Kant's discussion of the ethical implications of smallpox inoculation is presented here. In four fragments Kant analyzes the moral legitimacy of endangering other people in medical practice and especially endangering people who are incapable of giving consent. In addition, we re-evaluate the alleged „success story of the development of smallpox prevention and review the technical and theoretical difficulties of smallpox inoculation at the time of Kant.

At present, peer review is the most common method used by funding agencies to make decisions about resource allocation. But how reliable, efficient, and fair is it in practice? The ex ante evaluation of scientific novelty is a fundamentally uncertain endeavor; bias and chance are embedded in the final outcome. In the current study, I will examine some of the most central problems of peer review and highlight the possible benefits of using a lottery as an alternative decision-making mechanism. Lotteries (...) are driven by chance, not reason. The argument made in the study is that the epistemic landscape could benefit in several respects by using a lottery, thus avoiding all types of bias, disagreement, and other limitations associated with the peer review process. Funding agencies could form a pool of funding applicants who have minimal qualification levels and then select randomly within that pool. The benefits of a lottery would not only be that it saves time and resources, but also that it contributes to a more dynamic selection process and increases the epistemic diversity, fairness, and impartiality within academia. (shrink)

Research into the sociology of intellectual life reveals numerous appeals to the public conscience of intellectuals. The way in which concepts such as ‘the public intellectual’ or ‘intellectual life’ are discussed, however, conceals a long history of biased thinking about thinking as an elite endeavour with prohibitive requirements for entry. This article argues that this tendency prioritizes the intellectual realm over the public sphere, and betrays any claims to public relevance unless a broader definition of what counts as intellectual life (...) is introduced. By calling for a shift from the notion of public intellectuals to Jane Jacobs’ (1961) idea of the ‘public character’, a publicly situated and affect-laden conception of intellectual life is articulated with the aim of redefining intellectual life as an ordinary, collective pursuit, rather than the prerogative of a few extraordinary individuals, as well as restoring the role of the senses in theoretical discussions on the life of the mind. The theoretical scope of this article therefore is to cast the net wider in the search for meanings of what public intellectual life is, can or may be in a larger context than ‘intellectualist’ discussions currently allow. (shrink)

Material Engagement Theory, which forms the focus of this special issue, is a relatively new development within cognitive archaeology and anthropology, but one that has important implications for many adjacent fields of research in phenomenology and the cognitive sciences. In How Things Shape the Mind I offered a detail exposition of the major working hypotheses and the vision of mind that it embodies. Here, introducing this special issue, more than just presenting a broad overview of MET, I seek to enrich (...) and extend that vision and discuss its application to the study of mind and matter. I begin by laying out the philosophical roots, theoretical context and intellectual kinship of MET. Then I offer a basic outline of this theoretical framework focusing on the notions of thinging and metaplasticity. In the last part I am using the example of pottery making to illustrate how MET can be used to inform empirical research and how it might complement new research in phenomenology and embodied cognitive science. (shrink)

Humans are organisms of a creative sort. We make new things that scaffold the ecology of our minds, shape the boundaries of our thinking and form new ways to engage and make sense of the world. That is, we are creative ‘thingers’. This paper adopts the perspective of Material Engagement Theory and introduces the notion ‘thinging’ to articulate and draw attention to the kind of cognitive life instantiated in acts of thinking and feeling with, through and about things. I will (...) focus more specifically on Creativethinging, or creative material engagement, exploring the importance of thinging for understanding our species unique capacity for inventiveness. (shrink)

Traitant des origines de la pensée européenne - des présocratiques à Damascius, en passant par Platon, Aristote, Plotin et saint Augustin -, ce livre rencontre les inévitables intrications entre mythe et philosophie ainsi qu'entre l'Un et l'Etre. C'est précisément dans cette double intrication que s'enracine l'énigme de notre présent. Il s'agit ici d'une réflexion sur le passé. Mais le passé n'y est interrogé que dans la mesure où s'y dessine l'horizon à l'intérieur duquel la pensée continue de se déployer aujourd'hui. (...) Cette 3e édition est enrichie d'une présentation qui approfondit la question de la différence entre philosophie européenne et philosophie occidentale. (shrink)

Humans, more than any other species, have been altering their paths of development by creating new material forms and by opening up to new possibilities of material engagement. That is, we become constituted through making and using technologies that shape our minds and extend our bodies. We make things which in turn make us. This ongoing dialectic has long been recognised from a deep-time perspective. It also seems natural in the present in view of the ways new materialities and digital (...) ecologies increasingly envelop our everyday life and thinking. Still the basic idea that humans and things are co-constituted continues to challenge us, raising important questions about the place and meaning of materiality and technical change in human life and evolution. This paper bridging perspectives from postphenomenology and Material Engagement Theory is trying to attain better understanding about these matters. Our emphasis falls specifically on the human predisposition for technological embodiment and creativity. We re-approach the notion Homo faber in a way that, on the one hand, retains the power and value of this notion to signify the primacy of making or creative material engagement in human life and evolution and, on the other hand, reclaims the notion from any misleading connotations of human exceptionalism. In particular, our use of the term Homo faber refers to the special place that this ability has in the evolution and development of our species. The difference that makes the difference is not just the fact that we make things. The difference that makes the difference is the recursive effect that the things that we make and our skills of making seem to have on human becoming. We argue that we are Homo faber not just because we make things but also because we are made by them. (shrink)

A critical debate has blossomed within the field of research policy, science and technology studies, and philosophy of science regarding the possible benefits and limitations of allocating extramural grants using a lottery system. The most common view among those supporting the lottery idea is that some form of modified lottery is acceptable, if properly combined with peer review. This means that partial randomization can be applied only after experts have screened the pursuit-worthiness of all submitted proposals and sorted out those (...) of lowest quality. In the present paper, I will argue against the use of partial lotteries or partial randomization and instead promote use of a _pure lottery_ in combination with a radical increase in block funding. The main reason for holding this position is that a partial lottery cannot solve the problems inherent in the current funding system, which is based on grant competitions and peer review. A partial lottery cannot decrease the enormous time-waste, reduce the uneven distribution of time between researchers, neutralize expert biases or mitigate academic power asymmetries. Instead, we need a stronger focus on improving general time management in academia by implementing a more holistic model for organizing research opportunities in the future. (shrink)

The purpose of grant peer review is to identify the most excellent and promising research projects. However, sociologists of science and STS scholars have shown that peer review tends to promote solid low-risk projects at the expense of more original and innovative projects that often come with higher risk. It has also been shown that the review process is affected by significant measures of chance. Against this background, the aim of this study is to theorize the notions of academic judgment (...) and agonistic chance, and to present and analyze situations in which expert reviewers are faced with the challenge of trying to decide which grant proposals to select when there is strong disagreement. The empirical analysis is based on ethnographic observations of ten panel groups at the Swedish Research Council in the areas of natural and engineering sciences. By focusing on disagreement, the study provides a more in-depth understanding of how agonistic chance creeps into the peer review process and becomes part of the consensus that is created. (shrink)

I agree with Vaesen that it is a mistake to discard tool use as a hallmark of human cognition. I contend, nonetheless, that tools are not simply external markers of a distinctive human mental architecture. Rather, they actively and meaningfully participate in the process by which hominin brains and bodies make up their sapient minds.

This book is a groundbreaking attempt to address questions of non-human and material agency from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines: archaeology, ...

Introduction to the special issue in Pragmatics & Cognition focused on creativity, cognition, and material culture. With contributions from Maurice Bloch, Chris Gosden, Tim Ingold, John Kirsh, Carl Knappett & Sander van der Leeuw, Lambros Malafouris, Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau, Kevin Warwick, and Tom Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge.

Mise en forme des différents procédés énumératifs en partant des listes, en insistant plus spécialement sur la différence entre katalegein et mytheuesthai . L’analyse des formes catalogiques révèle deux pratiques dominantes : les généalogies et les cheminements, tandis que l’histoire du mythos s’achève par une multiplicité d’usages.Fecundity of Catalogical Practices. Formation of different enumerative procedures departing from the lists, insisting especially on the difference between katalegein and myth . The analysis of catalogical forms reveals two principal practices: genealogy and routes, (...) while the history of myths ends by a multiplicity of uses. (shrink)

Bullot & Reber (B&R) begin asking if the study of the mind's inner life can provide a foundation for a science of art. Clearly there are many epistemological problems involved in the study of the cognitive and affective basis of art appreciation. I argue that context is key. I also propose that as long as the continues to be perceived as an intracranial phenomenon, little progress can be made. Mind and art are one.

Sohn-Rethel’s theory undermines the line of thought that, from Kant to deconstruction, severs being or the thing from representation, by showing that the Kantian a priori categories of thought are a posteriori effects of the relations of things, to the point that it is ‘only through the language of commodities that their owners become rational beings’. This is the thesis of Marx’s theory of ‘commodity fetishism’, and Sohn-Rethel’s work develops the methodology that follows from it. ‘ Realabstraktion’ means that the (...) commodification of things amounts to their transformation into the language that provides the a priori categories of human thought. As a result, far from being inaccessible to representation, being is precisely that which reveals itself whenever the transcendental categories of representation are laid out. Therefore, Sohn-Rethel’s theory entails that not only can one not separate economy from thought but also economy and thought from being, so that there are no three distinct fields – economy, ontology and epistemology – but one: an economic epistemontology. Just as Marx’s ‘commodity fetishism’ introduced the unconscious in both subjectivity and economy – ‘they do this without knowing it’ – Sohn-Rethel analysed all economic, intellectual and practical spheres in terms of the fundamental distinction between consciousness and the unconscious. The article also points to certain corrections that Marx’s own theory indicates need to be made in Sohn-Rethel’s account, particularly regarding the source of abstraction, the role of coined money, and the difference between capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production and exchange. (shrink)

This article develops a framework for analysing how digital software and models become mediums for creative imagination in architectural design. To understand the hermeneutics of these relationships, we develop key concepts from Material Engagement Theory (MET) and Postphenomenology (PP). To push these frameworks into the realm of digital design, we develop the concept of Digital Materiality. Digital Materiality describes the way successive layers of mathematics, code, and software come to mediate enactive perception, and the possibilities of creative material engagement actualised (...) in work with software. Just as molecular materials come to transform action with material objects, so digital materiality comes to enable and transform creative practices with computers. Digital architectural design form a new space for ongoing enactive discovery and creativity through manipulation of digital models and their underlying software environments. By shifting relationships within their digital models, architects can direct their attention, intention, and imagination towards widely different aspects of the model. Here, creative imagination becomes a fundamentally situated activity where mind emerges through dynamic interaction between a variety of embodied, material, and cultural domains. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 17, Issue 2, Page 49-67, June 2012.

This paper argues that today the true source of terror in the economico-biopolitically advanced countries of global capitalism lies in biopower’s own constitution as a normative field (the protection of life) that presupposes its exception (the superfluity of life) as its own precondition. At the two extreme poles of this exception we find “terrorism,” and particularly suicide bombing, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones), as the pair revealing the core of biopower. However, of the two only “terrorism” is discursively (...) constructed in the “West” as a monstrous act that should incite horror. Linking horror to the psychoanalytic concepts of repression and foreclosure, I argue that the biopolitical function of horror lies in rendering unreadable the message of such “monstrous” acts. Furthermore, insofar as horror’s experience is an affective state of being that can, nevertheless, be incited discursively, affect shifts to the center of the political domain. The affect of horror in particular becomes instrumental to politics as it can provide the criterion for determining the bio-racial break between, in Foucault’s words, “what must live and what must die.”. (shrink)

This paper argues that today the true source of terror in the economico-biopolitically advanced countries of global capitalism lies in biopower’s own constitution as a normative field that presupposes its exception as its own precondition. At the two extreme poles of this exception we find “terrorism,” and particularly suicide bombing, and unmanned aerial vehicles, as the pair revealing the core of biopower. However, of the two only “terrorism” is discursively constructed in the “West” as a monstrous act that should incite (...) horror. Linking horror to the psychoanalytic concepts of repression and foreclosure, I argue that the biopolitical function of horror lies in rendering unreadable the message of such “monstrous” acts. Furthermore, insofar as horror’s experience is an affective state of being that can, nevertheless, be incited discursively, affect shifts to the center of the political domain. The affect of horror in particular becomes instrumental to politics as it can provide the criterion for determining the bio-racial break between, in Foucault’s words, “what must live and what must die.”. (shrink)

In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement... is its own movement... is automatic expansion... able to add value to itself... living off-springs...golden eggs...an independent substance....It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus value; as (...) the father differentiates himself from himself qua the son, yet both are one and of one age: for only by the surplus value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and so soon as this takes place, so soon as the son, and by the son, the father, is begotten, so soon does their difference vanish, and they again become one, £110.3. Marx (1967, 1:171-73)The future must no longer be determined by the past....Anticipation is imperative...in order to be more than herself...“impossible” subject, untenable in a real social framework....But secretly, silently, deep down inside, she grows and multiplies...she goes and passes into infinity....Heterogeneous, yes...she does not cling to herself; she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, desirous and capable of others, of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn't, of him, of you...she is everywhere, she exchanges...in the exchange that multiplies....She does not “know” what she's giving, she doesn't measure it...she finds not her sum but her differences....In one another we will never be lacking. Cixous (1986, 309-20)If God is dead, everything is permitted, then the conclusion imposing itself within the text of our experience is that the response to God is dead, is nothing is any longer permitted. Lacan (1991, 139)It is therefore absolutely impossible to control capitalism from the metalevel, because capitalism itself is deconstructive.Karatani (1995, 71). (shrink)

In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement... is its own movement... is automatic expansion... able to add value to itself... living off-springs...golden eggs...an independent substance....It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus value; as (...) the father differentiates himself from himself qua the son, yet both are one and of one age: for only by the surplus value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and so soon as this takes place, so soon as the son, and by the son, the father, is begotten, so soon does their difference vanish, and they again become one, £110.3.Marx (1967, 1:171-73)The future must no longer be determined by the past....Anticipation is imperative...in order to be more than herself...“impossible” subject, untenable in a real social framework....But secretly, silently, deep down inside, she grows and multiplies...she goes and passes into infinity....Heterogeneous, yes...she does not cling to herself; she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, desirous and capable of others, of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn't, of him, of you...she is everywhere, she exchanges...in the exchange that multiplies....She does not “know” what she's giving, she doesn't measure it...she finds not her sum but her differences....In one another we will never be lacking.Cixous (1986, 309-20)If God is dead, everything is permitted, then the conclusion imposing itself within the text of our experience is that the response to God is dead, is nothing is any longer permitted.Lacan (1991, 139)It is therefore absolutely impossible to control capitalism from the metalevel, because capitalism itself is deconstructive.Karatani (1995, 71). (shrink)