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
Category: Ethics
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
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
Coming to Terms with Determinism
In addition to shifting the centre of value, as discussed in my last post, posthumanism shifts the universal centre of potential for progress. Transhumanism extends the human centre, critical posthumanism relocates it to myriad ‘Others’, and theocentric posthumanism relocates it to God. To explain, consider that a key idea of humanism since the classical period,… Continue reading Coming to Terms with Determinism
The Metaethics of Posthumanist Discourse – Part 2
This post continues from my last post, which was really an argument for a theistic metaethics, i.e. there are no ethical or moral truths without theistic coercion enforcing moral obligation. That was more like an apologetic argument and less like an argument relating to posthumanism, but that is about to be addressed. Next, let’s return… Continue reading The Metaethics of Posthumanist Discourse – Part 2
The Metaethics of Posthumanist Discourse – Part 1
Transhumanism and critical posthumanism are, above all, ethical theories about how we should respond to the realisation that we live in a posthumanist age. Yet, their theorists fail to direct their critical-realist lens upon the damage done to the possibilities for ethics by a scientific-materialist imaginary. They also fail to appreciate the coercion inherent in… Continue reading The Metaethics of Posthumanist Discourse – Part 1
Theocentric Posthumanism 