This paper clarifies the significance of philosophy for traditional societies and modern societies and their evolution. In this paper ethics is the mainstream philosophy which studies and analyses the values of both the traditional societies and modern ones. This paper is only the ethical study of the traditional values and modern values. There are three ways to philosophize societies as traditional and modern: Ethical perspective, economical and theological, but this paper deals only with the ethical approach. Philosophers from ancient to (...) modern era played an important part in the transformation of traditional into modern. Morality and religion changed the mind of the nations towards development and ethical progress. In this article ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, modern philosophy and others religious philosophies of India, china, and Muslim philosophies exercised key attempts to study traditional societies and modern societies. This paper highlights the factors that are responsible for the vices in traditional societies and also the elements that are productive for the promotion of modern societies. (shrink)

Naturalist views of persons, such as those of the philosophers Annette Baier and Marjorie Grene, emphasize that human persons are cultural animals: We are living, embodied, organic beings, embedded in nature, the product of Darwinian evolution, but dependent on culture. Such naturalist views of persons typically eschew science fiction and look askance at the philosophical fantasies and thought experiments that often populate philosophical treatments of personal identity. Marge Piercy’s dystopian, cyberpunk, science fiction novel He, She and It weaves a complex (...) tale around the debate over the status of its central character Yod, a cyborg created in a lab but humanized through the efforts of two women, Malkah Shipman and her granddaughter Shira Shipman. Is Yod a person, despite having been engineered in a lab for a specific purpose? Piercy’s tale both challenges and ultimately supports a naturalist view of persons while simultaneously forewarning us of possible new styles of persons to come. (shrink)

Maria Kronfeldner’s Preface and Introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization maps the landscape of dehumanization studies. She starts with a brief portrayal of the history of the field. The systematically minded sections that follow guide the reader through the resulting rugged landscape represented in the Handbook’s contributions. Different realizations, levels, forms, and ontological contrasts of dehumanization are distinguished, followed by remarks on the variety of targets of dehumanization. A discussion on valence and emotional aspects is added. Causes, functions, and (...) consequences of dehumanization, and the prospects for reducing or undoing it, are introduced. The systematic overview closes with a discussion of some important theoretical complexities that arise in studying dehumanization. After these systematic sections, the scholarly work on dehumanization gets situated in the broader intellectual landscape of debates about the ‘human’ in the humanities and social sciences. The Introduction ends with some notes on scope, limitations, and intended readership of the Handbook. (shrink)

But my real cat is not Alice’s little cat … because I am certainly not about to conclude hurriedly, upon waking, as Alice did, that one cannot speak with a cat on the pretext that it doesn’t reply or that it always replies the same thing. Everything that I am about to entrust to you no doubt comes back to asking you to respond to me, you, to me, reply to me concerning what it is to respond. If you can. (...) The said question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means. And how to distinguish the response from a reaction.A response that does not respond to a question is a response that is not the solution to a problem or the .. (shrink)

This paper draws on a study of companion animals in human households and public spaces, deploying material gained by ethnographic observation and interviews with dog walkers in urban and rural contexts. The communities which are the subject of this study frequent public places that might be described as “Edgeland” space where dogs and “dog people” meet. It is argued the relationships between cross-species packs of people and dogs that develop over time in the routine practice of walking are micro-communities inclusive (...) of both dogs and their human companions. These might be understood as posthuman social forms with particular characteristics of inclusivity, diversity, and reconstitution. Human members of such communities are also invested in, and defensive of, Edgeland spaces and engaged in practices of care for both human and canine walkers. (shrink)

I adapt Robert Sinnerbrink's notion of cinematic poesis by arguing that Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line constitutes an example of ecological cinematic poesis: a style of filmmaking that works in concert with the limits and potentialities of the filmmaking as a medium. This cinematic bearing emerges in a new way following Malick's return to Hollywood, where a combination of factors spur the emergence of a radical Emersonian practice of cinematic receptivity. I draw on oral histories, and the film itself, (...) to demonstrate how Malick's creative process consistently tends towards an ethos of poverty. To further pattern and illuminate the ecological stakes of this Emersonian stance, I draw on the complementary framework of second-order systems theory, and in particular, on Niklas Luhmann's concept of simultaneity. In so doing, I outline the layered nature of Malick's cinematic praxis – a doubled Emersonian receptivity which not only invites defamiliarizing depictions of warfare and the nonhuman, but also welcomes, and toys with, the otherness haunting technical images and human cognition. As such, The Thin Red Line, and its immediate counterparts, perform the ecological work of reframing the conditions of wonder, asking us to marvel not at what we have seen, but what we haven’t. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 121-131, April 2022. The aim of this article is to explore how some aspects of Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of individuation may contribute to outlining a posthumanist theory of emotions. According to Simondon, the relation between affection and emotion is a key case study for examining the transindividual character of psychosocial individuation. Affection and emotion appear to him not as a binary opposition, but as an example of a transductive operation. The article suggests the (...) concept of ‘transindividual affect’ as a way of challenging some key dualisms. From this perspective, Simondon can contribute to a redefinition of the human from the non-dualistic and non-anthropocentric perspective that characterises critical posthumanism. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) presents a sustained reflection on a concept of ‘the animal’ that has underpinned the work of much of the philosophical tradition. Based on a series of lectures originally presented in 1997 Derrida's speculation on the question of the animal was thus written at a time when Derrida's thought was often turned to the motif of ‘to-come’ (see Derrida 1992; 1994) such that one may wonder at the apparent evasion, both in Derrida's (...) text and in its subsequent review, of the chance to think the two themes together, in the guise of ‘the animal-to-come’. Picking up on Derrida's asides on the verb ‘to follow’, this discussion considers what it might mean to follow, ‘methodically’ perhaps, the thought of ‘the animal-to-come’? What problems might it help to bring into focus and what forces and lineages may yet bear upon its very thought? And where in our thinking goes the animal if it is to remain always to come? (shrink)

This conceptual paper explores the theoretical possibilities of posthumanism and presents ecologies of repair as a heuristic device to explore the association modes of different entities, which, when confronted with the effects of human-induced destructive events, seek to repair the damage and transform the conditions of coexistence of various life forms. The central idea is that severe socio-environmental crisis caused by an intensification of industrial activity are conducive to observing new sociomaterial configurations and affective dispositions that, through the reorganization of (...) practices of resistance, remediation, and mutual care, are oriented to generating reparative and/or transformative processes from damaged ecologies and communities. Crises constitute true ontological experimentation processes where the presence of other-than-human natures, and of artifacts or devices that participate in reparative actions, become visible. A post-human approach to nature allows us to use languages and methodologies that do not restrict the emergence of assemblages under the assumption of theira prioriontological separation, but rather examine their reparative potential based on the efficacy of situated relationships. Methodologically, transdisciplinarity is relevant, with ethnography and other engaged methods applied over units of observation and experience called socio-geo-ecologies. The relevant attributes of these socio-geo-ecologies, beyond the individual, community, or institutional aspects, are the specific geological characteristics that make possible an entanglement of interdependent relationships between human and non-human agents. The conceptual analysis is illustrated with empirical examples stemming from socio-geo-ecologies researched in Southern Chile. (shrink)

This paper situates Günther Anders’s diagnosis of a shift in the modes of human self-production from hermeneutic and educational practices to techno-scientific interventions in the broader context of observations concerning posthumanism and biopolitics. It proposes to reframe the problem of human self-production within the philosophy of media and traces a common anti-hermeneutic trajectory to which both technoscientific transhumanism and certain strands of posthumanism belong, insofar as they are based on an ontology that exclusively considers causally effective agency. With Anders and (...) Martin Heidegger it is argued that such a focus on agency neglects the dimension of meaning that irreducibly guides technoscientific interventions. The paper claims that, with regard to the escalating dynamics both of human enhancement and of the Anthropocene, neither a truly critical theoretical stance nor a practical subversion is possible without taking the horizons of meaning into account that drive these dynamics. The last section sketches an outline of the complex interrelations of humans, technologies and meaning that cannot be mapped in terms of causally effective agency. (shrink)

The large-scale, intensive production of meat and other animal products, also known as the animal-industrial complex, is our largest food system in terms of global land use and contribution to environmental degradation. Despite the environmental impact of the meat industry, in much of the policy literature on climate and environmental change, sustainability and food security, meat continues to be included as part of a sustainable food future. In this paper, I present outcomes of a discourse analysis undertaken on a selection (...) of key major international and Australian reports. After highlighting common themes in the ways that meat and animals are discussed, I draw on the animal studies literature to critically analyse the assumptions underpinning such policy documents. My analysis illustrates that animals are effectively de-animated and rendered invisible in these bodies of literature by being either aggregated—as livestock, units of production and resources, or materialised—as meat and protein. These discursive frames reflect implicit understandings of meat as necessary to human survival and animals as a natural human resource. A critical examination of these understandings illustrates their dual capacity to normalise and encourage the continuation of activities known to be seriously harming the environment, climate and human health, while at the same time obstructing and even denigrating alternative, less harmful approaches to food. In response, I offer some conceptual and analytical modifications that can be easily adopted by researchers on climate change, sustainability and food security with the aim of challenging dominant discourses on meat and animals. (shrink)

In his exploration of Milan Kundera’s work, Jason Wirth inquires into the “borderlands” between philosophy and the novel. In this essay, I write as a novelist whose work is rooted in philosophy. I am thereby accepting the open invitation extended by Wirth’s book: an invitation to deepen the fertile conversation between philosophy and literature.

Humanist ideas in education have been promoted by both Western thinkers and classical wisdom texts of Asia. Exploring this connection, I examine the educational philosophy of an iconic ancient Tamil text, the Thiruvalluvar Kural, by juxtaposing it with a contemporary humanist classic, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As this comparative study reveals, both texts offer humanist visions of relevance to education, politics, and society. Notably, however, the Kural takes what might be described as a more mainstream humanist stance vis-à-vis (...) Freire’s radical humanist approach. Nevertheless, both educational philosophies share a common humanist bond representing important breakthroughs within their own given contexts. More specifically, the Kural supports a shift in consciousness and social practices away from caste rigidity, superstition, and pre-humanist beliefs while Freire championed transitioning from rigid, top-down and alienating educational delivery models and economic systems to learning processes and societies that are more democratized, dialogic and egalitarian. (shrink)

In times of current crisis, the voices of women are needed more than ever. The accumulation of war and environmental catastrophes teaches us that exploitation of people and nature through violent appropriation and enrichment for the sake of short-term self-interest exacts its price. This book presents contributions on the currently most relevant and most urgent issues: reshaping the economy, environmental problems, technology and the re-reading of history from the non-western and western tradition. With an outlook into the problems of class, (...) race and gender in its intersectional framing, the collection offers a unique overview of current research in these fields and contributes to the renewal and contemporary presentation of feminist thought from partly concrete perspectives with regard to factual issues. (shrink)

This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of the (...) human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation.The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts, and heritage studies, the articles contribute to the four thematic idioms of this issue in an attempt to structure a dialogical space on posthumanist perspectives on affect and on affect-based politics. Questions of environmental governance, the critique of speciesism, the formation of cross-species solidarity, the politics of the “inhuman”, biopolitics and necropolitics form the intellectual mosaic of this issue. Finally, we pose the question of “academic affects”, in circulation in the researcher's encounter with her others – humans, insects, ghostly presences or inanimate objects – and we ask how these affects, including anger and mourning, but also joyful affirmation, are brought to bear on the process of writing. (shrink)

The basic thesis of this paper is that communication is a fundamental activity of all human practices and that identity is constructed with the help of communication. Defining identity cannot be explained and understood exclusively from the standpoint of philosophy, sociology, political science or psychology. Given that the Latin root of the word communication, communio, refers to community, we can say that communication as a science best covers the relationships that people establish within the community such as schools, families, work (...) environment, social networks and forums. The activity of communication is the establishment of a community, i.e., sociability. To communicate means to unite something - to bring one?s actions into harmony with the community and with social life. In that sense, communication is in its essence a transition from the individual to the collective. In addition, any specific form of communication depends on the wider cultural and socio-political environment in which modern people operate. This paper aims to explore the impact of technology on individual identity, to answer questions about whether robots can have the same characteristics as personalities, and whether, and in what way, machines have an impact on people. The reason for asking such questions is the decision of the Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament to pass a law that will grant autonomous robots the status of?electronic personalities?. (shrink)

Traditional Chinese Medicine is often considered an “experiential medicine.” As such, it is seen as in need of conceptual elevation by scientific experiments and theorization, which actualize and undermine scientized forms of TCM. This essay argues that the predicaments of TCM are thoroughly modern and must be understood within the “Modern Constitution” in which the production and proliferation of asymmetries are both constitutive of and obscured by modern knowledge production. This essay dislodges these asymmetries through transdisciplinary engagements with TCM. This (...) transdisciplinary approach, as I will show, allows us to animate the experiential in order to unsettle the relations between the empirical and the conceptual, the concrete and the abstract, and the contingent and the universal. Most importantly, it enables reconsiderations of the experiential and the empirical as conditions for thinking, doing, and being that insist on immanence, move analogously, and travel sideways. Thus, rather than wanting conceptual uplifting, TCM as an experiential medicine could not only work as a critique of the Modern Constitution but also force a conceptual disruption from within by insisting on the empirical as conceptual. (shrink)

This response article argues that the question of “extrahuman relations” obtains on not just one level but two. It is not just a question of our relations to nonhuman forms of life—such as, for example, the embodiment and finitude we share with other beings. It's also a question of a second form of finitude that obtains in our prosthetic subjection to any semiotic system whatsoever that makes possible “our” concepts, “our” recognition and articulation of our “nonhuman relations” in the first (...) place. By examining the bird poems of Wallace Stevens, I demonstrate that with the question of extrahuman relations we are always talking, in other words, not about a thematics but about a technics of address. (shrink)

Whilst the concept of the subject has been called into question by many diverse approaches within contemporary political and social theory, there remains a focus upon agency, now attributable to reformulated subjectivities or assemblages. I query the persistence of this grammar of agency and ask whether politics can do without a ‘scene of the subject’. Spinoza’s philosophy, in particular, his conception of conatus, has inspired and offered some basis for rethinking agency. I examine two such prominent positions and argue that (...) ultimately neither captures the political promise of Spinoza’s philosophy. Configuring a concept of morphology to analyse this scene, my argument detaches the conatus from a narrow focus upon human desire, and focuses attention upon the scene of the subject as it folded into a wider complex body. My approach also returns a study of power to the discussion: the conatus is the power to persist, but it is also a differential force and site of conflict. By placing the spotlight on the scene of subjectivity in this way, the contemporary political theorist avoids the false antinomy between agency and structure, whilst continuing to track the production and composition of subjectivity in new political forms. (shrink)

The thrust of the argument presented in this paper is that phenomenological ontology survives the criticism of “correlationism” as advanced by speculative realism, a movement that has evolved in continental philosophy over the past decade. Correlationism is the position, allegedly occupied by phenomenology, that presupposes the ontological primacy of the human subject. Phenomenology survives this criticism not because the criticism misses its mark, but because phenomenology occupies a position that is broader than that of correlationism. With its critique of correlationism, (...) speculative realism rightly identifies a battle that no longer needs to be fought: the battle against 19th century brands of mechanical realism. Free from the impatient and defensive posturing against the mechanization of the human, phenomenology is also free to explore the world beyond its emphasis on human experience. Doing so requires a return to Husserl's discussion of hylé and the “twofold bed” of phenomenology. Phenomenology may emphasize hylé – that is, material; or it may emphasize nous – the world as it appears to or is transformed by consciousness. By returning to Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, a case is made for hyletic phenomenology. Hyletic phenomenology allows for ontological reversibility and recognizes the “unhuman” elements in things. It is hyletic phenomenology that grounds phenomenological ontology after the critique of correlationism has been assessed. (shrink)

This commentary is an attempt to rethink the ethics of taking care in posthumanist times. It is an effort to combine ethics, posthumanism and psychological theories. I examine how the psychological notion of long-term well-being can serve as an ethical yardstick and how it can be relevant to non-humans.

This essay defines and critiques ‘methodocentrism’, the belief that predetermined research methods are the determining factor in the validity and importance of educational research. By examining research in science studies and posthumanism, the authors explain how this methodocentrism disenables research from taking account of problems and non-human actants that are presumed to be of no importance or value in existing social science research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative. Building from a critique of these methods as profoundly anthropocentric, the authors examine (...) three crucial problematics in which methodocentrism functions in educational research: the institutionalization of graduate training, a wide-spread privileging of the visual, and the seeming necessity of ‘data’ in social scientific research methodologies. Ultimately, this article does not reject the necessity of particular studies having methods—rigorous, philosophically grounded approaches to problems in the world—but it argues that the belief that methods must be selected from existing options and assembled before approaching the ‘objects’ of study is not only a form of bad science, it is also deeply implicated in anthropocentric and colonialist politics. Instead, what research requires today is a thorough rethinking of the very distinction between subject and object and a renewed questioning of how agency functions in specific research settings. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJacques Lacan studied Chinese classics and received much inspiration from Zhuangzi. This paper concentrates on the comparative study of morality in those two thinkers from three connecting levels, namely, nature as the source of ethical codes, reason as the means to arrive at the ethical state, and pleasure as the ultimate purpose of morality. The investigation into the topic is enlightening for posthuman morality. Zhuangzi’s idea of the poetics of oneness inspires the Lacanian concept of the Real and ushers us (...) into a new territory to rethink animal rights. (shrink)

This article argues for an alternative interpretation of the happy fish scene in The Zhuangzi: the fish are not happy. The fish undergo an unpleasant experience while the philosophers debate animatedly over the joy of the fish. The dramatization of the fish scene compels us to contemplate anthropocentrism and species communication. Moreover, the contrast between the fish-bird becoming and the subsequent human narrations reinforces the anthropocentric usurpation of nonhuman agency. To get away from anthropocentrism, Zhuangzi proposes a posthumanist approach to (...) deal with species communication in three interconnected stages: to acknowledge the limits of human cognition, to forget anthropocentric prejudice, and to de-obscure childlike innocence. (shrink)

Both current and past analyses and critiques of transhumanist and posthumanist theories have had a propensity to cite the Greek myth of Prometheus as a paradigmatic figure. Although stark differences exist amongst the token forms of posthumanist theories and transhumanism, both theoretical domains claim promethean theory as their own. There are numerous definitions of those two concepts: therefore, this article focuses on posthumanism thought. By first analyzing the appropriation of the myth in posthumanism, we show how the myth fails to (...) be foundational and how we need to rethink the posthumanist mythological framework. We then introduce Haldane’s Daedalus figure as a fruitful analogy to understand the demiurgic posture that critics mean to unveil by first using Prometheus. Daedalus embodies the artisan role, whose status as an inventor for the mighty preserves from the gods' direct opprobrium. Thereafter, we introduce the Camusian Myth of Sisyphus as a competing analogy that ultimately serves as a myth better suited to address the posthumanist position on an existential standpoint. we ultimately show that Sisyphus, as the ‘absurd man’ that Camus claims him to be, is himself the posthuman, thus serving as a more ideal foundational myth for posthumanism and preserving the importance of narrative in posthuman discourses. To conclude, we specifically show that the concept of Sisyphus as a posthuman icon has significance that reaches beyond narrative value to current ecological debates in posthumanism. (shrink)

‘Tympaniser’, Alan Bass tells us, is an ‘archaic verb meaning to ridicule publicly’ or to decry. In the essay fronting Margins of Philosophy called ‘Tympan’ Derrida decries the philosophy that would own its limits, absorbing ‘the margin of its own volume’. While it is Derrida’s late work on the ‘animal question’ that has brought his insistence on the nourishment of the limits between species as limitrophy to wider attention, it is also named as the general condition of the interface of (...) the limits in the much earlier text, ‘Tympan.’ There, in dislocating the tympanum, the margins of philosophy are eaten. Equally, given the rhythmic address of the tympanum, we might say that the margins of philosophy are beaten. Struggling within the strictures of a small town amateur dramatic rehearsal, Selma, the lead protagonist in Dancer in the Dark, makes a plea for more rhythm. But there is no license for tap-dancing in The Sound of Music. This chapter considers Dancer’s persistent play on rhythmic sounds as that which trip Selma’s fantasy song and dance numbers as a ‘tympanising’ of the limits, notably of the limits of the law in both juridical and symbolic senses, as they also work the edges of the film’s two styles. In a provocative analysis of this film, Cary Wolfe suggests that we might understand Selma’s vocal style as a refusal of the phallic imposition of language, and that her virtually suicidal submission to the death sentence construed as a Lacanian ‘feminine’ act, allow for a notion of a ‘posthuman feminine’. ‘Tympan Alley’ redirects Wolfe’s tantalising term ‘posthuman feminine’ through a more consistently Derridean line of thought. It draws on Derrida’s late work on the animal, in which it is polemically clear that deconstruction has never been confined to the signifier nor to the human, and sounds out the implications of his early work on b/eating the limits through Selma’s percussive ear. (shrink)

This is the second article in a series of review articles addressing biosemiotic terminology. The biosemiotic glossary project is designed to integrate views of members within the biosemiotic community based on a standard survey and related publications. The methodology section describes the format of the survey conducted July–August 2014 in preparation of the current review and targeted on Jakob von Uexküll’s term ‘Umwelt’. Next, we summarize denotation, synonyms and antonyms, with special emphasis on the denotation of this term in current (...) biosemiotic usage. The survey findings include ratings of eight citations defining or making use of the term Umwelt. We provide a summary of respondents’ own definitions and suggested term usage. Further sections address etymology, relevant contexts of use, and related terms in English and other languages. A section on the notion’s Uexküllian meaning and later biosemiotic meaning is followed by attempt at synthesis and conclusion. We conclude that the Umwelt is a centerpiece phenomenon, a phenomenon that other phenomena in the living realm are organized around. To sum up Uexküll’s view, we can characterize an Umwelt as the subjective world of an organism, enveloping a perceptual world and an effector world, which is always part of the organism itself and a key component of nature, which is held together by functional cycles connecting different Umwelten. In order to pay respect to Uexküll’s work, we must move from notion to model, from mention of Uexküll’s Umwelt term to actual application of it. (shrink)

In the second half of the twentieth century, humanism— namely, the worldview that underpinned Western thought for several centuries—has been severely critiqued by philosophers who highlighted its theoretical and ethical limitations. Inspired by the emergence of cybernetics and new technologies such as robotics, prosthetics, communications, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology, there has been a desire to articulate a new worldview that will fit the posthuman condition. Posthumanism is a description of a new form of human existence in which the (...) boundaries between humans and nature and humans and machines are blurred, as well as a prescription for an ideal situation in which the limitations of human biology are transcended, replaced by machines. The transition from the human condition to the posthuman condition will be facilitated by transhumanism, the project of human enhancement that will ultimately yield the transformation of the human species from the human to the posthuman. As an intellectual movement, transhumanism is still very small, but transhumanist ideas exert deep and broad influence on contemporary culture and society. This essay highlights the religious dimension of transhumanism and argues that it should be seen as a secularist faith: transhumanism secularizes traditional religious themes, concerns, and goals, while endowing technology with religious significance. Science‐Religion Studies is the most appropriate context to explore the cultural significance of transhumanism. (shrink)

Acknowledging the power of the id-drives, Freud held on to the authority of reason as the ego’s best tool to control instinctual desire. He thereby placed analytic reason at the foundation of his own ambivalent social theory, which, on the one hand, held utopian promise based upon psychoanalytic insight, and, on the other hand, despaired of reason’s capacity to control the self-destructive elements of the psyche. Moving beyond the recourse of sublimation, post-Freudians attacked reason’s hegemony in quelling disruptive psycho-dynamics and, (...) focusing upon the social domain, they sought strategies to counter the oppressive (repressive) social restrictions and conformist impositions impeding individual freedom that result from thwarted desire. Postmodern celebration of desire at the expense of reason and sublimation leaves the Enlightenment prospects altogether and moves psychoanalysis into a new terrain, where the very notion of rationality and an autonomous ego upon which much of Freudianism rests has been deconstructed. Thus the debate that begins with Freud’s social theories reflects the deeper divisions, which arose with postmodern ethics and discarded Cartesian–Kantian notions of personal identity. Here we consider the moral framework in which Freudian social theory sits and a contrasting understanding of agency that confronts his modernist conception. In that debate, we discern the larger humanist confrontation with postmodernity. Yet, all who engaged Freud shared some version of his utopian ethos, albeit radically restructuring the theory upon which social reform might occur. (shrink)

Today’s technological-scientific prospect of posthumanity simultaneously evokes and defies historical understanding. On the one hand, it implies a historical claim of an epochal transformation concerning posthumanity as a new era. On the other, by postulating the birth of a novel, better-than-human subject for this new era, it eliminates the human subject of modern Western historical understanding. In this article, I attempt to understand posthumanity as measured against the story of humanity as the story of history itself. I examine the fate (...) of humanity as the central subject of history in three consecutive steps: first, by exploring how classical philosophies of history achieved the integrity of the greatest historical narrative of history itself through the very invention of humanity as its subject; second, by recounting how this central subject came under heavy criticism by postcolonial and gender studies in the last half-century, targeting the universalism of the story of humanity as the greatest historical narrative of history; and third, by conceptualizing the challenge of posthumanity against both the story of humanity and its criticism. Whereas criticism fragmented history but retained the possibility of smaller-scale narratives, posthumanity does not doubt the feasibility of the story of humanity. Instead, it necessarily invokes humanity, if only in order to be able to claim its supersession by a better-than-human subject. In that, it represents a fundamental challenge to the modern Western historical condition and the very possibility of historical narratives – small-scale or large-scale, fragmented or universal. (shrink)

This article engages with the question of who our neighbour is, linked to the imperative of love thy neighbour, with the aim of a broadened understanding of who should be seen as a neighbour on an ontological level. First, drawing on posthumanistic theory and its critique of human anthropocentrism, as well as ascribing subjectivity and agency outside the human sphere, it seeks to put it into relation with contemporary theological work. Secondly, it brings together the interconnectedness and interdependency argued by (...) posthumanism and its link with the climate crisis the world faces. Drawing on Hans Jonas’s ethics of responsibility and Sallie McFague’s kenotic theology, it argues for a responsibility to be taken by humanity through decentralization, as proposed by posthumanism. Finally, it argues for an expanded understanding of the neighbour in the context of all creation, where love should be directed to all beings. (shrink)

Posthuman affirmative ethics relies upon a fluid, nomadic conception of the ethical subject who develops affective, material and immaterial connections to multiple others. Our purpose in this paper is to consider what posthuman affirmative business ethics would look like, and to reflect on the shift in thinking and practice this would involve. The need for a revised understanding of human–animal relations in business ethics is amplified by crises such as climate change and pandemics that are related to ecologically destructive business (...) practices such as factory farming. In this analysis, we use feminist speculative fiction as a resource for reimagination and posthuman ethical thinking. By focusing on three ethical movements experienced by a central character named Toby in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, we show how she is continually becoming through affective, embodied encounters with human and nonhuman others. In the discussion, we consider the vulnerability that arises from openness to affect which engenders heightened response-ability to and with, rather than for, multiple others. This expanded concept of subjectivity enables a more relational understanding of equality that is urgently needed in order to respond affirmatively to posthuman futures. (shrink)

There is renewed interest in questions of ontology in various fields, as there has been in biosemiotics. But for umwelt theory, ontology needs to be approached in particular ways, in order to avoid it from being yet another “philosophy of access”, part and parcel of the epistemology-ontology dyad, where “ontology” is the leftover of epistemology, or any sort of subjective constitution of things. The article engages in philosophical considerations about what kinds of assumptions and preliminary considerations should be made for (...) a semiosic ontology that was multiple, relational, and irreducible, with the principle goal being to engage with some terminological issues at the meeting point of ontology and umwelt theory. Ontography is proposed as a name for a low-key descriptive engagement with non-human umwelts considered as “worldings”, and maieutics as a particular attitude, or ethos, for the practical situation of direct inaccessibility of nonhuman umwelts. Parallels are drawn with the ontological turn in anthropology, which has also successfully engaged with alterity. A comparative study of umwelts should consider the ontological self-determination of the nonhuman other. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of the main philosophical roots of Donna Haraway’s thinking, an issue she rarely discusses and which is frequently ignored in the literature, but which will allow us to not only better understand her thinking, but also locate it within the philosophical tradition. In particular, it suggests that Haraway’s thinking emanates from a Cartesian and Heideggerian heritage whereby it, implicitly, emanates from Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysical anthropocentrism to critique the divisions between human, (...) animal, and machine that Descartes insists upon in his Discourse on Method. While suggesting that Haraway is, implicitly, influenced by Heidegger’s critique of the binary logic constitutive of Descartes’ anthropocentrism, I first argue that her support for Jacques Derrida’s, Bruno Latour’s, and Giorgio Agamben’s critical readings of Heidegger lead her to jettison Heidegger’s suggestion that overcoming this logic requires a re-questioning of the meaning of being to, instead, develop an immersed, entwined ontology that aims to call into question the fundamental divisions underpinning Cartesian-inspired anthropocentrism, before, second, concluding by offering a Heideggerian critique of Haraway’s thinking. (shrink)

While Jacques Derrida’s influence on posthumanist theory is well established in the literature, given Martin Heidegger’s influence on Derrida, it is surprising to find that Heidegger’s relationship to posthumanist theory has been largely ignored. This article starts to fill this lacuna by showing that Heidegger’s writings not only influences but also has much to teach posthumanism, especially regarding the relationship between humanism and posthumanism. By first engaging with Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics and related critique of anthropocentrism, I show that, while (...) rejecting Heidegger’s conclusions for being too humanist, posthumanism shares, and indeed is largely unreflectively defined by, Heidegger’s critique of the binary logic underpinning anthropocentric humanism. With this, posthumanism aims to go beyond Heidegger by overcoming all forms of humanist understanding, an attempt that brings us back to the relationship between humanism and posthumanism and Heidegger’s notion of trace. With this, I not only show that Heidegger influences posthumanism through his destruction of metaphysics, critique of anthropocentrism and notion of trace, but also point towards an understanding of posthumanism that distinguishes it from humanism and transhumanism. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophically informed survey of transhumanism and ‘posthumanism(s)’ on education. It has two primary aims: (1) bringing clarity to the widespread confusion surrounding even the most basic theoretical contents and terminology of transhumanism (TH) and ‘critical posthumanism’ (CPH), the two dominant forms of posthumanism in academic and popular discourse, and (2) descriptively surveying the discourses of TH and CPH on education. The first section contains description of TH’s and CPH’s basic theoretical contents, brief histories of TH and (...) CPH, and a proposal for sorely needed standard terminology. The second section surveys the TH and CPH literature on education, emphasizing the way education typically is technologized by THs and politicized by CPHs. The conclusion considers possibilities for alternative forms of ‘posthumanism.’. (shrink)

This paper examines the challenges to critical realism posed by the ways in which the original postmodern sensibility has transformed into various forms of anti-humanism, trans-humanism, and post-humanism. These transformations, largely growing out of poststructuralism, are reinforced by developments in psychology and computer science but also incorporate a new turn toward ontology in alternate forms of realism such as Object-Oriented-Ontology. This paper identifies what is new and what is old in these trends and argues that, while there is something to (...) be learned from them, some of which implicitly and even explicitly borrow from CR, the humanist orientation of CR continues to deserve defense. (shrink)