The late modern, cultural and intellectual movement, transhumanism, is based on flawed assumptions which reduce people to information processing objects and equate artificial intelligence to human intelligence, creativity, and other cognitive, social and affective abilities in an overly simplistic way. 

By contrast, Coeckelbergh, Ess, Franck, Hampson, Hoff, Spiekermann (2017) suggest that “meaning is the most important aspect in human life as it allows us to understand reality, think further about it, and act upon it…. Meaning emerges when our entire body (including the brain) interacts with the world as it is, or actualizes new realities by linguistic and technical means. In other words: new realities and events come into being or ‘emerge’ mediated through our embodied encounter with the world.”

Indicative topics include:

· Distinguishing liberal and dystopical posthumanism, methodological and radical posthumanism

· Being in the world and Engaging Reality

    -Representationalism and its critics

    -Being there – second generation cognitive science and the ‘4E’ approach to cognition

· Affordance

· Language Mind and World: ‘A counter desecration phrasebook’

· Social or Solitary?  Attachment, Joint Attention and Persons-in-Relation

· Moral Life, Vulnerability and Compassion

      · Neoliberalism and transhumanism

By the end of this seminar students will have gained a deeper understanding of various social,  cultural, philosophical and psychological issues raised by posthumanism. They will further appreciate the relevance of transdisplinary approaches to related contentious aspects of ICT, and acquire skill in accessing, interpreting, and deploying material from a variety of sources.

Students will also gain a deeper insight into their chosen research domain, and have the opportunity to further develop writng and artistic skills.

full attendence is mandatory

This course is a mixture of an in-class setting and a field-experiment/creative work. After being introduced to the various forms of posthumanism as well as the transhumanistic idea of mankind, students will engage in a creative seminar project. They will chose a science fictin scenario (technology, person, scenario) and discuss it creatively through text (seminar paper) and a poster they develop. Text & poster critically reflect posthumanistic visions, how they are embedded in science fiction and to what extend these visions are realistic.

Students will have one project that is related to the indicative topics and their presentation and short text will be 100% of the grade. Missing a course unit will result in -10% of the grade for each unit missed.

The approach taken will combine methods and understanding from various disciplines especially psychology, philosophy, philosophical-theology, ethics and literature.  While some familiarity with one or more of these would be helpful, prior expert knowledge of all these areas is not required, but a willingness to entertain cross disciplinary approaches, and to ‘think outside the box’ are.

mis-sek@wu.ac.at; Tel: +43 1 31336 5460