Beyond Anthropocentric Humanism. The Potentialities of the Posthuman in Educational Studies (original) (raw)

Pedagogia e orizzonte post-umanista is both an insightful and a critical work. It has the merit of bringing to the forefront a theme that received much attention in the late 1980s but then slipped into the background of the Italian philosophical and pedagogical debate. Namely, the question of how to think education, and therefore pedagogy, in light of the profound changes marking our contemporary era. Ferrante asks how we may think education in all of its complexity and, above all, how we may think it today. He radically poses the question of the "order of discourse" required to formulate a thought that is appropriate for contemporary educational experience. Throughout the entire book, the author presents and discusses a hypothesis in two parts: first, that the contemporary era is characterised by a radical shift in the forms of experience daily engaged in by humans and nonhumans; the second, that this change is mainly due to the exponential increase and diffusion of technology, whose presence and use has transformed all life contexts. Echoing Galimberti, Ferrante claims that "the relationship between the human being and technology has changed both quantitatively and qualitatively with respect to the past" (14); most importantly, this transformation has modified the way in which human beings relate to themselves, to others and to the world. It is particularly crucial to acknowledge and understand this difference vis-à-vis the past when we come to conceptualizing education, the specific form of experience through which beings-human and non, as Ferrante suggests-construct their own form, discover and embody their possibility of being what it is possible for them to be on the basis of what they currently are, give rise to their becoming, and attribute meaning to themselves and that which surrounds them.