Philosophy of the Body: Medieval Islamic Philosophy as a Resource for the Bioethics of Biotechnological Enhancement

Contemporary bioethical debate over biotechnological enhancement, genetic engineering, prosthetics, and neuroenhancement largely takes place within a metaphysical framework inherited from post-Cartesian European philosophy. In this framework, humanity is essentially something received or given, and biotechnological intervention is a transgression against that givenness. This paper argues that medieval Islamic philosophy, particularly Ibn Tufail’s account of human environmental agency in Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and Maimonides’ integration of body and soul into a single moral–physical economy, offers conceptual resources that reframe this debate. According to the viewpoint developed here, the human is constitutively a self-shaping being whose formation is mediated through bodily and environmental conditions that the human reciprocally shapes. Biotechnology is therefore not a rupture in the human story but the latest expression of a perennial human practice. This reframing does not dissolve bioethical concern but relocates it: the question is not whether to engage in self-shaping (as we always have), but what forms of self-shaping conduce to the integrated flourishing of an embodied person.