We have never been Cartesian

Abstract Humanism is the traditional approach in many disciplines, including history, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology. Humanists tend to assume that there is an important distinction between the knowing subject and the rest of the world. Posthumanism challenges this assumption, asking us to examine how the distinction between subject and object is constructed in the first place. To do so, posthumanists argue that we must abandon our traditional resources for understanding the knowing subject. In its place, we must adopt a radical new notion of agency that encompasses humans and nonhumans. This paper argues that, although posthumanism teaches us a valuable lesson, the real problem lies not with humanism, but with Cartesianism. To show this, I develop a new version of humanism by drawing on two anti-Cartesian strands within recent philosophy of mind: the extended mind thesis and mental fictionalism. The result is a view that allows us to retain our traditional resources for understanding the knowing subject, while recognising that the nature of that subject can change over time.