Lives of Sogdians in Medieval China. By Moritz Huber. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2020. Pp. xvi + 350.

_This untraditional text is a series of parables, allegories, and prose poems that reflect on the problem of the fragment. Studying the fragment lays the theoretical ground for the basic question of where a text begins and ends._.

Many years ago, the esteemed patriarch of bioethics, Joseph Fletcher, spoke loud and clear in favor of rationality in reproduction. By rationality, he meant not merely limiting population growth, which he certainly favored, but bringing to bear human analytic and creative intelligence on the random and instinctive activities of sexual intercourse and procreation that we share with all mammals. In his 1974 book, The Ethics of Genetic Control: Ending Reproductive Roulette, he foresaw most of the issues that we are facing (...) today. He reflected on artificial insemination, prenatal diagnosis, cloning, eugenics, ectogenesis, ovum transfers, and genetic engineering. He examined these innovations to the extent that he felt that each of them represents a way of exercising rational and responsible control over life and reproduction. The subtitle of his book, “Ending Reproductive Roulette,” proclaims his faith. Dr. Fletcher's dedication to rationality led him to make the astonishing statement, “Man is a maker and the more rationally contrived and deliberate anything is, the more human it is. Therefore, laboratory reproduction is radically human compared to conception by ordinary heterosexual intercourse.”. (shrink)

IF THE OBJECT OF AN INQUIRY is a constituent of the physical world, such as a physical force or a chemical substance, it is not incumbent on the inquirer to raise the prior question of the basis and nature of inquiry itself. This is as true of the bodily functions of organisms endowed with subjective capacities as it is of the physical world within which the organism finds itself. But this situation no longer holds when the object of inquiry involves (...) the nature of subjectivity itself, and not simply the elements and processes of the spatio-temporal world from which subjects have emerged. Two centuries of research in the physical sciences have led to the conclusion that the physical universe is a process of cosmological and biological evolution which stretches back for billions of years prior to the appearance on this planet of any sort of subject, nonhuman or human. The supposition that an inference of this sort can be "theory-laden" to the point of invalidating the evolutionary inference itself will not be taken seriously here. Exactly how evolution is to be understood is certainly a problem, and is in fact one of the problems with which we are here concerned. But the essential premise, the fundamentally important point, is that organisms capable of subjective experience did emerge in the course of that evolution. It follows that if we are to attempt the analysis of a concept which does not refer simply to the physical world itself but both to that world and to the manner of conceiving it, then it is necessary to begin by situating subjectivity relatively to the evolutionary process. (shrink)

We argue that thinking of the man-machine comparison in terms of a contest involves, in a reasonable scenario, a criterion of success that is neutral. This is because we want to avoid a petitio principii. We submit, however, that, by looking at things this way, one makes the most essential human things invisible. Thus, in a sense, the contest approach is self-defeating.

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