Abstract

The new biotechnologies have triggered profound questions about what it means to be human, as the debates about ‘our’ image of humans show. How we deal with human life before birth or with individuals at the end of life affects our self-image. We have delegated these dilemmas to applied ethics, which, however, avoids anthropological questions. This book attempts to identify the crisis in our present self-understanding in the context of the last 500 years and scientific images of man. It shows that scientific anthropology has been determined by the medical profession since the beginning and is driven by technology—just like applied ethics today.