Get Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human PDF

Transhumanism posits that humanity is at the verge of fast evolutionary switch because of rising applied sciences and elevated international realization. even if, this perception is brushed off as a naive and debatable reframing of posthumanist concept, having additionally been vilified as “the most deadly concept on this planet” through Francis Fukuyama. during this e-book, Andrew Pilsch counters those reviews, arguing in its place that transhumanism’s utopian rhetoric actively imagines radical new futures for the species and its habitat.

Pilsch situates modern transhumanism in the longer background of a rhetorical mode he calls “evolutionary futurism” that unifies diversified texts, philosophies, and theories of technological know-how and know-how that expect a thorough explosion in humanity’s cognitive, actual, and cultural possibilities. by way of conceptualizing transhumanism as a rhetoric, instead of an vague staff of fringe figures, he explores the intersection of 3 significant paradigms shaping modern Western highbrow lifestyles: cybernetics, evolutionary biology, and spiritualism. In reading this collision, his paintings strains the assumption in a electronic, evolutionary, and collective destiny via a large variety of texts written by way of theologians and mystics, biologists and computing device scientists, political philosophers and fiscal thinkers, conceptual artists and Golden Age technological know-how fiction writers. Unearthing the lengthy historical past of evolutionary futurism, Pilsch concludes, permits us to extra essentially see the radical contributions that transhumanism bargains for escaping our present geopolitical bind through inspiring radical utopian thought.