The Philosophy Club of the American University in Cairo celebrates its 20th anniversary in a series of six talks spread across the 2012-2013 academic year. The second lecture, "Beyond Humanism: Becoming Cyborgs through Posthumanism", was delivered by Gavin Rae, assistant professor of philosophy at AUC. While the notion of the human being as a rational animal, distinct from and occupying a unique place in relation to other beings, was dominant for the overwhelming majority of Western intellectual thinking, the human being has undergone something of a Copernican Revolution in the past 100 years. This re-thinking of the human has emphasised the embedded nature of human being in an enveloping world and, by doing so, tries to overturn the anthropocentrism of previous thought. One of the most recent attempts to re-think the human comes from a thinking that orientates its analysis from the realm of biotechnology. This has allowed theorists known as posthumanists to advocate a re-thinking of human being that argues that the previous division between the human being and the machine is breaking-down. In short, we are becoming cyborgs.
The Philosophy Club of the American University in Cairo celebrates its 20th anniversary in a series of six talks spread across the 2012-2013 academic year. The second lecture, "Beyond Humanism: Becoming Cyborgs through Posthumanism", was delivered by Gavin Rae, assistant professor of philosophy at AUC. While the notion of the human being as a rational animal, distinct from and occupying a unique place in relation to other beings, was dominant for the overwhelming majority of Western intellectual thinking, the human being has undergone something of a Copernican Revolution in the past 100 years. This re-thinking of the human has emphasised the embedded nature of human being in an enveloping world and, by doing so, tries to overturn the anthropocentrism of previous thought. One of the most recent attempts to re-think the human comes from a thinking that orientates its analysis from the realm of biotechnology. This has allowed theorists known as posthumanists to advocate a re-thinking of human being that argues that the previous division between the human being and the machine is breaking-down. In short, we are becoming cyborgs.
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