Person and Post-Person: An Analysis of Jesús Ballesteros’s Thought on Transhumanism and Posthumanism

This article reconstructs the thought of Jesus Ballesteros regarding transhumanism and posthumanism, within the context of reflections on biotechnology, digitalization, and the crisis of personal identity. Ballesteros interprets transhumanism as a techno-gnostic attempt to transcend the human body through machines, genetic information, and artificial intelligence; he interprets posthumanism as a zoocentric and “dividualistic” dissolution of the human/non-human distinction. In both cases, personal identity is threatened. Ballesteros’s critique is grounded in an ontologically based personalist perspective, placing the defense of the human person, as an embodied, relational, and inviolable unity, at the heart of ethics, bioethics and biolaw.