A Cartography of the Posthumanities. New Frames from Epistemology to Political Philosophy

The so-called “Posthuman turn” is often assumed as a fickle category within the most general debate that questions the contemporary validity of the human concept. So much that, in recent decades, both posthuman and posthumanism have become terms with polysemic valence. Following the massive entry of new technologies, life sciences, cybernetic revolution, and most recent advances of AI a transdisciplinary debate raising the claim of the fragmentation of the human becomes topical. On the philosophical side, in addition to the most generic disruption within the human concept, it occurs a reappraisal of deconstructionism (especially in North-American debate) and the diffusion of post-structuralism and feminist epistemology within the academic context. Such shift produced multifaceted theoretical approaches that have started to question the generic notion of human and the one of humanity as a neutral, universal, wide-ranging concept to deal with. Posthumanism, therefore, springs from the need that arose at the height of the second half of 20th-century timescale shifts, to rethink, reassess and put under critical lens the idea of the human in the new era of the “posts”. This research aims to highlight the scientific soundness, epistemic validity, and political-philosophical role that Philosophical and Critical Posthumanism fulfill today. With the purpose to unravel the confusion crossing the current debate, the thesis argumentation makes use of the transdisciplinary methodology of the cartography, in order to propose a path of disambiguation of the generic posthuman signifier. This objective will be pursued by distinguishing paradigms and currents of thought that cannot be reduced to one another. Such scope is fulfilled in the research through the identification of an initial grid of analysis that distinguishes theoretical-political paradigms underlying posthumanism and transhumanism. Following the necessary clarification of the heterogeneous outcomes of these currents, such conceptual premises will make it possible to find in posthumanism a set of contributions that are fundamental to enlarge a political-philosophy reach that stands in constant relation to non-human otherness. Proposing a scientific reconstruction of the onto-epistemologies underlying the emerging Posthumanities, the thesis argument will unfold within the post-dualist, anti-speciesist, and post-anthropocentric dimension of a renewed theory of the human subject. This path, which intersects political philosophy, gender studies, and philosophy of science, firstly proposes a deeper focus on the characters that constitute the limit of the human category in Western modernity and secondly brings into dialogue the polyphony of voices that promises solidity to the scientific perspective of posthumanism. Finally, the thesis proposes some original readings of the intersection of posthumanist epistemology with political philosophy. Only through a research that moves along these axes of reconstruction and philosophical-political foundations of posthumanism is it possible to search for its value and epistemological solidity, useful for future promising application contexts such as: the intersectional approach to major contemporary philosophical-political questions, the re-evaluation of the notion of subjectivity and multispecies forms of agency and the design of current techno-crafted artifacts from a post-anthropocentric point of view.