While it is not accurate to say that Seeing Ourselves: Reclaiming Humanity from God and Science begins with answers and ends with questions, this would be true to its fundamental intention. My aim is the relatively modest one of clearing away certain misunderstandings about our nature that stop us addressing philosophical questions to which we need answers. While I say “relatively modest”, this aim may still seem to be wildly ambitious, in view of the domination of the collective conversation by views which I oppose and the numerous platforms they have. The task is analogous to cleaning the Augean stables while the horses are still evacuating their capacious bowels. Be that as it may, the most important question is: “What kinds of beings are we?”

Full disclosure: I am a secular humanist and a patron of Humanists UK (previously titled the British Humanist Association). It will be evident in what follows that I see this stance as a point of departure rather than of arrival. Humanism, for all its virtues, still lacks a philosophy that can compete in profundity with the religious beliefs it aims to displace.

Paramount among the many drivers to Seeing Ourselves are three beliefs. The first is that the work of humanism does not consist solely of – the admittedly important – tasks of distancing humanity from religious belief, highlighting the damage caused by religious institutions and the prejudices they validate, and challenging the ubiquitous hard power and soft influence they have in public life. Humanism has yet to develop a sufficiently clear idea of the “human” that the “-ism” is about. While anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, historians, and many other thinkers, researchers, and scholars, in the sciences and the humanities, hold up secular mirrors to ourselves, they often fall short of inquiry at the most fundamental level.

Philosophy can – or should – make a decisive contribution to the endeavour to understand what kinds of beings we are, even if (as is too often the case), this takes the form of correcting the errors of other philosophers. It has perhaps contributed less than it should. In part this is down to an entirely honourable commitment to rigour, that has made philosophy often rather technical and encouraged philosophers to approach problems piecemeal.