The history of Western modernity has been the history of humanism, and more particularly, the history of a shifting of the universal centre of potential progress and value, from God to humanity, theocentrism to anthropocentrism. Without initially diminishing an entrenched commitment to theism, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment witnessed the gradual displacement of the external… Continue reading A Draft Introduction for a Possible Article on the Philosophy of Religion
Category: History
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
On the Very Idea of a Human Nature
Anti-humanism is, at its core, an anti-essentialism. This will take some setting up. The essence or nature of something is an absolute answer to the question, “What is it?” That is, an essence is what something is independently of any temporary context or state. That is a tree, this is a planet, I am a… Continue reading On the Very Idea of a Human Nature
The Order of Things – Addendum
Before moving on to other matters, I thought that it would be worthwhile to address another argument for the situated and contingent nature of human reason that feeds into the poststructuralist bias towards anti-humanism. Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, in Being and Time (1927), stressed a problem with the received view that information about… Continue reading The Order of Things – Addendum
The Order of Things
The tenor of theocentric posthumanism is captured by its response to a landmark text of anti-humanism, Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1970). Often cited as a catalyst for post-colonial theory and politics, it has surprisingly little to do with a critique of humanism as a justification for oppression of the Other, despite containing Foucault’s… Continue reading The Order of Things
The Grand Narrative of Humanism
The idea of theocentric posthumanism begins with the thought that there was a pre-humanism from which Western humanism deviated. Thereafter, the grand narrative of humanism played out over four centuries until its exhaustion by the end of the twentieth century. On the theocentric view, this exhaustion was inevitable given the foundations of human nature and… Continue reading The Grand Narrative of Humanism
Theocentric Posthumanism 