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| posthumanism | |
|---|---|
| Name | posthumanism |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Main influences | Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Thomas Kuhn, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard |
posthumanism Posthumanism is a set of philosophical and cultural positions that reexamine human centrality in relation to technology, nonhuman life, and material systems. It engages with scientific practices, literary narratives, and political movements to propose alternatives to anthropocentrism and traditional humanist paradigms. Scholars and practitioners draw on diverse traditions to interrogate the boundaries of personhood, agency, and embodiment in the Anthropocene and information age.
Posthumanism encompasses debates over human identity vis-à-vis Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Gregor Mendel, James Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, Craig Venter, Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Marvin Minsky, Herbert A. Simon, Norbert Wiener, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Joseph Weizenbaum, Sherry Turkle, Hans Moravec, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Warwick, Aubrey de Grey, David Chalmers, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Thomas Metzinger, Susan Blackmore, Andy Clark, Mark P. Mills, Amartya Sen, Peter Singer, Judith Butler, Sally Haslanger, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway. It intersects with debates addressed in institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of Oxford, Harvard University, University of Cambridge, California Institute of Technology, Max Planck Society, Salk Institute, SRI International, RAND Corporation, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Apple Inc., Microsoft Research, IBM Research, NASA, European Space Agency, DARPA and Human Genome Project. The scope covers identity, embodiment, cognition, and agency as these relate to technologies like brain–computer interfaces, synthetic biology, and machine learning, alongside cultural texts from novelists, filmmakers, and artists.
The intellectual lineage traces from debates surrounding evolution and industrial modernity with figures such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber through 20th-century continental theorists including Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century developments were catalyzed by scientific milestones associated with Atlas Corporation, Manhattan Project, Human Genome Project, Sputnik 1, Apollo 11, CRISPR-Cas9 research tied to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, and computing advances from ENIAC to IBM Watson and AlphaGo. Intellectual networks centered on conferences and journals linked to Society for Neuroscience, Association for Computing Machinery, American Philosophical Association, Modern Language Association, Society for the History of Technology, Biennale di Venezia, Sundance Film Festival and academic presses at Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. Social movements and political events such as Club of Rome, Earth Summit (1992), Paris Agreement, Occupy Wall Street and policy debates in bodies like United Nations influenced public reception.
Variants include transhumanist-aligned positions associated with thinkers and proponents such as Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Aubrey de Grey, Max More, Natasha Vita-More; critical posthumanism influenced by Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Vandana Shiva, Anna Tsing and Rosi Braidotti; and techno-skeptical or anti-humanist strains drawing on Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno. Each variant engages with different institutional and intellectual networks including Future of Humanity Institute, Singularity Institute, Leverhulme Trust, Wellcome Trust, Rockefeller Foundation, National Science Foundation, European Research Council and university centers such as the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and Oxford Internet Institute.
Posthumanist inquiry examines intersections with technologies and sciences produced by teams and organizations like CRISPR Therapeutics, Illumina, Genentech, Pfizer, Moderna, Alphabet Inc., Facebook (Meta Platforms), Twitter (X), Tesla, Inc., SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boston Dynamics, NVIDIA, ARM Holdings, Hyperloop TT, Siemens, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, MIT Media Lab, Imperial College London, Johns Hopkins University and Karolinska Institutet. Topics include neural implants inspired by research at University of California, San Francisco, Neuralink, and Brown University; synthetic organisms in laboratories linked to J. Craig Venter Institute; artificial intelligence advances from DeepMind, OpenAI and IBM Research; and ecological-technological assemblages addressed by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Convention on Biological Diversity and UNESCO forums.
Cultural manifestations appear in novels, films, and visual arts by creators and institutions including Mary Shelley, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Octavia E. Butler, Iain M. Banks, Hideo Kojima, Ridley Scott, Denis Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan, Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron, Wes Anderson, Guillermo del Toro, Hayao Miyazaki, Village Voice, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Atlantic, BBC, HBO, Netflix, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Serpentine Gallery, Biennale di Venezia, Documenta, Sundance Film Festival and South by Southwest. Artists and composers such as Nam June Paik, Marina Abramović, Olafur Eliasson, Ryoji Ikeda, Laurie Anderson, Trevor Paglen and Diller Scofidio + Renfro explore embodiment, cyborg identities, and machine aesthetics.
Ethical and political debates involve policymakers, ethicists, and NGOs including World Health Organization, European Commission, United States Congress, Council of Europe, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, OpenAI Ethics Board, Future of Life Institute, Center for Humane Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, Nuffield Council on Bioethics, Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and national academies such as National Academy of Sciences and Royal Society. Issues include rights frameworks influenced by jurisprudence at International Court of Justice, regulatory efforts like the General Data Protection Regulation, and public policy shaped by debates in United States Senate, European Parliament and national legislatures about augmentation, surveillance, and environmental responsibilities.
Critiques come from voices associated with academic and activist networks including Judith Butler, Sally Haslanger, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Amartya Sen, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Vandana Shiva, Spike Lee, Cornel West, Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, Eric Hobsbawm and institutions such as International Labour Organization and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Concerns focus on inequality tied to corporate actors like Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Amazon (company), Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms, Inc., epistemic injustice, colonial continuities, and risks identified by advisory bodies such as Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Debates continue over governance, consent, distributive justice, and the societal consequences of decentering human exceptionalism.