Abstract
Murnane looks at the two major strains of posthumanism, as identified by Jeanine Thweatt-Bates, in relation to Rand: Donna Haraway’s cyborg, and the transhuman. Haraway’s cyborg is a socialist construction. In contrast, the transhuman—a theory and a practice put forward by Max More and the Extropians, Nick Bostrom, James Hughes, and others—hews to the legacy of individualism. Murnane briefly demonstrates Rand’s difference from Haraway. Then, he investigates how Rand’s veneration of the productive individual, and of capitalism, strongly impacted Extropianism, the earliest organized transhumanist movement. Also considered here is how Nietzsche’s Übermensch informs discussion of both the Ayn Rand hero and the transhuman. Thus, Rand’s work possesses philosophical similarities with transhumanism, and she has also directly influenced transhumanist thought.
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Murnane, B. (2018). The Posthuman and the Objectivist. In: Ayn Rand and the Posthuman. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90853-3_3
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