Bodiless

(Reblogged from Identities Journal Lockdown series # 30) Can we afford us any longer? Bodies hurt too much. Their pleasures are less trauma than a geologic diarrhoea. It’s shameful a vaulting planetary economy still uses us – like discovering a cache of unused condoms under pristine sand. No wonder we dream disconnection, communism, or apocalypse; […]

Technosphere

Interesting project. Seems to tie in nicely with the new substantivist position taken up here and in Posthuman Life “Research ProjectThe twentieth-century celebrated technology as a way to achieve planetary unity and control. Yet today technics, nature, and human activity seem to combine in increasingly disorienting, uncontrolled compositions in which once-reliable distinctions lose their stability. How […]

Pluralism, Good Manners and The Idea of a Common World

People and cultures have some non-overlapping beliefs. Some folk believe that there is a God, some that there is no God, some that there are many gods. Some people believe that personal autonomy is a paramount value, while others feel that virtues like honour and courage take precedence over personal freedom. These core beliefs are […]

Kant, Rawls and Sandel

These slides summarise aspects of Kant’s philosophy to which Sandel alludes in his criticism of Rawls in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice and list some problems supposedly generated by analogies between the two thinkers.   Liberalism communitarianism b_comp (1)http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=liberalismcommunitarianismbcomp1-120601042851-phpapp02&stripped_title=liberalism-communitarianism-bcomp-1&userName=DavidRoden View more presentations from David Roden.

Hacking Humans

  Here’s Scott Bakker with a most eloquent statement of his pessimism about our far technological, posthuman prospects: Brain science. The reason why I fear that ‘cognitive augmentation’ will be catastrophic turns on the way I see psychology and neuroscience slowly confirming what I think should be humanity’s greatest scientific fear: the possibility that meaning and morality […]