BIOPOLITICS AND (POST)HUMANISM

Humanism, posthumanism, and compassionate love

This article considers a special area where pure scientism, separated from humanistic perspectives, has come to define a perspective broadly termed posthumanism, where the modification of human nature is too easily embraced as progress. The humanistic response to this scientism is equally central in this reflection. I offer a perspective on the futility of pure scientism with regard to human pr...

Deconstruction and excision in philosophical posthumanism

I distinguish the ethics of transhumanism from a related metaphysical position which I refer to as “speculative posthumanism.” Speculative posthumanism holds that posthumans might be radically non-human and thus unintelligible in human terms. I claim that this transcendence can be viewed as analogous to that of the thing-in-itself in Kantian and post-Kantian European philosophy. This schema imp...

Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship

The New Empirical Biopolitics

Political science traditionally has either ignored biology in favor of purely environmental explanations for political phenomena or merely ruminated about the likely role of biology, leaving data-based research on biopolitics in dangerously short supply. Currently, attention to the apparent genetic basis for political and social orientations holds the greatest promise of advancing empirical bio...

The biopolitics of frozen embryos.

The unresolved debate about frozen embryos has left open the discussion on "what to do with them". There are only three ways to deal with frozen embryos: 1) to leave them frozen indefinitely; 2) to defrost and discard them and 3) to use them for research. In this paper, we suggest that the application of current scientific knowledge, instead of inappropriately referring to ethical principles or...