[ExI] transhumanist as a philosophy

[Damien Broderick]

On 6/16/2010 6:23 PM, natasha at natasha.cc wrote:

> For me, it is a philosophy with princples and is definitely a movement.

Leaving aside the movement aspect for a moment:

a perspective, a set of interpretative principles and principles of 
action, tends be regarded as a *formal philosophy* only after it has 
been canonized in one or more major texts.

What are these in the case of Transhumanism? FM-2030's books, for 
example, do not seem to be embraced, studied, taught, disputed by many 
people. THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR is not a philosophy text.

It might be argued that looking for *books* in the 21st century is 
entirely missing the point--that >H or H+ is articulated sufficiently in 
the discussions and colloquia associated with, say, the Extropy 
Institute of old and its listserv, and the various groups naming 
themselves as such like the World Transhumanist Association or 
Humanityplus...

But I'm not sure that's sufficient. I seem to recall various efforts to 
pull together a text titled TRANSHUMANISM, and that somesuch volumes 
already exist in Italian (and are fought over vehemently and even 
poisonously there), but I don't know of any canonical text in English. 
Is there one (or more)?  Amazon lists *Designer Evolution: A 
Transhumanist Manifesto* (2005, Prometheus) by Simon Young, which has as 
Part 3 "Transhumanism as a Totalized Philosophical System." Anyone here 
read it? And there's dear old *Great Mambo Chicken*, which is very much 
less than a philosophy although it was a hell of a ride way back in the day.

Damien Broderick