Educational posthumanism at the limits of modern humanism: Logos, pathos, and the circulation between humanism and posthumanism

Abstract

This collective essay, contributed to a special issue on East Asian engagements with philosophy of education, situates educational posthumanism where modern humanism meets its limits. Modern educational and social institutions have been constructed on logos-reason, technical rationality, predictability, calculability, and controllability-to secure safe and stable human lives. Through shared norms, rational procedures, and standardized judgment, they have pursued universality, equality, and fairness. The resulting impasse is here framed as a tension between logos and pathos that exceeds it-vulnerability, dependency, finitude, the excess of the gift, and contingency. Seven short essays engage two interrelated educational problems. First, as human-made technologies expand beyond human control, how can we take ethical responsibility for these technologies and their consequences? The first three essays by Chia-Ling Wang, Kuan-hsun Wu, and Seung-woo Cho & Jin Choi treat AI and digital infrastructures as unavoidable conditions and ask how humanist ethical and critical orientations can be sustained through attention to concrete situations of learning and teaching. Second, the latter four essays ask how education might respond to marginalized human and nonhuman others without demanding complete assimilation. Ami Ogasawara and Akane Takasu seek possibilities that modern humanist education could not recognize under posthuman conditions. Kazuaki Yoda and Michelle Ocriciano ask what may have been left behind before, or within, modernity, and pursue a dialogue and a sense of circulation between humanism and posthumanism. This collective essay was further enriched by the open reviews of the distinguished scholars Petar Jandri & cacute; and Michael A. Peters.