Transhumanism and Posthumanism (original) (raw)
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Introducing Post- and Transhumanism
Scientific and technological advances have questioned predominant doctrines concerning the human condition. Transhumanism and posthumanism are among the most recent and prominent manifestations of this phenomenon. Debates on trans- and posthumanism have not only gained a considerable amount of academic and popular attention recently, but have also created a widespread conceptual confusion. This is no surprise, considering their recent dates of origin, their conceptual similarities, and their engagements with similar questions, topics, and motifs. Furthermore, trans- as well as posthumanism frequently question their relationship to humanism and reconsider what it means to be human. In this regard both movements are streaming beyond humanism. What this means, however, is far from clear and shall be subject of discussion in this volume.
Philosophical and Cultural Aspects of Transhumanism and Posthumanism
Future Human Image, 2020
The article discusses the mechanisms of improving the human organism presented in past centuries’ culture and analogous phenomena present in contemporary cultural texts. On this basis, theoretical and speculative aspects of posthumanism and transhumanism are described, their literary realizations, and finally, their cultural consequences are presented. Ideas, movements and ideologies, or even philosophies of posthumanism and transhumanism, although affecting the common problematic area, still cause confusion because of their mutual confusion with each other. The article tries to find arguments for the position that posthumanism and transhumanism stand in one house, but the latter is less suitable for understanding the radically changing world that we experience in such a painful way.
"Existenz" published by The Karl Jaspers Society of North America, 2014
"Posthuman" has become an umbrella term to refer to a variety of different movements and schools of thought, including philosophical, cultural, and critical posthumanism; transhumanism (in its variations of extropianism, liberal and democratic transhumanism, among others); the feminist approach of new materialisms; the heterogeneous landscape of antihumanism, metahumanism, metahumanities, and posthumanities. Such a generic and all-inclusive use of the term has created methodological and theoretical confusion between experts and non-experts alike. This essay will explore the differences between these movements, focusing in particular on the areas of signification shared by posthumanism and transhumanism. In presenting these two independent, yet related philosophies, posthumanism may prove a more comprehensive standpoint to reflect upon possible futures.
Book review of Post- and Transhumanism: An Introduction
Journal of Evolution and Technology (JET), 2015
As post- and transhumanism have become ever-hotter topics over the past decade or so, their boundaries have become muddled by misappropriations and misunderstandings of what defines them, and especially what distinguishes them from each other. This edition of essays by various experts, edited by Robert Ranisch and Stefan Sorgner, goes a long way to resolve these issues. The introductory essay by the two editors – both of whom are philosophers – is alone worth the book’s purchase price. They give a very straightforward and understandable synopsis of what defines posthumanism, transhumanism, and the posthuman; and they also give thumbnail sketches of the major differences between them. Basically, transhumanists believe in improving the human species by using any and every form of emerging technology. Technology is meant in the broad sense here: it includes everything from pharmaceuticals to digital technology, genetic modification to nanotechnology. The posthuman is the state that transhumans aspire to: a state in which our species is both morally and physically improved, and maybe immortal – a species improved to the point where we perhaps become a different (and thus “posthuman”) species altogether.
Humanism, Transhumanism and Posthumanism
The Humanist and the transhumanist propose different methods for cultivating human capacities. The transhumanist claims that traditional techniques favoured by the humanist run up against the limits of our biology. She believes that prospective technologies could further the humanist cause by improving our nature. However, the transhumanist faces a difficulty. Her policies could produce posthumans. Evaluating posthuman lives might be impossible for us. But discounting them is not an option because she will share responsibility for their creation. I argue that one way through this impasse is for the transhumanist to produce posthumans or to become posthuman.
Annals of the University of Bucharest Philosophy Series, 2020
The rapid institutionalization of ‚transhumanism‛, promoted from the status of subculture to 'intellectual movement', to the point in which its interests have gained academic traction becoming a research and reflection field cannot conceal the many methodological and epistemic shortcomings it still suffers today. I intend to go through the most striking of them in order to claim that in order to properly respond to its self-imposed mission and tasks, transhumanism must either adopt a critical, philosophical posthumanism, as its own method, or renounce its claims altogether. The point is that critical posthumanism is already the immanent critique of transhumanism, and the latter cannot continue to ignore it without losing touch with its own content-which equates to the catastrophic loss of academic credibility and the relegation in the sphere of popular culture. Conversely, the transhuman as a field of actual transformations is the proper one for posthumanist research, without which its efforts to gain institutional ground are pointless.
Posthumanism, Transhumanism, and the New Materialisms (Syllabus)
“Posthuman” has become an umbrella term to refer to a variety of different movements and schools of thought, including philosophical, cultural, and critical posthumanism; transhumanism (in its variations of extropianism, liberal and democratic transhumanism, among others); the feminist approach of new materialisms; and the heterogeneous landscape of antihumanism, metahumanism, metahumanities, and posthumanities. The struggle over the meaning of “posthuman” can be seen as a way of coping with an urgency for the integral redefinition of the notion of the human, following the onto-epistemological as well as scientific and bio-technological developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Sapient Circuits and Digitalized Flesh: The Organization as Locus of Technological Posthumanization (second edition), 2018
The term ‘posthumanism’ has been employed to describe a diverse array of phenomena ranging from academic disciplines and artistic movements to political advocacy campaigns and the development of commercial technologies. Such phenomena differ widely in their subject matter, purpose, and methodology, raising the question of whether it is possible to fashion a coherent definition of posthumanism that encompasses all phenomena thus labelled. In this text, we seek to bring greater clarity to this discussion by formulating a novel conceptual framework for classifying existing and potential forms of posthumanism. The framework asserts that a given form of posthumanism can be classified: 1) either as an analytic posthumanism that understands ‘posthumanity’ as a sociotechnological reality that already exists in the contemporary world or as a synthetic posthumanism that understands ‘posthumanity’ as a collection of hypothetical future entities whose development can be intentionally realized or prevented; and 2) either as a theoretical posthumanism that primarily seeks to develop new knowledge or as a practical posthumanism that seeks to bring about some social, political, economic, or technological change. By arranging these two characteristics as orthogonal axes, we obtain a matrix that categorizes a form of posthumanism into one of four quadrants or as a hybrid posthumanism spanning all quadrants. It is suggested that the five resulting types can be understood roughly as posthumanisms of critique, imagination, conversion, control, and production. We then employ this framework to classify a wide variety of posthumanisms, such as critical, cultural, philosophical, sociopolitical, and popular (or ‘commercial’) posthumanism; science fiction; techno-idealism; metahumanism; neohumanism; antihumanism; prehumanism; feminist new materialism; the posthumanities; biopolitical posthumanism, including bioconservatism and transhumanism (with specialized objective and instrumental typologies offered for classifying forms of transhumanism); and organizational posthumanism. Of particular interest for our research is the classification of organizational posthumanism as a hybrid posthumanism combining analytic, synthetic, theoretical, and practical aspects. We argue that the framework proposed in this text generates a typology that is flexible enough to encompass the full range of posthumanisms while being discriminating enough to order posthumanisms into types that reveal new insights about their nature and dynamics.
The posthuman : philosophical posthumanism and its others
2013
As Rosi Braidotti in "Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming" (2002), puts it: Postmodernity is notoriously the age of proliferating differences. The devalued "others" which constituted the specular complement of the modern subjectwoman, the ethnic or racialized other and nature or 'earth-others'-return with a vengeance. They are the complement to the modern subject, who constructed himself as much through what he excluded. (174) Posthumanism may arise once the need for such a "vengeance" has been fulfilled, and the voices of subjectivities who have been historically reduced to the realm of the "Other", have been regained. Posthumanism is inextricably related to the Studies of the Differences, referring to the fields of research which developed out of the deconstruction of the "neutral subject" of Western onto-epistemologies 9. The deconstruction enacted, within the historical and philosophical frame of Postmodernism, by Feminist, Black, Gay and Lesbian, Postcolonial and Chicana theorists, together with differently abled activists and other outsiders, pointed out the partiality of the construction of the Discourse 10 , historically formulated by one specific subject, which finally appeared in its embodied vestiges, as: Western, white, male, heterosexual, propertied and abled, among other specific terms. In order to postulate a post-to the human, the differences which are constitutive to the human, and which have been historically erased by the self-claimed objectivity of hegemonic accounts, have to be taken into account. Posthumanism is indebted to the reflections developed out of the "margins" of such a centralized human subject, which emphasized the human as a process, more than as a given, inherently characterized by differences and shifting identities: Women's and Gender Studies, Gay 9 Such a genealogical location of the posthuman is already pointed out by William Spanos in his pioneer text "End Of Education: Toward Posthumanism", published in 1993. 10 Note that the notion of "Discourse" is intended here not only in the foucaultian use of the term as a way of constituting knowledge, social practices and power relations (Foucault 1976), but also as the phallogocentric logos (Irigaray 1974), and the symbolic order (Kristeva 1974).