I am an anti-essentialist in many respects, though there are some ideas denoted by some senses of the term to which I would not give assent. For example, I believe in a primitive kind of individual essence that explains the persistence of identity through change. However, I certainly do not believe in robust generic essences… Continue reading Against Telos Regarded as Intrinsic Proper Function or Similar
Category: Metaethics
Staying with the Trouble
Having recently read Donna Haraway’s text, Staying with the Trouble (Duke University Press, 2016), I now offer some thoughts in response. Haraway is best known for her seminal essay, ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’, first published in 1985, in which she explores the idea that humanity has always been constituted as a process of species becoming that… Continue reading Staying with the Trouble
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
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
The Posthumanism of Theological Voluntarism
Anti-humanism is the decentring of humanity as the universal centre of value and potential for progress. Posthumanism is the re-centring of value and potential elsewhere. Transhumanism re-centres on an extended and enhanced concept of humanity. Critical posthumanism re-centres on a multiplicity of centres, including Braidotti’s strategy of re-centring on living matter in any form. Theistic… Continue reading The Posthumanism of Theological Voluntarism
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 
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