dissolve past mistakes that keep resurfacing to disastrous effect.