› › Beyond Posthumanism

Beyond Posthumanism

Author : Alexander Mathäs

Publisher : Berghahn Books

Page : 314 pages

File Size : 34,4 MB

Release : 2020-02-03

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 1789205638

Get eBook

Book Description

Kant, Goethe, Schiller and other eighteenth-century German intellectuals loom large in the history of the humanities—both in terms of their individual achievements and their collective embodiment of the values that inform modern humanistic inquiry. Taking full account of the manifold challenges that the humanities face today, this volume recasts the question of their viability by tracing their long-disputed premises in German literature and philosophy. Through insightful analyses of key texts, Alexander Mathäs mounts a broad defense of the humanistic tradition, emphasizing its pursuit of a universal ethics and ability to render human experiences comprehensible through literary imagination.



Beyond Posthumanism

Author : Alexander Mathäs

Publisher : Berghahn Books

Page : 314 pages

File Size : 42,87 MB

Release : 2020-02-03

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 1789205646

Get eBook

Book Description

Kant, Goethe, Schiller and other eighteenth-century German intellectuals loom large in the history of the humanities—both in terms of their individual achievements and their collective embodiment of the values that inform modern humanistic inquiry. Taking full account of the manifold challenges that the humanities face today, this volume recasts the question of their viability by tracing their long-disputed premises in German literature and philosophy. Through insightful analyses of key texts, Alexander Mathäs mounts a broad defense of the humanistic tradition, emphasizing its pursuit of a universal ethics and ability to render human experiences comprehensible through literary imagination.



What is Posthumanism?

Author : Cary Wolfe

Publisher : U of Minnesota Press

Page : 394 pages

File Size : 39,37 MB

Release : 2010

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 0816666148

Get eBook

Book Description

What does it mean to think beyond humanism? Is it possible to craft a mode of philosophy, ethics, and interpretation that rejects the classic humanist divisions of self and other, mind and body, society and nature, human and animal, organic and technological? Can a new kind of humanities-posthumanities-respond to the redefinition of humanity's place in the world by both the technological and the biological or "green" continuum in which the "human" is but one life form among many? Exploring how both critical thought along with cultural practice have reacted to this radical repositioning, Cary Wolfe-one of the founding figures in the field of animal studies and posthumanist theory-ranges across bioethics, cognitive science, animal ethics, gender, and disability to develop a theoretical and philosophical approach responsive to our changing understanding of ourselves and our world. Then, in performing posthumanist readings of such diverse works as Temple Grandin's writings, Wallace Stevens's poetry, Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, the architecture of Diller+Scofidio, and David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he shows how this philosophical sensibility can transform art and culture. For Wolfe, a vibrant, rigorous posthumanism is vital for addressing questions of ethics and justice, language and trans-species communication, social systems and their inclusions and exclusions, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity. In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality. In doing so, Wolfe reveals that it is humanism, not the human in all its embodied and prosthetic complexity, that is left behind in posthumanist thought.



Beyond anthropocentrism

Author : Roberto Marchesini

Publisher : Mimesis

Page : 103 pages

File Size : 41,19 MB

Release : 2019-01-18T00:00:00+01:00

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 8869772063

Get eBook

Book Description

Roberto Marchesini presents a timely proposal within post-human philosophy in order to overcome the centuries-long separation between human beings, non-human animals and technology. This book highlights the inspiring nature of the relationship with non-human beings – what Marchesini calls “Epiphany” – and how its enhancement can open new existential dimensions. Technology is also reinterpreted, no longer as a performative tool, but as a virus that infiltrates the human dimension and changes its predicates. Technopoietic events are not just the product of human intelligence, but they arise from an epiphany (a becoming alterity), thus positioning technology well within the ontological and somatic dimension of human beings. This book lays the foundations for a new and non-anthropocentric Humanism, which is able to recognize the essential role that non-human alterities have had throughout our history.



Posthumous Life

Author : Jami Weinstein

Publisher : Columbia University Press

Page : 540 pages

File Size : 20,83 MB

Release : 2017-03-28

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 0231544324

Get eBook

Book Description

Posthumous Life launches critical life studies: a mode of inquiry that neither endorses nor dismisses a wave of recent "turns" toward life, matter, vitality, inhumanity, animality, and the real. Questioning the nature and limits of life in the natural sciences, the essays in this volume examine the boundaries and significance of the human and the humanities in the wake of various redefinitions of what counts as life. They explore the possibility of theorizing life without assuming it to be either a simple substrate or an always-mediated effect of culture and difference. Posthumous Life provides new ways of thinking about animals, plants, humans, difference, sexuality, race, gender, identity, the earth, and the future.



Posthuman Studies Reader

Author : Evi D. Sampanikou

Publisher : Schwabe Verlag (Basel)

Page : 336 pages

File Size : 26,89 MB

Release : 2021-04-20

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 3796543189

Get eBook

Book Description

The new reader presents an up-to-date collection of seminal texts dedicated to all branches of debates on Posthuman Studies: Transhumanism, Critical Posthumanism and Metahumanism. It includes classical as well as cutting-edge contributions to these debates. The Posthuman Studies Reader is an indispensable resource for studying as well as teaching key concepts, central claims and main arguments of contemporary debates in the field of Posthuman Studies. The reader includes texts by: Neil Badmington, Karen Barad, Nick Bostrom, Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Jaime del Val, FM-2030, Francis Fukuyama, Elaine Graham, Donna Haraway, Ihab Habib Hassan, N. Katherine Hayles, James Hughes, Julian Huxley, Brian Massumi, Max More, David Pearce, Anders Sandberg, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Stelarc, Natasha Vita-More and Cary Wolfe. "This Reader is a perfect guide to get into bleeding-edge philosophy."Nicolás Rojas Cortés, Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, University of Chile "The Reader can be used not only as a textbook in higher education, but also by all researchers and students in these fields as reference. [...] I highly recommend it to everyone who is interested in these movements and those works from which excerpts are included in it."Yunus Tuncel, The New School, New York "Since Sorgner, Sampanikou, Stasienko and their colleagues, almost singlehandedly, are crafting and advancing this discipline through its forming stages, when they publish a book with handpicked canonic texts, it should be treated as a landmark."Carmel Vaisman, The Cohn Institute and The Multidisciplinary Program in the Humanities, Tel Aviv University "What makes the Posthuman Studies Reader interesting and exciting is the facility to have in one volume the basic ideas and essentials of transhumanism, critical posthumanism and metahumanism. The reader provides in a condensed version an introduction to posthuman studies for both academic and nonacademic audiences."Leo Igwe, Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town "The Posthuman Studies Reader serves as a comprehensive guide and/or manual of an evolving and expanding Post/Trans/Meta Humanism discourse. [...] because of the clarity of organization by the editors and the highest scholarship of the writers, the collection was able to drive the interest of readers a notch or two higher."Joseph Reylan B. Viray, Polytechnic University of the Philippines



Post- and Transhumanism

Author : Robert Ranisch

Publisher : Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften

Page : 0 pages

File Size : 21,48 MB

Release : 2014

Category : Humanism

ISBN : 9783631606629

Get eBook

Book Description

Post- and Transhumanism are being introduced with respect to foundational questions, utopian issues, normative and evaluative elements, ontological perspectives and arts. The topics are divided up into five sections with the following titles: Confessions, Lands of Cockaygne, Neo-Socratic Reflections, Ontologies of Becoming and Paragone of the Arts.



The Posthuman

Author : Rosi Braidotti

Publisher : John Wiley & Sons

Page : 202 pages

File Size : 12,85 MB

Release : 2013-07-11

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0745669964

Get eBook

Book Description

The Posthuman offers both an introduction and major contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. Digital 'second life', genetically modified food, advanced prosthetics, robotics and reproductive technologies are familiar facets of our globally linked and technologically mediated societies. This has blurred the traditional distinction between the human and its others, exposing the non-naturalistic structure of the human. The Posthuman starts by exploring the extent to which a post-humanist move displaces the traditional humanistic unity of the subject. Rather than perceiving this situation as a loss of cognitive and moral self-mastery, Braidotti argues that the posthuman helps us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities. Braidotti then analyzes the escalating effects of post-anthropocentric thought, which encompass not only other species, but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole. Because contemporary market economies profit from the control and commodification of all that lives, they result in hybridization, erasing categorical distinctions between the human and other species, seeds, plants, animals and bacteria. These dislocations induced by globalized cultures and economies enable a critique of anthropocentrism, but how reliable are they as indicators of a sustainable future? The Posthuman concludes by considering the implications of these shifts for the institutional practice of the humanities. Braidotti outlines new forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism that emerge from the spectrum of post-colonial and race studies, as well as gender analysis and environmentalism. The challenge of the posthuman condition consists in seizing the opportunities for new social bonding and community building, while pursuing sustainability and empowerment.



The Posthuman Condition

Author : Julian Pepperell

Publisher : Intellect (UK)

Page : 0 pages

File Size : 38,59 MB

Release : 2009

Category : Artificial intelligence

ISBN : 9781841502908

Get eBook

Book Description

"Where humanists saw themselves as distinct beings in an antagonistic relationship with their surroundings, posthumans regard their own being as embodied in an extended technological world." Synthetic creativity, organic computers, genetic modification, intelligent machines--such ideas are deeply challenging to many of our traditional assumptions about human uniqueness and superiority. But, ironically, it is our very capacity for technological invention that has secured us so dominant a position in the world which may lead ultimately to (as some have put it) 'The End of Man'. If we are really capable of creating entities that exceed our own skills and intellect then the consequences for humanity are almost inconceivable. Nevertheless, we must now face up to the possibility that attributes like intelligence and consciousness may be synthesised in non-human entities--perhaps within our lifetime. Would such entities have human-like emotions; would they have a sense of their own being? The Posthuman Condition argues that such questions are difficult to tackle given the concepts of human existence that we have inherited from humanism, many of which can no longer be sustained. New theories about nature and the operation of the universe arising from sophisticated computer modelling are starting to demonstrate the profound interconnections between all things in reality where previously we had seen only separations. This has implications for traditional views of the human condition, consciousness, the way we look at art, and for some of the oldest problems in philosophy. First published in the 1990s, this important text has been completely revised by the author with the addition of new sections and illustrations. For further information see: www.post-human.net



(Beyond) Posthuman Violence: Epic Rewritings of Ethics in the Contemporary Novel

Author : Claudio Murgia

Publisher : Vernon Press

Page : 223 pages

File Size : 22,36 MB

Release : 2019-12-02

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 1622738195

Get eBook

Book Description

Neuroscience tells us that the brain is nothing but a metaphor machine capable of extracting meaning from a chaotic reality. Following Agamben, Arendt, Benjamin and Žižek, a theory of violence can be established according to which violence is a reaction on the part of the individual to the frustration generated by having her metaphor machine suppressed by the mythic narrative of the Law. In opposition to mythic violence, Benjamin posits the justice of divine violence. Divine justice is an excess of life, the very uniqueness of the metaphor machine. The individual is affected by a difficulty to communicate her metaphor machine to the Other, as if it were inexpressible. This work explores how the characters in the works of David Foster Wallace, Cormac MacCarthy, J. G. Ballard, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Maurice G. Dantec and China Mieville suffer from these limits of language and the constrictions of the Law. Through violence they look for their individual Voice, intended as their will-to-say, the ‘pure taking place of language’ (Agamben). In their struggle to be heard these characters are however deaf to the Voice of the Other. There is a need for a new Ethics of Narratives expressed through an Epic of the Voice founded on the will-to-listen, along the lines of the concept of the posthuman theorized by Rosi Braidotti. Here subjectivity is a process of constant autopoiesis dependent on the relationship the individual has with the Other and the environment around her, that is, in the reciprocal will-to-say and will-to-listen. Human beings can meet in the taking-place of language, in the place before the suppressive language of the Law is even born, in a meeting of Voices.