Prof. Steve Fuller on Transhumanism: Ask yourself what is human?
Prof. Steve Fuller is the author of 25 books including a trilogy relating to the idea of a ‘post-’ or ‘trans-‘ human future, and most recently, Nietzschean Meditations: Untimely Thoughts at the Dawn of the Transhuman Age. He has an incredibly broad amount of knowledge from a diversity of disciplines and I have to admit that I had a total blast interviewing him. In fact, I feel we could have easily gone for another 2 hours while still having fun. And so there is a great chance I will ask Prof. Fuller for another interview very soon indeed.
During this 2h 15 min interview with Steve Fuller we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: the social foundations of knowledge and our shared love of books; Transhumanism as a scientistic way of understanding who we are; the proactionary vs the precautionary principle; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Omega Point; Julian and Aldous Huxley’s diverging takes on Transhumanism; David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative as a concept straight out of Brave New World; the concept and meaning of being human, transhuman and posthuman; humanity’s special place in the cosmos; my Socratic Test of (Artificial) Intelligence; Transhumanism as a materialist theology; Elon Musk, cosmism and populating Mars; de-extinction, genetics and the sociological elements of a given species; the greatest issues that humanity is facing today; AI, the Singularity and armed conflict; morphological freedom and becoming human; longevity and the Death is Wrong argument; Zoltan Istvan and the Transhumanist Wager; Transhumanism as a way of entrenching rather than transcending one’s original views…
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Who is Steve Fuller?
Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK.
Originally trained in history, philosophy and sociology of science at Columbia, Cambridge and Pittsburgh, Fuller is best known for his foundational work in the field of ‘social epistemology’, which is the name of a quarterly journal that he founded in 1987 as well as the first of his nearly 25 books. From 2011 to 2014 he published a trilogy of books relating to the idea of a ‘post-’ or ‘trans-‘ human future, all published with Palgrave Macmillan: Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human Past, Present and Future (2011), Preparing for Life in Humanity 2.0 (2012) and (with Veronika Lipinska) The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism (2014).
Prof. Fuller’s most recent books include Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History (Routledge 2015), The Academic Caesar (Sage 2016), Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game (Anthem 2018) and most recently, Nietzschean Meditations: Untimely Thoughts at the Dawn of the Transhuman Age (Schwabe 2019). His works have been translated into around thirty languages. He was awarded a D.Litt. by the University of Warwick in 2007 for sustained lifelong contributions to scholarship. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the UK Academy of Social Sciences, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Prof. Steve Fuller on Transhumanism: Ask yourself what is human?
Prof. Steve Fuller on Transhumanism: Ask yourself what is human? was originally published on transhumanity.net