 It's a book that we think it's important because it's really an attempt to try to understand this landscape of thought that is opening When you think about what post humanism is well, it's the technological oriented variation that leads to transhumanism Or it's the ecological oriented version that leads to a Decentering of the humans both are really big thoughts That that separates with a lot of common ideas from the particular the Western tradition of thinking And it's important because it's about moral. It's about responsibility It's about an ability to react to things that are going on in the world right now we have chapters on the more traditional arts like literature and music and also moving into that part of our guard art which is constituted by bio arts and then We cover different sorts of more popular art forms film and television comic strips in a digital fashion anime films and and games and and with these we will also show that Post human imagination has actually become part of the popular imagination in the last decades And this raises lots of issues and I don't think these issues are going to disappear So even though this volume is called the handbook of post humanism and let and make no mistake this is the most sophisticated reference work on either and both Transhumanism and post humanism that's available and and if you just look at stuff that was being published that were passing themselves off as Reference books in this area. Let's say ten years ago. You could definitely see a step change here Okay, things are much more sophisticated much more articulated. I mean here. What you have is is at work If I may say so something that actually looks like an alternative world view to humanism Right in a sort of full comprehensive sense with with just as much complexity as one would have expected from humanism So I think the 18th century and the Enlightenment is someone who shot is is a context that should not be Brushed aside to easily. I'm not making a case for the Enlightenment because I would be nostalgic for it in any way. I Don't feel well that in order to lead the kind of life that I lead now I would have to be a French aristocrat like Emile de Châtelet and she died in her early 40s and childbirth the Intellectual Context are profoundly different, but I think it's exactly that different that makes it exciting to look at Similarities and how they play out in these different Thought worlds of the Enlightenment and post-humanism because when you look at a list of features of subjectivity that is relevant for post-humanism entanglements between the self and environment entanglements between animal and human experience and subjectivity in the mediated and technological age The links are relatively close And I haven't even talked about the industrial revolution and the media revolution where printed matter Started to circulate ever more rapidly ever more In ever more increased volume Throughout the 18th century. This is an age where the understanding of self and environment the understanding of human experience in relation to other kinds of experience and technology were really at the center of discussion so I have tried to think humanism and post-humanism very much in the context of Justice over the last ten years environmental justice in particular and that's since environmental justice tends to focus on The conflicts between different groups of humans in their access to nature and their risks from From natural catastrophes and contamination I've tried to twist that a little bit by focusing on the question of multi species justice that is how do we How do we a celebrate? Issues of justice against the background of vastly differing understandings of what justice constitutes in the context of our Interactions with nature, but how do we also think about the claims on our moral consideration of different groups of humans with very different degrees of privilege and Different groups of non-humans that is the plants and animals and the Micro-organisms that co-inhabit the planet with us and who are often left At the threshold when it comes to talking about justice some multi species justice is sort of a way of thinking Post-humanistically within a context of justice We are made of what we are not and are continually constructing ourselves out of the other Defining the other in terms of what it is. We are always already Optimizing for every time we say this is human or the human is this we are inevitably Injecting the outside that is the non-human the post human into our definition of the human Suggesting that any attempt at definition is futile then I should maybe just mention that we are Proud of the cover by Pierre Riech Which we think is Exactly being indeterminate in in in what it depicts in relation to the body and and And and the environment I mean if I think this this picture is a Wonderfully indeterminate in in in dealing with the post human and doesn't also fall into this trap with sometimes hunts the post human feel which is depicting Cyborg and bodies in a maybe two Technologically explicit manner. I think this is this is indeterminate in a really interesting way And to pick up on an extender's viewpoint and also one of the speeches this afternoon The title who's afraid of the post human? I think there's a lot of fear of the post human. I think part of the reason why the entropocene is It's popular Which is perhaps the wrong way of phrasing it, but it does have that property that it does not I Suggest that we are not the last advanced pieces on the earth that there might be some for someone after us that are more advanced And that's again one of the big thoughts of the post humanism which the arts Be it visual arts film literature and so on are not afraid of tackling actually find is thrilling in so many ways But which is something that we are much more reluctant to think of but which is I think as a current Situation with the way that technology is developing something that we really have to consider and think about some of the visionaries in the arts for example standing Kubrick in his movie 2001 space Odyssey where you really have all the post human and evolutionary themes in there Prior to the technologies that we today life of us being sort of primitive and way outdated But essentially striking all the same notes that we are trying to investigate today