“Professor Anne Phillips (LSE) – ‘Are we not both human beings?’ In ‘On Humanity in Dark Times’, Hannah Arendt questions the limitations of a humanism that pretends to a commonality while evading the reality of a ‘world become inhuman’. I take this as a starting point for an exploration of the notion of the human. Though the assertion of our common humanity remains a powerful ethical and political ideal, it too often involves either a substantive account of what it is to be human that then becomes the basis for gradations, or else a stripped down contentless account that denies important differences. We need to think of the human, rather, as an enactment of and commitment to equality.”