This special issue brings together fresh critical reflections on the issue of human distinctiveness from both humanist and posthumanist perspectives, studying different secular, religious, and postsecular/postreligious anthropologies and ontologies. The contributions demonstrate that the discussions about human distinctiveness are not only alive in philosophy, ethics, religious studies, history of ideas, and theology, but that they are developing in new and interesting directions on both sides of the humanist-posthumanist divide in contemporary humanities.

In the last decade or so, we have been witnessing cultural, scientific, and intellectual developments that increasingly question the idea of human distinctiveness. Among such developments are the increasing scientific understanding of animal minds and societies in the fields such as ethology and anthrozoology, which exude new and deeper similarities between human and nonhuman animals; stunning developments in neuroprosthetics, robotics, and AI blur the line between the biological human and the machine; the increasing inclusion of animals and ecological actors into legal frameworks around the world; and a flourishing posthumanist cultural production in contemporary literature, visual arts, music, film, and philosophy. To be sure, anthropocentric humanism is still widely entrenched in both secular and religious cultures around the world and shows no signs of dying, even if it is often not expressed or considered explicitly but assumed, taken for granted, lived. But alternative visions of humanity and the world which displace humans from the centre of our moral and political concerns, and question human distinctiveness—at least in the sense of a distinctive and higher moral value in relation to other worldly beings and things—are growing in influence and visibility, both in scholarly literature and beyond.

The increasing dissatisfaction with the idea of human distinctiveness is easier to understand when we consider the structure of most Western philosophical and theological anthropologies. In order to give clear content to the concept of ‘the human’—or, until not so long ago, the concept of ‘man’—these anthropologies have been concerned especially with that which is supposed to set humans apart from those beings that appear most similar to us: ‘higher’ animals, angels, god(s), and more recently, human-like machines. Up until recently, it used to be common to claim that, unlike the other great apes, humans use a uniquely complex system of symbolic communication and create abstract concepts, unique in the biological world, in order to carve out a distinctive place of humans in relation to beings which are most like humans in terms of properties or capacities that matter to us the most. Two contributions to this special issue can be seen as contemporary project with a somewhat similar structure, both focusing on demarcating the difference between humans and some form of artificial intelligence which appears, in some respects, to be remarkably human-like. Noreen Herzfeld argues that the absence of emotions and anything significantly similar to the human embodiment or social life are the reasons why AI machines are incapable of lying, which makes humans distinctive in relation to even the most advanced machines (including the best deep learning AI and the large language models) (Herzfeld, 2023, this issue). In a more theological tone, Yusuf Çelik, adopting an Akbarian perspective and Ibn al-ʿArabī’s views on God and the imago Dei, respectively, relates human distinctiveness to the capacity ‘to expansively respond to God’s love to be recognized’, focusing on human practice of imitating the divine virtues and a distinctive kind of human ‘fragility and lack rather than exceptionalism’. What the artificial superintelligence lacks, according to Çelik, is that ‘fuller mimetic capacity’ characteristic for humans (Çelik, 2023, this issue).

Normally, it is only when the reflection on human distinctiveness is embedded in a large and systematic endeavour to order beings and realities hierarchically—that is, when it develops some variant of the ‘Great Chain of Being’ (Lovejoy, 1971)—that such reflection also refers to beings and realities that are very unlike us: distant animals, plants, fungi, ecosystems, materials, planetary systems, and sometimes also ‘non-intelligent artefacts’, social kinds, and abstract objects, such as buildings, money, or religious ideals, respectively. Even when an assertion of human distinctiveness is couched in terms of observable, factual differences, it is normally not primarily the question of science. Humanism is not and never has been a scientific theory. Furthermore, most variants of humanism are something much larger than just philosophical or theological anthropologies. This can already be seen in the medieval, ‘pre-humanist’, theological and legal ideas of human nature and human distinctiveness in relation to nonhuman animals. Analysing one of the famous medieval trials against pigs—that involving a pig Sustitia and her six piglets—in France in 1457 and using a history of ideas approach, Sven Gins in his contribution to the present special issue argues that animal trials were historical ideological laboratories in which ‘Western philosophy of law and philosophical anthropology intersect and, from the bottom-up, (re)invented particular notions about human distinctiveness’ (Gins, 2023, this issue). By putting Sustitia the pig on trial for murder, the premodern Europeans ‘acted out’ the Great Chain of Being, so to speak: the superiority of humans over beasts is affirmed by demonstrating the rationality of human animals (opting for a procedural trial rather than simple revenge) which pigs, as ‘lower beasts in God’s creaturely hierarchy’, do not possess (ibid.).

Later, both Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment humanism were large-scale social, ethical, religious (or anti-religious), political, even civilizational projects, encompassing art, education, ‘new politics’ of the time, reinterpretation of religion, and more. While the relationship between the Renaissance humanism and Religion (Christianity, and to smaller extent, Judaism and Paganism) was complex, the humanism since the fourteenth century—even the theological humanism of Pico della Mirandola—has always defined itself in opposition to some kind of dogmatism. Most variants of secular humanism today still share this spirit of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment humanism. They too exhibit an ambition to present a grand ethical, political, cultural, and civilizational narrative and vision. All of the above-mentioned, large humanist projects have kept the celebration and (self-)admiration of the excellence of human beings, achievements, and potentialities at its core. In recent years, this has been as clearly manifested in the scientistic humanism of Steven Pinker (2018), as it has been in A.C. Grayling’s anti-religious humanism that presents itself as philosophical wisdom of the ages, distilled for our times (Grayling, 2013).

However, we should not lose sight of the fact that humanism can also be understood in a deflated sense, i.e. as a much more modest and critical task of careful reflection about human distinctiveness. David Roden reminds us of this when he explains the distinction between humanism and anthropocentrism:

A philosopher is a humanist if she believes that humans are importantly distinct from non-humans and supports this distinctiveness claim with a philosophical anthropology: an account of the central features of human existence and their relations to similarly general aspects of nonhuman existence. … A humanist philosophy is anthropocentric [only] if it accords humans a superlative status that all or most nonhumans lack. (Roden, 2015, 10–11)

But even a minimal and careful humanism can exhibit a ‘panic of demarcation’, or at least an angst of protecting the ‘species boundaries’ between humans and non-humans (Haraway, 2004). A philosophical expression of such an angst—more concretely, a worry that distinctiveness of humanity is being eroded by technology, strands of philosophy and some cultural developments—is Jürgen Habermas’ so-called species ethics, developed in his book The Future of Human Nature (2003). Habermas’ post-metaphysical and ‘detranscendentalized’ conception of humanity is, in important aspects, deflated: it does not assume either free will or autonomy as definite or supposedly universal human traits, as does Kant’s transcendental humanism, but only as ‘precarious achievements’ made possible through intersubjective relations with other humans. Nevertheless, Habermas affirms human distinctiveness in a strong sense, positing that ‘only the members of this community can place one another under moral obligations and expect one another to conform to norms in their behaviour’ (Habermas, 2003). It is this kind of relational symmetry which, for Habermas, undergirds morality as such. If that is so, morality is impossible without the idea of exclusive moral equality among humans who treat each other as con-specifics. For this reason, Habermas argues for a certain ‘inviolability’ of human species, not necessarily in a biological but definitely in an ethical sense.

Although claiming much less than the grand humanisms of Renaissance or Enlightenment, or the humanism of a Pinker or a Grayling, Habermas’ species ethics is nevertheless vulnerable to a now classic critique which inspired the whole movement of critical posthumanism, the critique developed by Donna Haraway. She argues that the ‘embodied cross-species sociality’ (Haraway, 2004) between humans and some animals calls for a kind of reciprocal responsibility and demands a broadened conception of morality that includes them in the moral community. Haraway includes both animal ‘companion species’ and cyborgs in such a community which transcends that which is possible only among beings whose thought is linguistically and similarly structured and share the range of experiencing and needs typical for humans. Such notion of morality can, it is argued, ‘more fruitfully inform livable politics and ontologies in current life worlds’ (ibid.).

Beyond, and independently of, Haraway’s approach, the idea that some animals as moral agents—not only primates, and not only those Haraway calls our ‘companion species’ (Haraway, 2003), but rather all beings with social relations of a certain level of complexity—has been growing in different fields of scholarship. In ethological research, this view has been argued on the basis of the strong family resemblances in social behaviour of animals and humans (de Waal, 1997), while some philosophers—in the analytic and Wittgensteinian traditions, not just among the Continentals—have also argued that animals can be moral agents and not merely moral patients (Grušovnik, 2021). In the present special issue, we read Craig Taylor, who writes within the Wittgensteinian tradition of moral philosophy, arguing that the moral significance of the ‘shared creaturely fellowship’ between humans and many animals means that ‘the mutual recognition between such animals and us humans, which is at least part of our shared life …, can break down; either of us can fail to live up to the demands of this fellowship’ (Taylor, 2023, this issue). For Taylor, this does not extinguish all basis for human distinctiveness, since the shared life we have with other humans, Taylor claims, still involves a recognition of a distinctive value of humans qua humans which is different from the value we share with all animals on the basis of our moral fellowship with them.

In addition to animal ethics in combination with ethology, and cognitive science combined with philosophy of technology (most often, but not necessarily, focusing on AI), there are, of course, other ‘fields of entry’ into rethinking, questioning, or even abandoning the idea of human distinctiveness. A very significant field for such reflections has been the environmental ethics, especially the kind of ethics characteristic for deep ecology and eco-theology. In the last couple of decades, deep ecology and eco-theology have increasingly engaged with the new materialism as it has been developed in the works of thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, and Jane Bennett. In the current issue, the contributions of Petra Carlsson and Kocku von Stuckrad both analyse the significance of new materialist ontologies for the radical rethinking of human distinctiveness. Carlsson suggests that the two main ontological approaches of the material turn—the object-oriented ontology or OOO (esp. as argued by Timothy Morton) and vitalism (esp. as argued by Jane Bennett)—can ‘be viewed as part of a larger project to decolonize nature, to decolonize the material world’ from the immense grip of coloniality, inflicted upon it by human culture, power, and knowledge. She argues for combining this with a critical analysis of power and the ways it operates through and within the academic discourse, in order to liberate the academic discourse from that of ‘domination and exploitation’. By employing epistemic ‘tactic’, the idea of human distinctiveness can, therefore, be decolonised and reframed, not as a quest for the actual differences that would demarcate humans from the nonhuman world, but ‘as a discursive role given to the human in theoretical work and text production’ (Carlsson, 2024, this issue).

Not dissimilarly, von Stuckrad discusses a radical re-examination of some of the most central assumptions of European humanism. Engaging constructively with new materialism—in his case, that is especially Karen Barad’s ‘onto-epistem-ological’ theory of agential realism and animism—he argues for an alternative approach to epistemology that is capable to break free from the anthropocentric assumptions of the Kantian and related humanist epistemologies. However, this task is made more difficult than some posthumanists assume, since all ‘our tools of interpretation are themselves part of the diffraction that co-creates knowledges’. The solution is to recognize that ‘agential networks that constitute the situational intra-action do not only include humans, but they also include nonhuman actors on equal basis’ (von Stuckrad, 2023, this issue). Such an approach allows us, argues von Stuckrad, to take human distinctiveness or ‘specificity’ seriously without regarding humans as ‘the center of knowledge and power’ (ibid.).

Finally, and touching on several themes of this special issue in a unique way, Carool Kersten’s exploration of the literary and philosophical universe of Reza Nagarestani makes for exciting, almost dizzying reading. Kersten’s contribution traces the development of Nagarestani’s thought from his earlier writings on Islamic exotericism and apocalypticism, via his most well-known work in speculative fiction, Cyclonopedia, in which, among other things, we find the idea of non-human agency and equates the ontological status of humans and nonhumans, to his later development of the so-called inhuman accelerationism where Nagarestani moves beyond antihumanist nihilism of Nick Land and Ray Brassier (Nagarestani’s earlier influences) and defines the Inhuman ‘by the possibility of alternative ways of binding exteriority qua concept-less negativity’ (Kersten, 2023, this issue). Kersten argues that the term ‘inhuman’ enables Nagarestani to eventually achieve ‘a more accurate articulation of the question what it means to be human’, where ‘humankind’s ability to access symbols and give these a social and technological application in a continuous process of constructing and revising norms’ shows that being human is a practice of ‘constant exploration of who “we” are’ (ibid.). It is tempting to see a surprising similarity of this description of what it means to be human with Pico della Mirandola’s idea that what is unique to humans is that, unlike other creatures, we do not have a fixed nature in God’s preordained plan but are, instead, characterized by a striking underdetermination which allows for openness and freedom for co-creating who ‘we’ are (Bori, 2008). This does not, of course, mean that inhuman accelerationism pushes beyond the anti- and post-human philosophies in such a way as to ‘come full circle’ and land back in Pico-style humanism. What it does appear to suggest, however, is that the pull of the project of reflection on human distinctiveness does not easily go away even for thinkers, such as Nagarestani, who have already adopted philosophical approaches after the material turn that have thought they had left humanism far behind.