Wolfgang Schirmacher, Ph.D., (b. 1944) is Arthur Schopenhauer Chair and Program Director of the Media and Communications Division at the European Graduate School EGS. He is an internationally active philosopher of technology with an emphasis on media, gene technology, and neuroscience. Wolfgang Schirmacher is President of the International Schopenhauer Association, Chair of the Artificial Life Group, Director of International Relations of the Philosophy and Technology Studies Center, Polytechnic University, New York, and a former Core Faculty Member of the Media Studies Graduate Program, New School for Social Research.

The philosophy of Wolfgang Schirmacher is as much about living as it is about thinking. Strongly influenced by the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, having written his doctoral dissertation (Ereignis Technik) on Heidegger's philosophy of technology, Wolfgang Schirmacher proposes a new form of human existence in the post-technological era in which life is intrinsically artificial and the human being has become Homo generator. A radically affirmative being surviving the death of God, Homo generator anthropomorphically generates worlds without the need for any transcendental purpose outside of life itself. Such a life can make no claim for authenticity beyond itself, and in this sense it is artificial. 'An artificial life is led as the art of life, by a person who exists authentically, whose ethic is anthropologically characterized by openness' (Schirmacher). The hitherto unpublished book Homo Generator is forthcoming in German.

Wolfgang Schirmacher is the author of several books: Ereignis Technik: Heidegger und die Frage nach der Technik (1980), Technik und Gelassenheit. Zeitkritik nach Heidegger (1983), Zeit Der Ernte: Studien zum Stand der Schopenhauer-Forschung (1983), Schopenhauer (1985), Schopenhauer Aktualität: Ein Philosoph wird neu gelesen (1988), Schopenhauer In Der Postmoderne (1989), and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche Und Die Kunst (1992). He is the editor of Schopenhauer-Studien and New York Studies in Media Philosophy, and has edited the following volumes in English: Schopenhauer: Philosophical Writings (1994), German Essays on Science in the Nineteenth Century (1996), German Essays on Science in the Twentieth Century (1996), German Socialist Philosophy: Feuerbach, Marx, Engels (1996), German Twentieth Century Philosophy: The Frankfurt School (2000), and German Essays on Psychology (2000), all published as part of the German Library by Continuum International Publishing Group.