Scientific Humanisms and Technological Utopias

Abstract

In this essay, I will first briefly relate transhumanist imaginaries to genealogies and critiques of utopia-minded technological determinisms and technological sublimes. I will also relate such imaginaries to conceptions of transcendence active in the linked traditions of scientific humanism, naturalism, and cosmic religion. Against this backdrop, I will focus on some of the ways that transhumanism tends to stitch together conventionally secular and theological grammars, suggesting elements of instability in those designations and certain corollaries that may come with that instability.