O transhumanismo nas revistas científicas brasileiras: uma revisão sistemática de literatura

Abstract

Transhumanism is an intellectual movement that seeks to alter and augment human capacities - physicals, psychologicals, morals - beyond its biological limits by means of technology. One can say that it was Julian Huxley, in 1951, who used the term in the way in which it is comprehended by the movement currently. Even though transhumanism had its roots in mythological and literary narratives, in humanist philosophy and scientific-technological advances since modern science, some authors think of it from a sociopolitical perspective. Thus, this movement gained momentum in the second half of XX century in a moment of decline of the big political narratives. However, the theme is still little discussed in Brazil. This paper seeks to supplement a literature gap doing a systematic review for the purpose of mapping the transhumanist theme in brazilian scientific journals. Four descriptors were utilized: “transhumanismo”, “transumanismo”, “trans-humanismo” and transhumanism, in SciELO database and in the aggregator of databases Portal CAPES. All the works found in journals edited in Brazil were selected, without restriction of idiom or publication date. The only exclusion criterion was of the papers that did not contain any graphical variation of the term in the body of the text. All articles that obeyed these criteria were taken as results for the mapping that this work proposes. 44 articles were found in total. The oldest article was published in 2009, being the year of 2014 a second inflexion point from which productions became more constant and numerous. 2020 was the year with the most publications: nine. It is notable that 2020 was the coronavirus pandemics year, as well as a special about the theme in Revista Aurora de Filosofia. Ten tematchics areas of journals were found in which the articles were published. The highlight was philosophy, with 14 papers, corresponding to 31,82% from articles total. 81,82% of the papers were published in journals with the best qualis - A1, A2, and B1, which indicates that the discussion about the matter have been taking place in relevant journals. By the papers authorship, we saw that 11 (25%) were authors that published more than one paper, while the remainder had authored only one paper. The percentage of brazilian authored papers was 65,91%, exactly the same of works published in portuguese. Even the foreigner authorship as the publications in other idioms corresponded to 34,09%, a proportion that we considered relevant. Two criteria were utilized to quantitatively measure the relevance of the therm transhumanism in the present work: that of conferring if the word appeared in the title, abstract or any keywords and that to quantificate how many times any graphical variation of the word appeared in the body of the text. Only in nine papers, 20,45% from the total, that was not found transhumanism in one of these strategic spots and that transhumanism appeared less than ten times in the body of the text, which indicates a good use of the descriptors to the goal of this work. Lastly, nine foreigner authors' works repeated at least five times in the papers references, while five works with brazilian authorship repeated themselves two times, an important data to understand by which means a brazilian transhumanist discourse is produced.