[ExI] transhumanist as a philosophy

[Stefano Vaj]

On 21 June 2010 00:25, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> A remarkable list, but fairly useless in the context of discussing >H *as
a
> formal philosophy*.
>
> E.g., McKibben acknowledges transhumanist thinkers, but as you note he's
one
> of the violently hostile commentators. Egan's novels display some versions
> of *post*humans (as do those of Sterling, Gibson, Stross, Kelly, Di
> Philippo, Banks, me and other fiction scribblers), but don't really
> constitute a philosophic tradition. I see only a couple of titles in there
> that might almost be the equivalent of David Kelley's, Tara Smith's and
> Chris Sciabara's books on Rand's Objectivism (although the non-English
ones
> on >H might be packed with powerful goodness).

In fact, Objectivism may or may not be a good analogy, or not. Not really,
because it had an undisputed, single, founder and master (mistress?), fixing
orthodoxy. Yes to a point because it has to be inferred from a handful of
novels, as in the case of transhumanism we have to take it out of a number
of works either tangential to the subject, or owed to precursors, or again
dealing with some technoscientific revolution or other.

But what you mention for objectivisms are just kind of cribs and dummies
guides, if I am not mistaken. Those should be rather easy to produce, but
one probably finds more interesting stuff in the book of Stock, Naam,
Hughes, Kurzweil, Young, Ettinger, Garreau, Moravec, or for that matter
Rifkin, Fukuyama or Kass. More on the philosophical side one also finds
Pearson's Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman
Condition<http://www.amazon.com/Viroid-Life-Perspectives-Nietzsche-Transhuman/dp/0415154359/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277114171&sr=1-1>,
or Julie Clark's The Paradox of the
Posthuman<http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Posthuman-Science-Fiction-Techno-Horror/dp/3639143795/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277114024&sr=1-1>,
and much more in Italian or French.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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