ABSTRACT
The terms 'humanism', 'transhumanism' and 'posthumanism' are widely used among philosophers, critical theorists and professional futurists, but often in ways that are insufficiently nuanced. The suppression of genuine post-human possibilities in both critical posthumanist and transhumanist is an important philosophical failure and not simply a semantic oversight. A humanist philosophy is anthropocentric if it accords humans a superlative status that all or most nonhumans lack. In Existentialism and Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that human existence precedes its essence. This means that humans are radically free and self-defining agents whose existence is prior to any concept of what they ought to be. Aristotelian ethics provides a good example of moderate anthropocentricism. In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle claims that, among living things, only humans are responsive to reason. Badmington argues that this separation of mind and machine is less hygienic than it might appear, for it implies that a material system with the complexity to generate flexible performances would be functionally rational.
