The anti-essentialism motivating the posthumanist turn tacitly rejects realism about two distinct forms of essence: descriptive and prescriptive. The first relates to the absence of any objective correctness or naturalness as to the boundaries of the concepts we apply in language and thought, let alone the essence concepts (sortals) that denote the primary kind to… Continue reading Naturalness Talk
Author: theopohomo
The Performance of Gender Oppression
In my last post, here, I pointed out a way in which one futurist suppresses a tacit commitment to objective morality. This suppression is a common theme of posthumanist discourse, because anti-essentialist ethics often tries to have its cake and eat it, too, by declaring all essences to be socially constructed, and yet trying to… Continue reading The Performance of Gender Oppression
Homo Deus
Though it does not seem to end up saying anything on a scale of grandeur to justify the title, rather appearing to peter out on the cusp of transitioning from a commentary about to humanity’s past to a substantial exploration of future possibilities, Yuval Noah Harari’s work of popular non-fiction about our possible trans- or… Continue reading Homo Deus
Alita: Battle Angel
***Mild Spoiler Warning*** James Cameron (producer) and Robert Rodriguez (director) have delivered an aesthetically stunning adaptation of the manga series, Gunnm, but at the expense of developing significant narrative tension and critical engagement with challenging ideas. Its failure to grapple with questions arising for human essentialism once the genie of genetic and cybernetic enhancement is… Continue reading Alita: Battle Angel
Against Appeals to Natural Law in the Public Square
Posthumanism is an anti-essentialism and, as such, it rejects arguments from humanity’s intrinsic nature to conclusions about law and morality. Or, at least, that is the logical consequence. It does not stop posthumanists from making ethical and culturally critical arguments that rely on a fluid conception of telos to, somewhat selectively, ground their normative claims.… Continue reading Against Appeals to Natural Law in the Public Square
Materialism and Representation
Much posthumanist, nonhumanist or antihumanist discourse is motivated by a methodological commitment to materialism. This is so notwithstanding the question mark over what the more detailed commitments of materialism actually are, e.g. whether matter is prior to or dependent upon the form of objects. In other words, whether matter is fundamentally things or stuff, or… Continue reading Materialism and Representation
Our Posthuman Future
In his book, Our Posthuman Future (2002), Francis Fukuyama attempts to defend humanity as a category of exclusive moral and political significance by invoking a brand of Aristotelian essentialism, as follows: Aristotle argued, in effect, that human notions of right and wrong—what we today call human rights—were ultimately based on human nature. That is, without… Continue reading Our Posthuman Future
Identifying the Human
According to the theocentric posthumanism that I have been laying out in this blog, there is no objective essence of humanity that divides the human from the non-human. However, there is a concept of humanity in the mind of God, which may be (and is, in my view) the concept expressed in divine revelation that… Continue reading Identifying the Human
The Primacy of Revelation
The anti-essentialism of most posthumanist theory results in the untenability of any theory of ethics or morality based on a moral subject (human or otherwise) realising an objectively prescriptive essence or nature that determines what it means for a being of that kind to flourish. Without a metaphysics of essences, there is just no principled… Continue reading The Primacy of Revelation
A Substantial Posthumanist Self
The poststructuralist self is constructed by language and prone to prevailing and countervailing interpretations sustained through dynamic power relations. The critical posthumanist self is a functionally unified hybrid of dynamic natural, cultural and technological systems and self-organising materials. Either way, there does not seem to be enough, here, to explain the objective endurance of a… Continue reading A Substantial Posthumanist Self
Theocentric Posthumanism 
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