[ExI] CALL: H+ call for papers

[Damien Broderick]

At 12:45 AM 2/20/2009 +0000, BillK wrote:

>Quote:
>We particularly welcome papers that identify and critically evaluate
>the implicit religious beliefs underlying key transhumanist claims and
>assumptions. For example, what are the operative notions of
>anthropology, soteriology, and eschatology that are at play in the
>transhumanist quest for enhancement, including extreme longevity? We
>welcome more overtly philosophical critiques of posthuman discourse.
>------------------
>
>They want criticism of transhumanism, not criticism of religion.

Well, "critique" means something other and broader than "criticism" 
(understood to mean "attempts to demolish"), just as "deconstruct" 
doesn't mean "destroy". However, like you, I sense that these guys 
want to show that >H is a sort of debased and bogus variety of True 
Religious Truth, a kind of cheap and nasty and misled naturalistic 
appropriation of God and Heaven and Redemption. Which is what my own 
earlier comment tried to address.

In reality, Western >H probably does contingently derive part of its 
impulse from remnants of childhood and cultural Xianity, but as I've 
quote before, the Marxist theorist and critic Fred Jameson identifies 
a different and more persistent principle of utopian hope (which he 
cites from Ernst Bloch): `the unexpected emergence, as it were, 
beyond "the nightmare of History" **and from out of the most archaic 
longings of the human race**, of the impossible and inexpressible 
Utopian impulse here none the less briefly glimpsed: "Happiness for 
everybody!...."'[1]


[1].Fredric Jameson, `Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the 
Future?', Science Fiction Studies, No. 27, 1982, p. 157. He draws 
here upon the Soviet brothers Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic.


Damien Broderick