Between Beast & God

The status of the human is presently in question in some corners. The momentum behind post-humanism, transhumanism, and transgenderism indicates new doubts about what it means to be human—and indeed about the desirability of being human at all. Thus, Mary Nichols’s new book, Aristotle’s Discovery of the Human, despite chiefly being a reading of 2,500-year-old texts, could scarcely have come at a better time. In Nichols’s hands, these texts and their relevance to our times quickly become clear.