Posthumanism or post-humanism is an idea in continental philosophy and critical theory responding to the presence of anthropocentrism in 21st-century thought. It encompasses a wide variety of branches, including:
- Antihumanism: a branch of theory that is critical of traditional humanism and traditional ideas about the human condition, vitality and agency.
- Cultural posthumanism: a branch of cultural theory critical of the foundational assumptions of humanism and its legacy that examines and questions the historical notions of "human" and "human nature", often challenging typical notions of human subjectivity and embodiment and strives to move beyond archaic concepts of "human nature" to develop ones which constantly adapt to contemporary technoscientific knowledge.
- Philosophical posthumanism: a philosophical direction that draws on cultural posthumanism, the philosophical strand examines the ethical implications of expanding the circle of moral concern and extending subjectivities beyond the human species.
- Posthuman condition: the deconstruction of the human condition by critical theorists.
- Posthuman transhumanism: a transhuman ideology and movement which, drawing from posthumanist philosophy, seeks to develop and make available technologies that enable immortality and greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities in order to achieve a "posthuman future".
- AI takeover: A variant of transhumanism in which humans will not be enhanced, but rather eventually replaced by artificial intelligences. Some philosophers and theorists, including Nick Land, promote the view that humans should embrace and accept their eventual demise as a consequence of a technological singularity. This is related to the view of "cosmism", which supports the building of strong artificial intelligence even if it may entail the end of humanity, as in their view it "would be a cosmic tragedy if humanity freezes evolution at the puny human level".
- The Merge Hypothesis : Futurologism, a variant of Transhumanism in which humans and AI will merge to create a new post human species, with AI absorbing elements of humanity such as creativity, empathy, and social cohesion, and humanity being enhanced by AI to achieve new feats.
- Voluntary Human Extinction, which seeks a "posthuman future" that in this case is a future without humans.
Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in numerous texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity".
Ronald Myles Dworkin was an American legal philosopher, jurist, and scholar of United States constitutional law. At the time of his death, he was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London. Dworkin had taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, where he was the Professor of Jurisprudence, successor to philosopher H.L.A. Hart. An influential contributor to both philosophy of law and political philosophy, Dworkin received the 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize in the Humanities for "his pioneering scholarly work" of "worldwide impact." According to a survey in The Journal of Legal Studies, Dworkin was the second most-cited American legal scholar of the twentieth century. After his death, the Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein said Dworkin was "one of the most important legal philosophers of the last 100 years. He may well head the list."
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. He was widely known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger, which critics labeled "Dreydegger".
Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher and cultural theorist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. He co-hosted the German television show Im Glashaus: Das Philosophische Quartett from 2002 until 2012.
Nicholas Paul Wolterstorff is an American philosopher and theologian. He is currently Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. A prolific writer with wide-ranging philosophical and theological interests, he has written books on aesthetics, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and philosophy of education. In Faith and Rationality, Wolterstorff, Alvin Plantinga, and William Alston developed and expanded upon a view of religious epistemology that has come to be known as Reformed epistemology. He also helped to establish the journal Faith and Philosophy and the Society of Christian Philosophers.
Joseph Raz was an Israeli legal, moral and political philosopher. He was an advocate of legal positivism and is known for his conception of perfectionist liberalism. Raz spent most of his career as a professor of philosophy of law at Balliol College, Oxford, and was latterly a part-time professor of law at Columbia University Law School and a part-time professor at King's College London. He received the Tang Prize in Rule of Law in 2018.
Simon Critchley is an English philosopher and the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, USA.
Hans Köchler is a retired professor of philosophy at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and president of the International Progress Organization, a non-governmental organization in consultative status with the United Nations. In his general philosophical outlook he is influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, his legal thinking has been shaped by the approach of Kelsen. Köchler has made contributions to phenomenology and philosophical anthropology and has developed a hermeneutics of trans-cultural understanding that has influenced the discourse on the relations between Islam and the West.
Shannon Bell is a Canadian performance philosopher who lives and writes philosophy-in-action, experimental philosophy. Bell is also professor and graduate programme director in the York University Political Science Department, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She teaches postmodern theory, fast feminism, sexual politics, cyber politics, identity politics and violent philosophy.
Luciano Floridi is an Italian and British philosopher. He is the Director of the Digital Ethics Center at the Yale University. He is also a Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bologna, Department of Legal Studies, where he is the director of the Centre for Digital Ethics. He is adjunct professor, Department of Economics, American University, Washington D.C. He is married to the neuroscientist Anna Christina Nobre.
Rosi Braidotti is a contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician. Born in Italy, she studied in Australia and France and works in the Netherlands.
John Sallis is an American philosopher well known for his work in the tradition of phenomenology. Since 2005, he has been the Frederick J. Adelmann Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He has previously taught at Pennsylvania State University (1996–2005), Vanderbilt University (1990–1995), Loyola University of Chicago (1983–1990), Duquesne University (1966–1983) and the University of the South (1964–1966).
Babette E. Babich is an American philosopher who writes from a continental perspective on aesthetics, philosophy of science, especially Nietzsche's, and technology, especially Heidegger's and Günther Anders, in addition to critical and cultural theory.
Jeff Malpas is an Australian philosopher and emeritus distinguished professor at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. Known internationally for his work across the analytic and continental traditions, Malpas is also at the forefront of contemporary philosophical research on the concept of "place", as first and most comprehensively presented in his Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography—now in its second edition—and further developed in numerous subsequent works.
Michael Friedman is an American philosopher who serves as Professor of Philosophy and the Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. Friedman is best known for his work in the philosophy of science, especially on scientific explanation and the philosophy of physics, and for his historical work on Immanuel Kant. Friedman has also done historical work on figures in continental philosophy such as Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. Friedman also serves as the co-director of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford University.
Fred Reinhard Dallmayr is an American philosopher and political theorist. He is Packey J. Dee Professor Emeritus in Political Science with a joint appointment in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame (US). He holds a Doctor of Law from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and a PhD in political science from Duke University. He is the author of some 40 books and the editor of 20 other books. He has served as president of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (SACP); an advisory member of the scientific committee of RESET – Dialogue on Civilizations (Rome); the executive co-chair of World Public Forum – Dialogue of Civilizations (Vienna), and a member of the supervisory board of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute (Berlin).
Harold Vincent Poor FRS FREng is the Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, where he is also the Interim Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is a specialist in wireless telecommunications, signal processing and information theory. He has received many honorary degrees and election to national academies. He was also President of IEEE Information Theory Society (1990). He is on the board of directors of the IEEE Foundation.
Joan Callahan was a Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky, an institution where she taught for more than twenty years and served in a variety of roles, including as director of the Gender and Women's Studies Program. Callahan's research has focused on feminist theory, critical race theory, ethics, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of law, and on the junctions of these topics.
Lorenz (Lorencino) Bruno Puntel is a Brazilian philosopher based in Germany, who established the school of Structural-systematic philosophy. Professor emeritus at the University of Munich, Puntel has been named as one of the great contemporary philosophers, articulating his ideas from the most varied traditions.
