It will help to clarify concepts to which I refer by certain terminology, especially since many terms in the discourse of posthumanism seem to be contested.
By ‘humanism’, I mean the view that humanity is the centre of value and potential for progressive change in the universe, where ‘humanity’ is a natural kind that objectively carves out a subset of the species homo sapiens. Diagrammatically, it looks as follows:-
Anti-humanism is any view that denies humanism, and probably does not include transhumanism as I am about to define it.
By ‘transhumanism’, I mean a kind of hyper-essentialist humanism, which extends the set of possible humanity beyond the species homo sapiens to uploaded or AI human consciousness, and cybernetically or genetically enhanced humans. It is hyper-essentialist in that it tends to narrowly focus in on rational and ethical capacities as the characteristics of true humanity, which can therefore transcend the biological species homo sapiens in something like the following way:-
By ‘critical posthumanism’ I primarily refer to Rosi Braidotti’s conception of the posthuman as a critique of exclusive humanisms, but which goes beyond anti-humanism for its positive valorisation of the Other, or many centres of value. It might look like the following:-
This critique obviously extends to transhumanism, as defined, and it would also offer specific critiques of attempts to portray human reason and an ethical self as a natural kind, instead arguing that these phenomena stand in relations of interdependence with many situated aspects of an individual’s body and ecology.
Some examples of the posthuman Other include:-
- human cultures previously regarded as sub-human;
- animal species other than homo sapiens;
- the broader ecology or biome;
- symbiotic micro-organisms;
- genetically altered / enhanced homo sapiens;
- cybernetically altered / enhanced homo sapiens;
- artificial intelligence, including the software (intelligent programs) and the hardware (robots);
- alien life forms.
Theocentric Posthumanism 