The Human is Not in Space. Humankind is in Space
Abstract
A contribution to philosophical anthropology exploring the relationship between humanity and outer space by studying how different ways of imagining and defining the essence of the human stand up to the empirical and experiential realities of life aboard the ISS. The aim of the paper is to show that in the Anthropocene understood as a Post-Planetary Age we ought to neither treat our encounter space as necessarily entangled with a flight away from the planet, nor as a justification for returning to Earth, but rather include it as a critical location within the narrative of planetization which can contribute to helping us to understand more clearly where we are, and how our choices and actions might come to affect the future of planetary life.