ABSTRACT

What does it mean to be human? What is the defi nition of humanity? What is the measure of humanity? What does it mean to lead a human life? These are age-old questions with which philosophers have occupied themselves ever since they turned their gaze away from the natural world toward the world of human beings. To say that these are philosophical questions is not to say that they are merely theoretical questions. An answer to the question of what it means to be human can have far-reaching practical consequences as well, both in those cases in which there is a positive answer to this question (such as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and in those cases in which a certain defi nition of what it means to be human is used to exclude some from the realm of human interaction.