Introduction 1 Who are we at the beginning of the 21 st century? We are a globalized humanity driven by science and technology no less than a tribalized humanity canni- balized by all kinds of conflicts and wars based on oil, religion, and mutual exploitation. Who is the ‘we’ in this question? In whose name and by whom is this question stated? Based on what and whose values and interests? What is the self-understanding of humanity in our time? Whose time? Facing what challenges? We know today that the hominisation (anthro- pogenesis) goes back up to more than 6 million years ago through various ramifications. Our family tree shows a deep and complex genetic intertwinement not only with other primates but with all living be- 1 Keynote paper at the international conference “Information Ethics: Future of Humanities,” organized by the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education, and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, St Cross College, Oxford, 8-9 December 2010. First pub- lished in: Rafael Capurro / John Holgate (eds.), Messages and Messengers. Angeletics as an Approach to the Phenomenology of Communication, Munich 2011, 161-179. ings. 2 The natural evolution of the human race or ‘hominisation’ and the cultural evolution or ‘human- isation’ are related but of different order. The dis- tinction between nature and culture has become blurred nowadays not only because we have learnt to transform nature according to our needs and desires, but also because we are able to manipulate, change and even produce new kinds of living beings. We are in a process of transforming ourselves after having learnt – or believing we have learnt – to dominate, but in fact often to destroy nature in the name of man, placing ourselves at the center of reality. We live in a time of the crisis of humanisms that have a long history recently addressed by Charles Taylor in his monumental book A Secular Age. 3 What answers do we as ethicists give to this chal- lenge that “calls for thinking” 4 today? I consider this 2 See the eleven papers on Ardipithecus Ramidus in: Science, Special Edition, October 2, 2009. 3 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge MA 2007. 4 Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken?, Tübingen 1971 (Engl. Transl. What calls for Thinking?, in:Basic Writings. Martin Heidegger, ed. by David Farrell, London 1993, 365-391). Journal of New Frontiers in Spatial Concepts KIT Scientific Publishing ISSN 1868-6648 | Volume 4(2012), 1-12 http://ejournal.uvka.de/spatialconcepts/archives/1362 Beyond Humanisms Rafael Capurro International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE) (http://icie.zkm.de/), E-Mail: rafael@capurro.de Abstract In the first part of this paper a short history of Western humanisms (Socrates, Pico della Mirandola, Des- cartes, Kant) is presented. As far as these humanisms rest on a fixation of the ‘humanum’ they are meta- physical, although they might radically differ from each other. The second part deals with the present debate on trans- and posthumanism in the context of some breath-taking developments in science and technology. Angeletics, a theory of messengers and messages, intends to give an answer to the leading question of this paper, namely: ‘what does it mean to go beyond humanisms?’ The conclusion exposes briefly an ethics of hospitality and care from an angeletic perspective. Keywords: humanism, posthumanism, angeletics, ethics, metaphysics Manuscript received 20 December 2011, revised 10 January 2012, accepted 19 January 2012. Copyright note: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.