Symposium: Religious Philosophy Between Humanism and Posthumanism

2013

In this paper 1 I investigate Peter Sloterdijk's relation to humanism, especially in its post-Kantian sense of an ideology of Enlightenment based on anthropology. How does an author who writes after Nietzsche's biopolitical challenge of the Übermensch, Heidegger's ontological upgrading of the humanitas, Foucault's structuralist decentering of man, Derrida's deconstruction of anthropocentric discourse, and Deleuze & Guattari's machinic constructivism, relate to the ideology of emancipation through formation (Bildung), i.e. the "anthropotechnics" of reading and writing? What are the biopolitical insights of an "anthropophenomenology" or an "anthropology beyond humans"? (1999: 54) Can a positive understanding of 'humanity' still be found in his work?

2022

The ubiquitous presence of ‘the digital’, the levels of technological control and the prevalence of scientific understanding today are having profound effects, not only on our understanding of the mind-body relationship and what we conceive as real, but also on our very notion of humanity and our relationship with both the natural and the technological environment and beings. These ontological complications meet interesting perspectives in religion, especially in the neglected areas such as animism, contemporary paganism and pantheism which are known for their strong preference for immanent divine and embodied spirituality, their immersive and boundary-transgressing phenomenology of nature, and their links to Deep Ecology. The international conference Nature Religions, Science and Technology seeks to bring into the contemporary discussion interdisciplinary debates in the fields of religion, science and technology, by focusing especially on philosophical, theological, anthropological and religious studies perspectives. The contributions include original research on selected topics in pantheism, animism and/or paganism — especially (but not exclusively) in their ‘Western’ forms — in relation to important questions about science and technology. In this way, the research presented and produced by both established as well as early career scholars, addresses contemporary cultural and intellectual sensibilities that arise in the intersection of these fields. A selection of the papers presented will be published in a special issue of journal Religions, titled Religion, Science and Technology in Pantheism, Animism and Paganism. The conference is a part of the research project Creatures, Humans, Robots: Creation Theology Between Humanism and Posthumanism, based at the Institute for Philosophical Studies, Science and Research Centre of Koper (ZRS Koper), Slovenia, and funded by Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS). The conference is co-organized and supported by ZRS Koper, and the Centre for Religion, Health and Wellbeing at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Groningen. It is taking place at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, on 22nd and 23rd September, 2022. Gorazd Andrejč and Victoria Dos Santos, 18.09.2022

Thesis Eleven 132.1 , 2016

sense as it discusses materiality in general and how human relationships with things, from drugs to CDs to photographs, create and confirm particular cosmologies and identities. While most of these things are indeed technologically-produced artefacts, more specific reflections on the nature or essence of technology would have been welcome. The author raises an interesting discussion of 'technological lifecycles'-the phases and stages technologies such as the telephone go through while transforming or dying off. The subject-object blurring efforts of Donna Haraway around 'companion species' and Serres on 'quasi-objects' is discussed before Matthewman arrives at his conclusion: 'We have always been posthuman'. Technology and Social Theory makes a valuable contribution to sociology and related disciplines that face a double challenge: keeping pace and looking ahead in a rapidly changing socio-technological milieu, while simultaneously looking back at how technology has been shaping society and the (post)human ever since upright walking apes took hold of stones on the African savannah. Understanding what technology is, what it does and how individuals and societies are coupled with and transformed by technology will become ever more salient as planet Earth increasingly becomes a 'human-built world'. Such a world calls for a critical sociology that understands the history, essence and effects of technology on both humans and nonhumans, not only in our times but the times to come. It came as little surprise when I recently learned Matthewman is currently at work on a book on the sociology of accidents and disasters, phenomena that are both solved and often created by technological interventions. For a relatively short survey, Technology and Social Theory covers a lot of ground. The book chronicles the trajectory of technology in social theory since Marx, while the critical discussions of ANT, 'thing studies' and posthuman theory highlight some of the dynamic newer directions in social theory. Despite this, there is surprisingly little coverage of major sociological topics such as globalization, mobilities, the internet, and the environment, phenomena which are unthinkable without considering the evolution of technology. Nonetheless, Matthewman's volume is highly recommended for mid to upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates and any social scientist who needs reminding of (or a first lesson about) the centrality of technology to the (post)human condition.

2017

This contribution addresses the anthropocenic challenge from a dialectical perspective, combining a diagnostics of the present with a prognostic of the emerging future. It builds on the oeuvres of two prominent dialectical thinkers, namely Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Hegel himself was a pre-anthropocenic thinker who did not yet thematise the anthro-pocenic challenge as such, but whose work allows us to emphasise the unprecedented newness of the current crisis. I will especially focus on his views on Earth as a planetary process, emphasising that (in the current situation) the " spirit " of technoscience is basically monitoring the impacts of its own activities on geochemistry and evolution. Subsequently, I will turn attention to Teilhard de Chardin, a palaeontologist and philosopher rightfully acknowledged as one of the first thinkers of the Anthropocene and whose oeuvre provides a mediating middle term between Hegel's conceptual groundwork and the anthropocenic present. Notably, I will discuss his views on self-directed evolution, on the ongoing absorption of the biosphere by the noosphere, and on emerging options for " sublating " the current crisis into a synthetic convergence towards (what Teilhard refers to as) the Omega point. I will conclude that (a), after disclosing the biomolecular essence of life, biotechnology must now take a radical biomimetic turn (a shift from domesticating nature to the domestication of domes-tication, i.e., of technology); that (b) reflection itself must become distributed and collective; and (c), that the anthropocenic crisis must be sublated into the noocene.

Journal of The History of The Behavioral Sciences, 2018

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2018

In this thoughtful, highly readable book, Robert Biel makes a case for creating more sustainable food systems by focusing on the relationship between social and non-capitalist movements, and organic and urban agriculture. Biel argues that modern farming and food production systems are fundamentally broken, and that a 'new paradigm' is required to address growing food insecurity and environmental degradation. Emphasizing that it is not an intensification of production that is needed, he asserts that the principal driver of the new paradigm should be distribution-creating distributive justice in order to address the problem of access to food globally. Biel advocates a return to what he terms 'deep tradition', essentially encompassing subsistence and communally based modes of production, and illustrates this with reference to the agricultural ecologies of First Nation and tribal peoples. A central argument of Sustainable food systems is that there is a synergy between socialism and organics, in the sense that organic agriculture is inherently socialist in its underlying structural ideology. This intuitively obscure relationship is well articulated. Biel demonstrates how deep its roots are in socialist thought, and how central food production and distribution were to the development of ideas by political theorists and Marxist thinkers throughout the twentieth century. As well as Marxism, the book takes in a vast range of theoretical and conceptual sources, including general systems theory, entropy, deep ecology, chaos theory, biomimicry, and panarchy, among many others. Especially in the early chapters, Biel moves between all these with sometimes bewildering speed: discussing, for example, the development of a capitalist landholding system on one page and the maintenance of soil fertility on the next. This means the book is always interesting. The author is also clearly very well versed in current debates surrounding the development of technical solutions to the crisis in soil fertility and agricultural productivity. Conversely, the Green Revolution and the commercialization of agriculture, particularly in the developing world, come in for detailed criticism. In illustrating their deleterious effects, he makes the stark point that a 'significant number' of the 12,360 farmers who killed themselves in India in 2014 could plausibly be ascribed as 'Green Revolution-related' (pp. 116-17). The examples of how the city may contribute to the development of sustainable food systems are interesting. Biel rejects aquaponics, coming down in favour of potential solutions such as peri-urban cultivation, community-supported agriculture and gardening, box schemes, composting, allotments, and a return to the commons, combined with the adoption of radical social movements, thus creating what he terms a new urban metabolism and political ecology. As he implies himself, these ideas are somewhat utopian and, in the case of many Western cities, remain far from being fulfilled. A recent community food-growing scheme in an area of London, for example, has been hailed as an achievement, but only produces enough food to

American ethnologist, 2003