Download or read book The Future of Post Human Sports written by Peter Baofu and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are sports really supposed to be so competitive that, as Henry R. Sanders once famously said, ""Men, I'll be honest. Winning is...the only thing!""? (WK 2012) This competitive view of sports can be contrasted with a critical view by William Shakespeare, who wrote in Othello (Act. iv. Sc. 1), ""They laugh that win."" (BART 2012) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones, as will be discussed in the book), sports (in relation to both training and winning) are neither possible (or impossible)...
Download or read book The Future of Post Human Semantics written by Peter Baofu and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This seminal project aims to fundamentally change the way we think about semantics, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its 'post-human' fate.
Download or read book The Future of Post Human War and Peace written by Peter Baofu and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-04-16 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is peace really so precious that it is popularly viewed in irenology (peace studies) of our time as “natural” and “a prime force in human behavior”—whereas war, its opposite, is instead condemned as “sinful” and “not” natural? In fact, there is even the prestigious Nobel “peace” prize to be awarded to those who contribute to world peace but not an equivalent Nobel “war” prize to those who do the contrary. This euphoric view of peace is by no means a constant conventional wisdom in human history, as it can be sharply contrasted with an equally seductive view of war in polemology (war studies). For instance, only several decades ago, the well-known writer Thomas Mann once approvingly asked about war: “Is not peace an element of civil corruption and war a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope?” (WK 2009a) This fickleness of conventional wisdom on war and peace has blinded us from the dark sides of both war and peace, with the consequence of impoverishing our understanding of the human condition and its future. Contrary to the two opposing sides of this conventional wisdom in its fickle history, war and peace are neither possible nor desirable to the extent that their respective ideologues would like us to believe. In addition, war and peace cannot exist with each other. Of course, this is not to suggest that irenology (peace studies) and polemology (war studies) are worthless, or that other fields of study (related to war studies and peace studies) like “political science, economics, psychology, sociology, international relations, history, anthropology, religious studies,…gender studies, as well as a variety of others” should be ignored. (WK 2009) Needless to say, neither of these two extreme views is reasonable either. Instead, this book accepts the challenging task to provide an alternative (better) way to understand the nature of war and peace, especially in relation to aggression and pacificity—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). Thus, this book offers a new theory to transcend the existing approaches in the literature on war and peace in a way not conceived before. If successful, this seminal project is to fundamentally change the way that we think about war and peace, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.
Download or read book The Future of Post Human Performing Arts written by Peter Baofu and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are the performing arts really supposed to be so radical that, as John Cage once said in the context of music, “there is no noise, only sound,” since “he argued that any sounds we can hear can be music”? (WK 2007a; D. Harwood 1976) This radical tradition in performing arts, with music as an example here, can be contrasted with an opposing view in the older days, when “Greek philosophers and medieval theorists in music defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies, and vertically as harmonies. Music theory, within this realm, is studied with the presupposition that music is orderly and often pleasant to hear.” (WK 2007a) Contrary to these opposing traditions (and other views as will be discussed in the book), performing arts, in relation to both the body and its presence, is neither possible nor desirable to the extent that the respective ideologues on different sides would like us to believe. Needless to say, the challenge to these opposing traditions in performing arts does not imply that performing arts are worthless human endeavors, or that those fields of study related to performing arts like aesthetics, acoustics, communication studies, psychology, culture studies, sociology, religion, morality, and so on should be rejected too. Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Instead, this book provides an alternative, better way of understanding the future of performing arts, especially in the dialectic context of the body and its presence—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them or integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other. In other words, this book offers a new theory (that is, the transdisiciplinary theory of performing arts) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way. If successful, this seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about performing arts, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its “post-human” fate.
Download or read book Our Posthuman Future written by Francis Fukuyama and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is a baby whose personality has been chosen from a gene supermarket still a human? If we choose what we create what happens to morality? Is this the end of human nature? The dramatic advances in DNA technology over the last few years are the stuff of science fiction. It is now not only possible to clone human beings it is happening. For the first time since the creation of the earth four billion years ago, or the emergence of mankind 10 million years ago, people will be able to choose their children's' sex, height, colour, personality traits and intelligence. It will even be possible to create 'superhumans' by mixing human genes with those of other animals for extra strength or longevity. But is this desirable? What are the moral and political consequences? Will it mean anything to talk about 'human nature' any more? Is this the end of human beings? Our Posthuman Future is a passionate analysis of the greatest political and moral problem ever to face the human race.
Download or read book The Contemporary Posthuman written by Leonardo Caffo and published by Ethics International Press. This book was released on 2023-11-25 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The interest in what can be considered ‘posthumanism’ has surged over the past few years. There is no surprise as to why, given the urgency and immanence of a likely sixth mass extinction event, and the catastrophic consequences of global warming. These processes, all of which fundamentally rest on the foundations of human practices and abuses, are forcing us to rethink our place in existence. The foundations of this position have a history firmly rooted in the daily practices and beliefs of Western cultures. The Contemporary Posthuman confronts these assumptions of truth, head-on. The author follows his conceptual journey with practical steps for putting his philosophy into practice, by drawing on philosophy, design, art, and architecture. The Contemporary Posthuman was originally published in Italian by Einaudi, and was translated from the Italian by Dr Steven Umbrello.
Download or read book The Philosophical Ethology of Roberto Marchesini written by Jeffrey Bussolini and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roberto Marchesini is an Italian philosopher and ethologist whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human–animal relations. Throughout such important books as Il dio Pan (1988), Il concetto di soglia (1996), Post-human (2002), Intelligenze plurime (2008), Epifania animale (2014), and Etologia filosofica (2016), he offers a scathing critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to zooanthropological and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life. Centred on the dynamic and performative field of interactions and relations in the world, his critical and speculative approach to the cognitive life sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, whose action and agency is also indispensable to human culture. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives and histories with animals in different contexts of interaction, Marchesini’s cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the animal that most requires the present and input of other animals. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
Download or read book The Posthuman written by Rosi Braidotti and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Posthuman offers both an introduction and major contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. Digital 'second life', genetically modified food, advanced prosthetics, robotics and reproductive technologies are familiar facets of our globally linked and technologically mediated societies. This has blurred the traditional distinction between the human and its others, exposing the non-naturalistic structure of the human. The Posthuman starts by exploring the extent to which a post-humanist move displaces the traditional humanistic unity of the subject. Rather than perceiving this situation as a loss of cognitive and moral self-mastery, Braidotti argues that the posthuman helps us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities. Braidotti then analyzes the escalating effects of post-anthropocentric thought, which encompass not only other species, but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole. Because contemporary market economies profit from the control and commodification of all that lives, they result in hybridization, erasing categorical distinctions between the human and other species, seeds, plants, animals and bacteria. These dislocations induced by globalized cultures and economies enable a critique of anthropocentrism, but how reliable are they as indicators of a sustainable future? The Posthuman concludes by considering the implications of these shifts for the institutional practice of the humanities. Braidotti outlines new forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism that emerge from the spectrum of post-colonial and race studies, as well as gender analysis and environmentalism. The challenge of the posthuman condition consists in seizing the opportunities for new social bonding and community building, while pursuing sustainability and empowerment.
Download or read book Posthuman Folklore written by Tok Thompson and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2019-09-25 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can a monkey own a selfie? Can a chimp use habeas corpus to sue for freedom? Can androids be citizens? Increasingly, such difficult questions have moved from the realm of science fiction into the realm of everyday life, and scholars and laypeople alike are struggling to find ways to grasp new notions of personhood. Posthuman Folklore is the first work of its kind: both an overview of posthumanism as it applies to folklore studies and an investigation of “vernacular posthumanisms”—the ways in which people are increasingly performing the posthuman. Posthumanism calls for a close investigation of what is meant by the term “human” and a rethinking of this, our most basic ontological category. What, exactly, is human? What, exactly, am I? There are two main threads of posthumanism: the first dealing with the increasingly slippery slope between “human” and “animal,” and the second dealing with artificial intelligences and the growing cyborg quality of human culture. This work deals with both these threads, seeking to understand the cultural roles of this shifting notion of “human” by centering its investigation into the performances of everyday life. From funerals for AIBOs, to furries, to ghost stories told by Alexa, people are increasingly engaging with the posthuman in myriad everyday practices, setting the stage for a wholesale rethinking of our humanity. In Posthuman Folklore, author Tok Thompson traces both the philosophies behind these shifts, and the ways in which people increasingly are enacting such ideas to better understand the posthuman experience of contemporary life.
Download or read book Posthuman Ethics written by Patricia MacCormack and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Posthuman theory asks in various ways what it means to be human in a time when philosophy has become suspicious of claims about human subjectivity. Those subjects who were historically considered aberrant, and our future lives becoming increasingly hybrid show we have always been and are continuously transforming into posthumans. What are the ethical considerations of thinking the posthuman? Posthuman Ethics asks not what the posthuman is, but how posthuman theory creates new, imaginative ways of understanding relations between lives. Ethics is a practice of activist, adaptive and creative interaction which avoids claims of overarching moral structures. Inherent in thinking posthuman ethics is the status of bodies as the site of lives inextricable from philosophy, thought, experiments in being and fantasies of the future. Posthuman Ethics explores certain kinds of bodies to think new relations that offer liberty and a contemplation of the practices of power which have been exerted upon bodies. The tattooed and modified body, the body made ecstatic through art, the body of the animal as a strategy for abolitionist animal rights, the monstrous body from teratology to fabulations, queer bodies becoming angelic, the bodies of the nation of the dead and the radical ways in which we might contemplate human extinction are the bodies which populate this book creating joyous political tactics toward posthuman ethics.
Download or read book Posthuman Urbanism written by Debra Benita Shaw and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The World Health Organisation estimates that, by 2030, six out of every ten people in the world will live in a city. But what does it mean to inhabit the city in the twenty-first century? Posthuman Urbanism evaluates the relevance and usefulness of posthuman theory to understanding the urban subject and its conditions of possibility. It argues that contemporary science and technology is radically changing the way that we understand our bodies and that understanding ourselves as 'posthuman' offers new insights into urban inequalities. By analysing the relationship between the biological sciences and cities from the nineteenth-century onward as it is expressed in architecture, popular culture and case studies of contemporary insurgent practices, a case is made for posthuman urbanism as a significant concept for changing the meaning of urban space. It answers the question of how we can change ourselves to change the way we live with others, both human and non-human, in a rapidly urbanising world.
Download or read book Posthuman Bliss written by Susan B. Levin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tightly argued and expansive examination of the pitfalls of transhumanism that reacquaints us with what it means to live well. Advocates of transhumanism, or "radical" enhancement, urge us to pursue the biotechnological heightening of select capacities - above all, cognitive ability - so far beyond any human limit that the beings with those capacities would exist on a higher ontological plane. For proponents of such views, humanity's self-transcendence through advancements in science and technology may even be morally required. Consequently, the human stakes of how we respond to transhumanism are immeasurably high. In Posthuman Bliss? The Failed Promise of Transhumanism, Susan B. Levin challenges transhumanists' overarching commitments regarding the mind and brain, ethics, liberal democracy, knowledge, and reality, showing their notion of humanity's self-transcendence into "posthumanity" to be little more than fantasy. Uniting philosophical with scientific arguments, Levin mounts a significant challenge to transhumanists' claim that science and technology support their vision of posthumanity. In a clear and engaging style, she dismantles transhumanists' breezy assurances that posthumans will emerge if we but allocate sufficient resources to that end. Far from offering theoretical and practical "proof of concept" for the vision that they urge upon us, Levin argues, transhumanists engage inadequately with cognitive psychology, biology, and neuroscience, often relying on questionable or outdated views within those fields. Having shown in depth why transhumanism should be rejected, Levin argues forcefully for a holistic perspective on living well that is rooted in Aristotle's virtue ethics but that is adapted to liberal democracy. This holism is thoroughly human, in the best of senses: It directs us to consider worthy ends for us as human beings and to do the irreplaceable work of understanding ourselves rather than relying on technology and science to be our salvation.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism written by Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As our ideas of the human have come under increasing challenges – from technological change, from medical advances, from the existential threat of climate crisis, from an ideological decentering of the human, amongst many other things – the 'posthuman' has become an increasingly central topic in the Humanities. Bringing together leading scholars from across the world and a wide range of disciplines, this is the most comprehensive available survey of cutting edge contemporary scholarship on posthumanism in literature, culture and theory. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism explores: - Central critical concepts and approaches, including transhumanism, new materialism and the Anthropocene - Ethical perspectives on ecology, race, gender and disability - Technology, from data and artificial intelligence to medicine and genetics - A wide range of genres and forms, from literary and science fiction, through film, television and music, to comics, video games and social media.
Download or read book Conceptual Breakthroughs in Ethology and Animal Behavior written by Michael D. Breed and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2017-01-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conceptual Breakthroughs in Ethology and Animal Behavior highlights, through concise summaries, the most important discoveries and scientific revolutions in animal behavior. These are assessed for their relative impact on the field and their significance to the forward motion of the science of animal behavior. Eighty short essays capture the moment when a new concept emerged or a publication signaled a paradigm shift. How the new understanding came about is explained, and any continuing controversy or scientific conversation on the issue is highlighted. Behavior is a rich and varied field, drawing on genetics, evolution, physiology, and ecology to inform its principles, and this book embraces the wealth of knowledge that comes from the unification of these fields around the study of animals in motion. The chronological organization of the essays makes this an excellent overview of the history of animal behavior, ethology, and behavioral ecology. The work includes such topics as Darwin's role in shaping the study of animal behavior, the logic of animal contests, cognition, empathy in animals, and animal personalities. Succinct accounts of new revelations about behavior through scientific investigation and scrutiny reveal the fascinating story of this field. Similar to Dr. John Avise's Contemporary Breakthroughs in Evolutionary Genetics, the work is structured into vignettes that describe the conceptual revolution and assess the impact of the conceptual change, with a score, which ranges from 1-10, providing an assessment of the impact of the new findings on contemporary science. - Features a lively, brisk writing style and brief entries to enable easy, enjoyable access to this essential information - Includes topics that cover the range of behavioral biology from mechanism to behavioral ecology - Can also be used as supplemental material for an undergraduate animal behavior course, or as the foundational text for an upper level or graduate discussion course in advanced animal behavior
Download or read book Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film written by Enrica Maria Ferrara and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2020-08-08 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As humans re-negotiate their boundaries with the nonhuman world of animals, inanimate entities and technological artefacts, new identities are formed and a new epistemological and ethical approach to reality is needed. Through twelve thought-provoking, scholarly essays, this volume analyzes works by a range of modern and contemporary Italian authors, from Giacomo Leopardi to Elena Ferrante, who have captured the shift from anthropocentrism and postmodernism to posthumanism. Indeed, this is the first academic volume investigating narrative configurations of posthuman identity in Italian literature and film.
Download or read book Sustainability Wellbeing and the Posthuman Turn written by Thomas S. J. Smith and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how the way we conceive of, or measure, the environment changes the way we interact with it. Thomas Smith posits that environmentalism and sustainable development have become increasingly post-political, characterised by abstraction, and quantification to an unprecedented extent. As such, the book argues that our ways of measuring both the environment, such as through sustainability metrics like footprints and Payments for Ecosystem Services, and society, through gross domestic product and wellbeing measures, play a constitutive and problematic role in how we conceive of ourselves in the world. Subsequently, as the quantified environmental approach drives a dualistic wedge between the human and non-human realms, in its final section the book puts forward recent developments in new materialism and feminist ethics of care as providing practical ways of re-founding sustainable development in a way that firmly acknowledges human-ecological relations. This book will be an invaluable reference for scholars and students in the fields of human geography, political ecology, and environmental sociology.
Download or read book Critical Ethology and Post Anthropocentric Ethics written by Roberto Marchesini and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-22 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The primary purpose of this book is to contribute to an overcoming of the traditional separation between humanties and life sciences which, according to the authors, is required today both by the developments of these disciplines and by the social problems they have to face. The volume discusses the theoretical, epistemological and ethical repercussions of the main acquisitions obtained in the last decades from the behavioral sciences. Both the authors are inspired by the concept of a “critical ethology”, oriented to archive the nature/culture and human/animal dichotomies. The book proposes a theoretical and methodological restructuring of the comparative study of the animal behavior, learning, and cultures, focused on the fact that thought, culture and language are not exclusively human prerogatives. The proposed analysis includes a critique of speciesism and determinism in the ethical field, and converge with the Numanities, to which the series is dedicated, on a key point: it is necessary to arrive at an education system able to offer scientific, social and ethical skills that are trasversal and transcendent to the traditional humanities/life sciences bipartition. Skills that are indispensable for facing the complex challenges of the contemporary society and promoting a critical reflection of humanity on itself.
