Phenomenology is based on a doctrine of evidence that accords a crucial role to the human capacity to conceptualise or ‘intuit’ features of their experience. However, there are grounds for holding that some experiential entities to which phenomenologists are committed must be intuition-transcendent or ‘dark’. Examples of dark phenomenology include the very fine-grained perceptual discriminations which Thomas Metzinger calls ‘Raffman Qualia’ and, crucially, the structure of temporal awareness. It can be argued, on this basis, that phenomenology is in much the (...) same epistemological relationship to its own subject matter as descriptive (i.e. ‘phenomenological’) physics or biology are to physical and biological reality: phenomenology cannot tell us what phenomenology is really ‘about’. This does not mean we should abjure phenomenology. It implies, rather, that the domain of phenomenology is not the province of a self-standing, autonomous discipline but must be investigated with any empirically fruitful techniques that are open to us (e.g. computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, etc.). Finally, it entails that while a naturalized phenomenology should be retained as a descriptive, empirical method, it should not be accorded transcendental authority. (shrink)

We imagine posthumans as humans made superhumanly intelligent or resilient by future advances in nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science. Many argue that these enhanced people might live better lives; others fear that tinkering with our nature will undermine our sense of our own humanity. Whoever is right, it is assumed that our technological successor will be an upgraded or degraded version of us: Human 2.0. Posthuman Life argues that the enhancement debate projects a human face onto an empty (...) screen. We do not know what will happen and, not being posthuman, cannot anticipate how posthumans will assess the world. If a posthuman future will not necessarily be informed by our kind of subjectivity or morality the limits of our current knowledge must inform any ethical or political assessment of that future. Posthuman Life develops a critical metaphysics of posthuman succession and argues that only a truly speculative posthumanism can support an ethics that meets the challenge of the transformative potential of technology. (shrink)

In his 1993 article ‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How to survive in the posthuman era’ the computer scientist Virnor Vinge speculated that developments in artificial intelligence might reach a point where improvements in machine intelligence result in smart AI’s producing ever-smarter AI’s. According to Vinge the ‘singularity’, as he called this threshold of recursive self-improvement, would be a ‘transcendental event’ transforming life on Earth in ways that unaugmented humans are not equipped to envisage. In this paper I argue Vinge’s idea (...) of a technologically led intelligence explosion is philosophically important because it requires us to consider the prospect of a posthuman condition succeeding the human one. What is the ‘humanity’ to which the posthuman is ‘post’? Does the possibility of a posthumanity presuppose that there is a ‘human essence’, or is there some other way of conceiving the human-posthuman difference? I argue that the difference should be conceived as a historically emergent disconnection between individuals, not in terms of the presence or lack of essential properties. I also suggest that these individuals should not be conceived in narrow biological terms but in ‘wide’ terms permitting biological, cultural and technological relations of descent between human and posthuman. Finally, I consider the ethical implications of this metaphysics of the posthuman. If, as I claim, the posthuman difference is not one between kinds but between individuals, we cannot specify its nature a priori but only a posteriori. Thus the only way to evaluate the posthuman condition would be to witness the emergence of posthumans. The implications of this are somewhat paradoxical. We are not currently in a position to evaluate the posthuman condition. Since there are no posthumans, the condition of posthumanity is not defined. However, posthumans could result from some iteration of our current technical activity, so we have an interest in understanding what they might be like. It follows that we have an interest in making or becoming posthumans. (shrink)

Musicians and theorists such as the radiophonic pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, view the products of new audio technologies as devices whereby the experience of sound can be displaced from its causal origins and achieve new musical or poetic resonances. Accordingly, the listening experience associated with sonic art within this perspective is ‘acousmatic’; the process of sound generation playing no role in the description or understanding of the experience as such. In this paper I shall articulate and defend a position according to (...) which an adequate phenomenology of auditory experience must refer to mechanisms of sound generation. This position is shown to follow from a phenomenology of sounds as located events and a physicalist account of auditory properties as features of the temporal development of such events. (shrink)

I distinguish two theses regarding technological successors to current humans (posthumans): an anthropologically bounded posthumanism (ABP) and an anthropologically unbounded posthumanism (AUP). ABP proposes transcendental conditions on agency that can be held to constrain the scope for “weirdness” in the space of possible posthumans a priori. AUP, by contrast, leaves the nature of posthuman agency to be settled empirically (or technologically). Given AUP there are no “future proof” constraints on the strangeness of posthuman agents. -/- In Posthuman Life I defended (...) AUP via a critique of Donald Davidson’s work on intentionality and a “naturalistic deconstruction” of transcendental phenomenology (See also Roden 2013). In this paper I extend this critique to Robert Brandom’s account of the relationship between normativity and intentionality in Making It Explicit (MIE) and in other writings. -/- Brandom’s account understands intentionality in terms of the capacity to undertake and ascribe inferential normative commitments. It makes “first class agency” dependent on the ability to participate in discursive social practices. It implies that posthumans – insofar as they qualify as agents at all – would need to be social and discursive beings. -/- The problem with this approach, I will argue, is that it replicates a problem that Brandom discerns in Dennett’s intentional stance approach. It tells us nothing about the conditions under which a being qualifies as a potential interpreter and thus little about the conditions for meaning, understanding or agency. -/- I support this diagnosis by showing that Brandom cannot explain how a non-sapient community could bootstrap itself into sapience by setting up a basic deontic scorekeeping system without appealing (along with Davidson and Dennett) to the ways in which an idealized observer would interpret their activity. -/- This strongly suggests that interpretationist and pragmatist accounts cannot explain the semantic or the intentional without regressing to assumptions about ideal interpreters or background practices whose scope they are incapable of delimiting. It follows that Anthropologically Unbounded Posthumanism is not seriously challenged by the claim that agency and meaning are “constituted” by social practices. -/- AUP implies that we can infer no claims about the denizens of “Posthuman Possibility Space” a priori, by reflecting on the pragmatic transcendental conditions for semantic content. We thus have no reason to suppose that posthuman agents would have to be subjects of discourse or, indeed, members of communities. The scope for posthuman weirdness can be determined by recourse to engineering alone. (shrink)

In my book Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (Routledge 2014) I set out a recursive account of the conditions for posthumanity: the Disconnection Thesis (DT). The DT states that a being is posthuman iff: -/- 1) It has ceased to belong to WH (the "Wide Human" socio-technical network) as a result of technical alteration; 2) Or it is a wide descendent of such a being (outside WH) (PHL 112) -/- Jon Cogburn's "Galapagos objection" attempts to show (...) that there could be life forms whose evolution satisfies the disconnection criteria but which lack the degree of autonomy that elicits our moral concern with the prospect posthumans. In this post I respond to Jon's objection and briefly discuss other philosophical objections to my account of posthumanity. -/- Roden, David. 2012. “The Disconnection Thesis”. In The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment, A. Eden, J. Søraker, J. Moor & E. Steinhart (eds), 281–98. London: Springer. -/- Roden, David. 2014. Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. London: Routledge. -/- . (shrink)

Most contemporary readings of Derrida’s work situate it within a transcendental tradition of philosophical enquiry explicitly critical of naturalistic accounts of knowledge and mind. I argue that Derrida provides the naturalist with some of the philosophical resources needed to rebut transcendental critiques of naturalism, in particular the phenomenological critiques which derive from Husserl’s philosophy. I do this by showing: a) that Derrida’s account of temporality as differance undermines phenomenological accounts of the meaning of naturalistic theories and assumptions; and b) that (...) it is itself both usable and interpretable within the naturalistic framework of current cognitive science. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the anti-reductionist thesis supports a case for the uselessness of intentional idioms in the interpretation of highly flexible, self-modifying agents that I refer to as “hyperplastic” agents. An agent is hyperplastic if it can make arbitrarily fine changes to any part of its functional or physical structure without compromising its agency or its capacity for hyperplasticity. Using Davidson’s anomalous monism (AM) as an exemplar of anti-reductionism, I argue that AM implies that no hyperplastic could (...) use intentional psychology to predict its future intentional states or the psychological consequences of self-alterations. This is because AM implies there would be no laws allowing the hyperplastic to infer the psychological consequences of its self-alterations. This implies that no generalisations linking current to future psychological states would hold either - these could always be defeated by a self-intervention carried out by the hyperplastic. By the same token, neither hyperplastics nor human interpreters could use intentional psychology to understand the behaviour of other hyperplastics. Radical interpretation of hyperplastic agents - if such there were - would be impossible. It follows that were humans to become hyperplastic posthumans, intentional psychology would have to be instrumentally eliminated because neither the capacity nor the linguistic idiom for attributing propositional attitudes would retain predictive or hermeneutic utility. (shrink)

I distinguish the ethics of transhumanism from a related metaphysical position which I refer to as “speculative posthumanism.” Speculative posthumanism holds that posthumans might be radically non-human and thus unintelligible in human terms. I claim that this transcendence can be viewed as analogous to that of the thing-in-itself in Kantian and post-Kantian European philosophy. This schema implies an impasse for transhumanism because, while the radically non-human or posthuman would elude evaluation according to transhumanist principles such as personal autonomy or liberal (...) freedom, it is morally unacceptable for transhumanists to discount the possible outcomes of their favoured policies. I then consider whether the insights of critical posthumanists, who employ a cyborg perspective on human-technology couplings, can dissolve this impasse by “deconstructing” the opposition between the human and its prospective posthuman successors. By exhibiting its logical basis in the postructuralist philosophies of Derrida and Deleuze, I show that the cyborg perspective is consistent with both cyborg humanism and a modified speculative posthumanism. This modified account treats the alterity of the posthuman as a historically emergent feature of human and posthuman multiplicities that must be understood through their technical or imaginative synthesis, not in relation to a transcendental conception of the human. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger and Jacques Ellul propounded substantivist accounts of technology which rejected the received instrumentalist view of technology according to which only the ends to which technologies are applied can be evaluated. In opposition to instrumentalism, they claimed that modern technology involves a displacement of non-technological values or (in Heidegger’s case) other ways of relating to Being. The theory of technical autonomy that Jacques Ellul sets out in The Technological Society is distinguished from Heidegger’s brand of substantivism, however, in providing (...) a non-transcendental, naturalistic account of the conditions under which technique displaces non-technical values in modern societies. I show how Ellul’s theory resolves into two components – 1) a theory of the essence of technique given in terms of the notion of efficiency and 2) a theory of the conditions for autonomy - and set out some criticisms of Ellul’s essentialism by way of an analysis of the concept of efficiency. I argue that component (2) is incompatible with his essentialism because it is committed to techniques being replicable across different contexts of use. I then use Jacques Derrida’s notions of iterability and generalised writing to develop a theory of technical replicability which accounts for the historical particularity of techniques and for their mechanism-dependent replicability. I support this account of technical iteration by showing how it allows explanatory connections to be made between specific mechanisms of technical replication and the fragile cultural forms or phenomenologies they support. I then use it to reformulate Ellul’s theory without its essentialist commitments and claim that the background assumptions of the resultant theory are sufficiently weak to render it plausible. However, while this supports certain aspects of Ellul’s original thesis, I argue that the modified theory no longer implies a hegemonic role for technique. While technical process may be self-augmenting and uncontrollable (much as Ellul describes it) there are no grounds for claiming that it prescribes a particular set of values. (shrink)

_Derrida_ (2002) Directed by Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick UK Premiere: 31 January 2003.

In this essay I argue for a constructivist account of the entities composing the object languages of Davidsonian truth theories and a quotational account of the reference from metalinguistic expressions to interpreted utterances. I claim that ‘radical quotation’ requires an ontology of repeatable events with strong similarities to Derrida's account of iterable events. In part one I summarise Davidson's account of interpretation and Olav Gjelsivk's arguments to the effect that the syntactic individuation of linguistic objects is only workable if interpreters (...) make richer assumptions about semantic properties than Davidson can tolerate. In part two I show that the objectivist account of syntactic objects which Gjelsivk's arguments presuppose is incompatible with one corollary of Davidsonian semantic indeterminacy: namely, the relativity of language to interpretative scheme. In place of this an account of radical interpretation is presented in which a quotational theory of metalinguistic reference furnishes the requisite relativity. In part three I argue that this account requires that particular utterance events must be repeatable to be radically quotable and give reasons why particularity and repeatability are not incompatible. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “How Is That Fair? How Is That in Any Way Fair?” “We Make Our Own Laws Now, Our Own Justice” “The Shape of Things to Come?” Notes.

Ray Brassier's "Unfree Improvisation/Compulsive Freedom" is a terse but insightful discussion of the notion of freedom in improvisation. He argues that we should view freedom not as the determination of an act from outside the causal order, but as the reflective self-determination by action within the causal order. This requires a system that acts in conformity to rules but can represent and modify these rules with implications for its future behaviour. Brassier does not provide a detailed account of how self-determination (...) works in improvisation. His text implies that the act of improvisation involves an encounter between rule-governed rationality and idiomatic patterns or causes but does not specify how such rules operate in music, what their nature is or how the encounter between rules and more rudimentary “pattern-governed” behaviour occurs. I will argue that, in any case, there are no such rules to be had. Instead, claims about what is permissible or implied in musical processes index highly-context sensitive perceptual and affective responses to musical events. I develop this picture in the light of recent accounts of predictive processing and active inference in cognitive science. This account provides an alternate way of expressing Brassier’s remarks on the relationship between music and history in “Unfree Improvisation” one that eschews normative discourse in favour of an ontology of social and biological assemblages, their affects, and the processes they entrain. This adjustment is of more than aesthetic interest. Brassier’s text suggests that the temporality of the improvising act models an insurgent relation to time: specifically, the remorseless temporality explored in his writings on Prometheanism and Radical Enlightenment. I will conclude by using use this analogy to elaborate the idea of a posthuman agency adapted to a hypermodern milieu of self-augmenting technological change. (shrink)

Finding avenues for collaboration and engagement between the arts and the sciences (natural and social) was a central theme of investigation for the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and Public Engagement programme at BrisSynBio, a BBSRC/EPSRC Synthetic Biology Research Centre that is now part of the Bristol BioDesign Institute at University of Bristol (UK). The reflections and experiments that appear in this dossier are a sample of these investigations and are contributed by Maria Fannin, Katy Connor and David (...) class='Hi'>Roden. Darian Meacham coordinated and introduces the dossier. (shrink)

Part of the appeal of the biological approach to personal identity is that it does not have to countenance spatially coincident entities. But if the termination thesis is correct and the organism ceases to exist at death, then it appears that the corpse is a dead body that earlier was a living body and distinct from but spatially coincident with the organism. If the organism is identified with the body, then the unwelcome spatial coincidence could perhaps be avoided. It is (...) argued that such an identification would be a mistake. A living organism has a different part/whole relationship and persistence conditions than the alleged body. A case will be made that the concept ‘human body’ is a conceptual mess, vague in an unprincipled manner, and that an eliminativist stance towards dead bodies is the appropriate response. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

As a continuation of the work of the third author in [5], we make further observations on the features of Galois cohomology in the general model theoretic context. We make explicit the connection between forms of definable groups and first cohomology sets with coefficients in a suitable automorphism group. We then use a method of twisting cohomology (inspired by Serre’s algebraic twisting) to describe arbitrary fibres in cohomology sequences—yielding a useful “finiteness” result on cohomology sets. Applied to the special case (...) of differential fields and Kolchin’s constrained cohomology, we complete results from [3] by proving that the first constrained cohomology set of a differential algebraic group over a bounded, differentially large, field is countable. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In this classic work David Bohm, writing clearly and without technical jargon, develops a theory of quantum physics which treats the totality of existence as an unbroken whole.

Oxford Philosophical Texts Series Editor: John Cottingham The Oxford Philosophical Texts series consists of authoritative teaching editions of canonical texts in the history of philosophy from the ancient world down to modern times. Each volume provides a clear, well laid out text together with a comprehensive introduction by a leading specialist, giving the student detailed critical guidance on the intellectual context of the work and the structure and philosophical importance of the main arguments. Endnotes are supplied which provide further commentary (...) on the arguments and explain unfamiliar references and terminology, and a full bibliography and index are also included. The series aims to build up a definitive corpus of key texts in the Western philosophical tradition, which will form a reliable and enduring resource for students and teachers alike. David Hume's aim in writing An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding was to introduce his philosophy to a European culture in which many educated people read original works of philosophy. He gives an elegant and accessible presentation of strikingly original and challenging views about the limited powers of human understanding, the attractions of scepticism, the compatibility of free will and determinism, and weaknesses in the foundations of religion. Hume's philosophy was highly controversial in the eighteenth century and remains so today. The text printed in this edition is that of the Clarendon critical edition of Hume's works. A substantial introduction by the editor explains the intellectual background to the work and surveys its main themes. The volume also includes detailed explanatory notes on the text, a glossary of terms, a full list of references, and a section of supplementary readings. (shrink)

Religion, science, and naturalism -- Perception and religious experience -- Panexperientialism, freedom, and the mind-body relation -- Naturalistic, dipolar theism -- Natural theology based on naturalistic theism -- Evolution, evil, and eschatology -- The two ultimates and the religions -- Religion, morality, and civilization -- Religious language and truth -- Religious knowledge and common sense.

For a writer who forces his readers to plunge fast and deeply into a wealth of material and experience, Hegel nonetheless spends an inordinate amount of time and effort in prefaces and introductions in order to prepare the reader for the explorations to be undertaken. Hegel clearly seems to think that how one begins philosophical investigation is crucial. Yet, ironically, he commits us to beginning everywhere and all at once. The tension of this irony may be localized as we consider (...) the “beginning” of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit with sense certainty and the “beginning” of the Logic with Being. The very possibility of beginning in such radically different ways, as well as the relationship between them, will be the subject of our essay. We must follow the remarks of the introductory materials to both works in order to address these questions. More specifically, for each work we will investigate what Hegel understands by “beginning” and by the “resolve” to begin as a means for establishing some sense of the relationship between, and development of, the Phenomenology and the Logic. (shrink)

For a writer who forces his readers to plunge fast and deeply into a wealth of material and experience, Hegel nonetheless spends an inordinate amount of time and effort in prefaces and introductions in order to prepare the reader for the explorations to be undertaken. Hegel clearly seems to think that how one begins philosophical investigation is crucial. Yet, ironically, he commits us to beginning everywhere and all at once. The tension of this irony may be localized as we consider (...) the “beginning” of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit with sense certainty and the “beginning” of the Logic with Being. The very possibility of beginning in such radically different ways, as well as the relationship between them, will be the subject of our essay. We must follow the remarks of the introductory materials to both works in order to address these questions. More specifically, for each work we will investigate what Hegel understands by “beginning” and by the “resolve” to begin as a means for establishing some sense of the relationship between, and development of, the Phenomenology and the Logic. (shrink)

In this innovative study, Lea David critically investigates the relationship between human rights and memory, suggesting that, instead of understanding human rights in a normative fashion, human rights should be treated as an ideology. Conceptualizing human rights as an ideology gives us useful theoretical and methodological tools to recognize the real impact human rights has on the ground. David traces the rise of the global phenomenon that is the human rights memorialization agenda, termed 'Moral Remembrance', and explores what (...) happens once this agenda becomes implemented. Based on evidence from the Western Balkans and Israel/Palestine, she argues that the human rights memorialization agenda does not lead to a better appreciation of human rights but, contrary to what would be expected, it merely serves to strengthen national sentiments, divisions and animosities along ethnic lines, and leads to the new forms of societal inequalities that are closely connected to different forms of corruptions. (shrink)

Liberal thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were alert to the political costs and human cruelties involved in European colonialism, but they also thought that European expansion held out progressive possibilities. In Progress, Pluralism, and Politics David Williams examines the colonial and anti-colonial arguments of Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, and L.T. Hobhouse. Williams locates their ambivalent attitude towards European conquest and colonial rule in a set of tensions between the impact of colonialism on European states, the (...) possibilities of progress in distant and diverse places, and the relationship between universalism and cultural pluralism. In so doing he reveals some of the central ambiguities that characterize the ways that liberal thought has dealt with the reality of an illiberal world. Of particular importance are appeals to various forms of universal history, attempts to mediate between the claims of identity and the reality of difference, and the different ways of thinking about the achievement of liberal goods in other places. Pointing to key elements in still ongoing debates within liberal states about how they should relate to illiberal places, Progress, Pluralism, and Politics enriches the discussion on political thought and the relationship between liberalism and colonialism. (shrink)

Thus, Meyers provides a valuable account, not only of current medical attitudes, but also of relevant case and statute law as it stands at present.

David Charles presents a major new study of Aristotle's views on meaning, essence, necessity, and related topics. These interconnected views are central to Aristotle's metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, and are also highly relevant to current philosophical debates. Charles aims to reach a clear understanding of Aristotle's claims and arguments, to assess their truth, and to evaluate their importance to ancient and modern philosophy.

Auditory stimulation training (AST) has been proposed as a potential treatment for chil-dren with specific language impairments (SLI). The current study was designed to test this as-sumption by using an AST with technically modulated musical material (ASTM) in a random-ized control group design. A total of 101 preschool children (62 male, 39 females; mean age = 4.52 years, SD = 0.62) with deficits in speech comprehension and poor working memory ca-pacity were randomly allocated into one of two treatment groups or (...) a control group. Children in the ASTM group (n = 40) received three 30-minute sessions per week over 12 weeks, whereas children in the comparison group received pedagogical activities during these intervals (n = 24). Children in the control group (n = 37) received no treatment. Working memory, phoneme dis-crimination and speech perception skills were tested prior to (baseline) and after treatment. Chil-dren in the ASTM group showed significantly greater working memory capacity, speech per-ception, and phoneme discrimination skills after treatment, whereas children in the other groups did not show such improvement. Taken together, these results suggest that ASTM can enhance auditory cognitive performance in children with SLI. (shrink)

Confronted with the apparent explanatory gap between physical processes and consciousness, there are many possible reactions. Some deny that any explanatory gap exists at all. Some hold that there is an explanatory gap for now, but that it will eventually be closed. Some hold that the explanatory gap corresponds to an ontological gap in nature.