zoo or letters not about things

Is the spectre of humanism badly raised? I think that we could understand the interesting philosophical perspectives on humanism and antihumanism, which is not to forget to mention the casual and frequently confused use of terms such as rights, anthropocentrism, humanitarianism and so on which guarantees confusion about the status of the human and the non-human relative to other discourses and disciplines. For example how contemporary humanism relate to the various sciences ? Is science merely what modern and post-modern humans do, or is it instead a demonstration of difference which shows how unimportant humanity is at the level of the cosmos ? What might be it’s status in relation to the political ? We obviously can still speak of progressive emancipation in politics just as we can talk of the reverse, but at the same time this is haunted by the ludicrous neo-religious belief in an anthropocentric destiny?
It’s difficult to produce a clear separation of contemporary humanisms and antihumanisms but it’s feasible to suggest some important moments of contemporary humanism:
• A universalist commitment to human rights, whereby each individual is endowed with certain negative and positive freedoms, both legalistic and ethical.
• The existentialist belief in the nature of human choice that is often falsely presented as being a unique human possession.
• The scientific commitment to the capacities of technology and scientific research to provide benefits to humans and non-humans alike.
Antihumanism can perhaps be thought of as containing the following key concepts and results
• Attempts to differentiate the human from the non-human are a sign of the post-religious remains haunting our understanding of the human, and which usually fail to point out that there is very little that differentiates one species (assuming you accept that species exist as meaningful concepts and differences); genetically and pragmatically from other non-human-animals (remember that none of the following are human specific: tool-use, war, sexual difference, sociality, politics, morality, aggression, symbolic communication, laughing, crying, language and so on).
• Any human thinking that poses the centrality of human needs and concerns is either a speciesism or it pays no heed to the contingency of the human as a species. Most importantly it neglects the indifference that nature and the cosmos has towards us.
• The concept that links the idea of history and progress which implies in some way that human subjects or humanity might be in some way the subject of history cannot account for the randomness of man-made disasters and natural events.