Posthumanist philosophy is essentially a way of interpreting the human condition, which does so by questioning some conceptual tenets of the humanistic tradition. The point is not to hail a posthuman future – that is to say, a pseudo-speciation to come – but rather to revise the ideal of man brought forward by the humanist revolution.

The latter, in fact, saw man as a disjointed, autopoietic, focal and self-determined figure that inevitably lacked any hybrid and conjugative dimension. Man was considered pure, autonomous and, above all, ontologically defined and opposed to the whole non-human universe.

From the humanist perspective, the human is, in fact, an autarchic entity, impervious to the world, the bearer of a universal metric perspective that subsumes the whole of reality, positioned at the center, conceivable iuxta propria principia and in charge of his own destiny.

This view of man is what is now being challenged. Indeed, the post-human age is not the simple chimeric realization of a so-called “post-man”, but the acknowledgment of the hybrid condition of the human being.

In short, the posthumanist perspective questions some assumptions of the humanist tradition that seem to be wavering in the face of some major changes that have occurred in the twentieth century.

To mention some: (i) the full establishment of Darwinian evolutionism, which has brought the theme of animality back to the center of ontological reflection, weakening the “human vs animal” antinomy; (ii) the development of a thought focused on complexity and in particular on the relational and systemic dynamics in the construction of predicational emergence; (iii) the digital revolution, which has turned the workshop of analogical instrumentation into a single organismic reality, endowed with the same language and accessible in all sectors of human life, creating a new dimensionality – the technosphere; (iv) the advent of cognitive sciences and neurobiology, which showed the limits of human intelligence (bias) with respect to computational machines, the chemistry of neuromodulation, the psychotropic possibilities, and the many kinds of knowledge present in the animal world; (v) the great ecological crisis, which affects entire biomes causing mass extinctions, but which puts into question the very survival of man on the planet due to global warming, the carbon cycle, the water supply, the demographic boom and the resource deficit.

What emerges from all this is an anthropo-decentralizing process that inevitably clashes with the anthropocentric exaltation that has characterized Western thought since the fifteenth century.

In this sense, the twentieth century has been as a century of transition, a time of inevitable problems, wide-ranging philosophical shifts, and interpretative doubts about the occurring phenomena, showing the inadequacy of traditional answers at the very time in which technoscientific research acquired unexpected and unforeseen potential.

The bioethics of the late twentieth century has also shown how the clumsy attempt to face the new challenges with the old conceptual and value tools could not provide valid or exhaustive guidelines.

In the same way, while neurobiology showed the complex specialization of the phylogenetic predicates of Homo sapiens and evolutionism showed that there is no regressive entity in the adaptive supply chain, humanistic anthropology continued to take refuge in the myth of human

The humanistic triangulation, based on the “animal-man-angel” relational geometry, was shifted onto that of “man-animal-machine”; this implied not only the replacement of the angelic dimension with the mechanical one, but the centrality of the animal as opposed to man.

The post-humanistic perspective is therefore first and foremost a philosophy of animality, where to understand or attain the cyber – organic dimension the human being must first recognize his own animality and rely on the animal reference.

The post-humanist perspective therefore offers an eco-ontological or relational ontology approach, by which the human body is open and welcoming rather than closed-off and impervious, albeit enhanced by the techno-therianthropic dimension.

Non-human otherness, like technology, is no longer considered an external improvement, something prosthetic- ergonomic – which fits the body like a glove, keeping the hand pristine and preserved in its essential characters – but rather metamorphic.

In other words, the body adapts to technology, and the latter is somatized: hence the hybridization and the inevitably contaminated condition of the human being.