Challenges of Life: Essays on philosophical and cultural anthropology – serie

Life Configurations focuses on the analysis and reflection on the various forms in which human beings imagine, design, conjecture, and plan their ‍“becoming”, that is to say their lives. Case studies written by an interdisciplinary circle of well-known academics explore how the capacity of designing life, the concept of free will, and the methods to calculate the future have been changed and adopted in different societies and in different ages.

The body is at the same time a place where we express duration and/or discontinuity in history, a witness of radical social changes, and a factor of stabilization, but also of the transformation of human life - and therefore an eminent challenge for every human being. This book will contribute in a decisively interdisciplinary and cross-cultural way to a better understanding of the place, role, and connection of the body within social, political, and cultural shifts.

The central question of the book is as follows: To what extent does the community present a challenge in the life of the individual? Well-known international Philosophers, historians, anthropologists, political scientists, theologians and sociologists attempted to find explications by intercultural comparison.