A collection of philosophical and aesthetic essays, influenced by Bernard Stiegler, which focuses on the techno-cultural artefact in order to critique, engage, or respond to, an aspect of digital culture.

The article sets out to develop the concept of attention as a key aspect to building the possible therapeutics that Bernard Stiegler’s recent works have pointed to (The Automatic Society, 2016, The Neganthropocene, 2018 and Qu’appelle-t-on Panser, 2018). The therapeutic aspect of pharmacology takes place through processes that are neganthropic; therefore, which attempt to counteract the entropic nature of digital technologies where there is flattening out to the measurable and the calculable of Big Data. The most obvious examples (...) of this flattening out can be seen in relation to the use of natural language processing technologies for text interpretation and the use of text analytics alongside student analytics. However, the process of exosomatisation of knowledge takes place in forms of hypomnesic tertiary retentions or digital technologies. The loss of knowledge is inherent to these processes of exteriorisation, this loss of knowledge takes place through a process proletarianisation which Marx had pointed to in the Grundisse (1939). The therapeutic gesture is, therefore, an intrinsically educational one, where the loss of knowledge of the pharmacological nature of digital technologies is counteracted by other forms of knowledge construction that can be enabled by digital technologies. Hence, there is a profound educational gesture necessary to enable the re-harnessing of technology to enable the therapeutics. This paper will argue that the positive re-harnessing, the therapeutics, can take place through the development of new forms of neganthropic gestures which can be afforded by the development of specific forms of digital technologies. These also enable a contributive research process whereby the rationalisation of the production of knowledge within the university can be challenged by collaborative, interpretative processes of knowledge production. (shrink)

Bernard Stiegler interviewed by Ben Roberts, Jeremy Gilbert and Mark Hayward.

This new translation of four revised radio interviews, conducted in December 2002 at France Culture with Elie During, is the best introduction to Stiegler's Time and Technics series. This collection includes a new interview conducted specially for this volume and an interview with Artpress from 2001. In Philosophising By Accident, Stiegler introduces some of the key arguments about the technical constitution of the human and its relation to politics, aesthetics and economics. He reads philosophical texts from the perspective (...) of his controversial thesis about the three types of memory and speaks about concepts central to his later works, such as synchrony/diachrony, grammatisation and the industrial temporal object. (shrink)

This interview is articulated around the following theses: capitalism must first be understood as a « libidinal economy » ; this libidinal economy is exhausted by the hyper-industrialization of contemporary capitalism : industrially treated desire leads to the destruction of desire ; whence the necessity of inventing a new form of public authority which can reactive, stimulate desire. Ecological damage is indeed the consequence of a symbolic poverty, a poverty of the forms of life and practices. The only response to (...) such damage is to propose a genuine ecology of mind. (shrink)

In this important new book, Jacques Derrida talks with Bernard Stiegler about the effect of teletechnologies on our philosophical and political moment. Improvising before a camera, the two philosophers are confronted by the very technologies they discuss and so are forced to address all the more directly the urgent questions that they raise. What does it mean to speak of the present in a situation of "live" recording? How can we respond, responsibly, to a question when we know (...) that the so-called "natural" conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, and deliberation have been breached? As Derrida and Stiegler discuss the role of teletechnologies in modern society, the political implications of Derrida's thought become apparent. Drawing on recent events in Europe, Derrida and Stiegler explore the impact of television and the internet on our understanding of the state, its borders and citizenship. Their discussion examines the relationship between the juridical and the technical, and it shows how new technologies for manipulating and transmitting images have influenced our notions of democracy, history and the body. The book opens with a shorter interview with Derrida on the news media, and closes with a provocative essay by Stiegler on the epistemology of digital photography. In Echographies of Television, Derrida and Stiegler open up questions that are of key social and political importance. Their book will be of great interest to all those already familiar with Derrida's work, as well as to students and scholars of philosophy, literature, sociology and media studies. (shrink)

Today’s question concerning technology involves asking about both the post-pandemic world and the post-data-economy world, in a situation where resentments and scapegoats are easily generated. We c...

Stiegler argued in Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise that we must refer to archi-cinema just as Derrida spoke of archi-writing. In this article he proposes that in principle the dream is the primordial form of this archi-cinema. The archi-cinema of consciousness, of which dreams would be the matrix as archi-cinema of the unconscious, is the projection resulting from the play between what Husserl called, on the one hand, primary and secondary retentions, and what Stiegler, on the (...) other hand, calls tertiary retentions, which are the hypomnesic traces of conscious and unconscious life. There is archi-cinema to the extent that for any noetic act – for example, in an act of perception – consciousness projects its object. This projection is a montage, of which tertiary retentions form the fabric, as well as constituting both the supports and the cutting room. This indicates that archi-cinema has a history, a history conditioned by the history of tertiary retentions. It also means that there is an organology of dreams. (shrink)

If performativity means that to say stupid things is to do stupid things, then today stupidity is a very large problem, both within and outside philosophy, stemming, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from a prostitution of the Aufklärung. But understanding stupidity seems almost to require becoming stupid oneself, as evidenced by Derrida's misunderstanding of Deleuze on just this topic, the former failing to grasp that the latter's account is founded on Simondon's theory of individuation, and on the difference between specific (...) individuation and psychic individuation. This failure comes despite the fact that différance itself must be understood as individuation, and thus what both Deleuze and Derrida help us to think, without quite managing to think it themselves, is that stupidity must be understood in terms of that psychic being who is pharmacologically and technologically capable of being disindividuated. (shrink)

This text is a transcription of Rouvroy’s presentation on 7th October 2014 at the “Digital Studies” seminar series at the Centre Georges Pompidou. This seminar series, organised by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, question the influence of digital technologies on knowledge from an epistemological point of view and from the way they alter academic disciplines.

Ours is an age of general automation. The factory that produced proletarians now extends to the biosphere; consequently, disautomatization is needed, which is the real meaning of autonomy. Autonomy and automatism must be reconceived as a composition rather than an opposition. Knowledge depends on hypomnesic automatisms that open up the possibility of what Socrates called “thinking for oneself”; digitalization thus requires a new epistemology that entails questions of political and libidinal economy. Today, automatization serves the autonomization of technics more than (...) noetic autonomy, but reconceiving the latter necessarily involves reconsidering the meaning and character of desire. Greta Thunberg’s diagnosis of the irresponsibility of the generation before hers exposes the fact that the knowledge necessary to combat the consequences of contemporary technological development has been destroyed. The only possible counter to this irresponsibility lies in the reconstitution of knowledge, understood as the means by which humans struggle against entropy and anthropy. (shrink)

At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves, with beings formed by nature. This distinction persisted until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of the technical object. This philosophy developed while industrialisation was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of social organisation, which highlighted technology's new place in philosophical enquiry. Bernard Stiegler goes back to the beginning of Western philosophy (...) and revises the Aristotelian assessment, developing a complex argument whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinctive temporality and dynamic of its own. The author engages the ideas of Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela. (shrink)

In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno warned that industrial society turns reason into rationalization, and Polanyi warned of the dangers of the self-regulating market, but today, argues Stiegler, this regression of reason has led to societies dominated by unreason, stupidity and madness. However, philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century abandoned the critique of political economy, and poststructuralism left its heirs helpless and disarmed in face of the reign of stupidity and an economic crisis of global proportions. New (...) theories and concepts are required today to think through these issues. The thinkers of poststructuralism Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida must be re-read, as must the sources of their thought, Hegel and Marx. But we must also take account of Naomi Klein’s critique of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School and her account of the ‘shock doctrine’. In fact, argues Stiegler, a permanent ‘state of shock’ has prevailed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, intensified by the creative destruction brought about by the consumerist model. The result has been a capitalism that destroys desire and reason and in which every institution is undermined, above all those institutions that are the products par excellence of the Enlightenment the education system and universities. Through a powerful critique of thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Stiegler develops new conceptual weapons to fight this destruction. He argues that schools and universities must themselves be transformed: new educational institutions must be developed both to take account of the dangers of digitization and the internet and to enable us to take advantage of the new opportunities they make available. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the First World War, the poet Paul Valéry wrote of a "crisis of spirit", brought about by the instrumentalization of knowledge and the destructive subordination of culture to profit. Recent events demonstrate all too clearly that the stock of mind, or spirit, continues to fall. The economy is toxically organized around the pursuit of short-term gain, supported by an infantilizing, dumbed-down media. Advertising technologies make relentless demands on our attention, reducing us to idiotic beasts, no longer (...) capable of living. Spiralling rates of mental illness show that the fragile life of the mind is at breaking point. Underlying these multiple symptoms is consumer capitalism, which systematically immiserates those whom it purports to liberate. Returning to Marxʹs theory, Stiegler argues that consumerism marks a new stage in the history of proletarianization. It is no longer just labour that is exploited, pushed below the limits of subsistence, but the desire that is characteristic of human spirit. The cure to this malaise is to be found in what Stiegler calls a "pharmacology of the spirit". Here, pharmacology has nothing to do with the chemical supplements developed by the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmakon, defined as both cure and poison, refers to the technical objects through which we open ourselves to new futures, and thereby create the spirit that makes us human. By reference to a range of figures, from Socrates, Simondon and Derrida to the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Stiegler shows that technics are both the cause of our suffering and also what makes life worth living. -- Publisher description. (shrink)

These lectures outline the project of a general organology, which is to say an account of life when it is no longer just biological but technical, or when it involves not just organic matter but organized inorganic matter. This organology is also shown to require a modified Simondonian account of the shift from vital individuation to a three-stranded process of psychic, collective and technical individuation. Furthermore, such an approach involves extending the Derridean reading of Socrates's discussion of writing as a (...) pharmakon, so that it becomes a more general account of the pharmacological character of retention and protention. By going back to Leroi-Gourhan, we can recognize that this also means pursuing the history of retentional modifications unfolding in the course of the history of what, with Lotka, can also be called exosomatization. It is thus a question of how exteriorization can, today, in an epoch when it becomes digital, and in an epoch that produces vast amounts of entropy at the thermodynamic, biological and noetic levels, still possibly produce new forms of interiorization, that is, new forms of thought, care and desire, amounting to so many chances to struggle against the planetary-scale pharmacological crisis with which we are currently afflicted. (shrink)

This paper builds upon recent work in narrative theory and the philosophy of technology by examining the place of transparency and responsibility in discussions of AI, and what some of the implications of this might be for thinking ethically about AI and especially AI practices, that is, the structured social activities implicating and defining what AI is. In this paper, we aim to show how pursuing a narrative understanding of technology and AI can support knowledge of process and practice through (...) transparency, as well help summon us to responsibility through visions of possibility and of actual harms arising from AI practices. We provide reflections on the relations between narrative, transparency and responsibility, building an argument that narratives (about AI, practices, and those persons implicated in its design, implementation, and deployment) support the kind of knowing and understanding that is the aim of transparency, and, moreover, that such knowledge supports responsibility in informing agents and activating responsibility through creating knowledge about something that can and should be responded to. Furthermore, we argue for considering an expansion of the kinds of practices that we might legitimately consider ‘AI practices’ given the diverse set of (often materially embedded) activities that sustain and are sustained by AI that link directly to its ethical acceptability and which are rendered transparent in the narrative mode. Finally, we argue for an expansion of narratives and narrative sources to be considered in questions of AI, understanding that transparency is multi-faceted and found in stories from diverse sources and people. (shrink)

This article addresses the question under what conditions it is still possible to think in today’s era of the Anthropocene, in which the human has become the key factor in the evolution of the biosphere, considering the fact, structurally neglected by philosophy, that thinking is thoroughly conditioned by a technical milieu of retentional dispositives. The Anthropocene results from modern technology’s domination of the earth through industrialization that is currently unfolding as a process of generalized, digital automation, which tends to eliminate (...) reflection and to block any genuine questioning of its own development, producing a state of generalized entropy at all levels—ecological, psychic, social, economic, and, in particular, the noetic or thinking. The radical undermining of the very possibility of thinking and questioning, thought by Martin Heidegger in terms of Enframing, should be understood as a pharmacological situation that calls for a therapeutic reversal of the toxicity of current digital technologies into a remedial instrument for realizing a negentropic turn beyond the Anthropocene and toward the Neganthropocene. This requires that thinking starts to understand itself as caring, i.e., as a taking care of itself by taking care of the technical pharmaka that thoroughly constitute and condition it and that can render human life as noetic life both deeply unlivable and profoundly worthwhile. (shrink)

This article attempts an organological and pharmacological re-interpretation of the later Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology as a provocative mode of revealing of beings, in particular of its central notions of Gestell [enframing] Gefahr [danger], Kehre [turning] and Ereignis [event]. Although these notions in principle allow us to think what is at stake currently in the Anthropocene as the age of total automation, generalized toxicity of the technical milieu and post-truth calling for a radical bifurcation, they need to be reframed (...) and re-imagined in terms of the process of exosomatization issuing from humanity’s original and necessary default of origin and situated within the perspective of entropy and negentropy, both unthought by Heidegger. Only thus will it become possible to really think and take care of what Heidegger called the danger of technology and its turning into the event as the destiny of enframing. This also requires a rethinking of Aristotle’s theory of four causes as it is invoked by Heidegger in his analysis of technology, in particular the efficient and final causes, in terms of what Deleuze called quasi-causality, here understood as the need and the obligation for mortals to make their fault come true, i.e., to make it truly happen or make it advene in truth, out of the experience of the danger as the ordeal of the necessary default. Thus becoming the anti-anthropic cause of anthropic toxicity, humans would restore final causality as quasi-causality and inaugurate, as neganthropos, the bifurcation into the Neganthropocene. (shrink)

In this important new book, the leading cultural theorist and philosopher Bernard Stiegler re-examines the relationship between politics and aesthetics in our contemporary hyperindustrial age. Stiegler argues that our epoch is characterized by the seizure of the symbolic by industrial technology, where aesthetics has become both theatre and weapon in an economic war. This has resulted in a ‘symbolic misery’ where conditioning substitutes for experience. In today’s control societies, aesthetic weapons play an essential role: audiovisual and digital (...) technologies have become a means of controlling the conscious and unconscious rhythms of bodies and souls, of modulating the rhythms of consciousness and life. The notion of an aesthetic engagement, capable of founding a new communal sensibility and a genuine aesthetic community, has largely collapsed today. This is because the overwhelming majority of the population is now totally subjected to the aesthetic conditioning of marketing and therefore estranged from any experience of aesthetic inquiry. That part of the population that continues to experiment aesthetically has turned its back on those who live in the misery of this conditioning. Stiegler appeals to the art world to develop a political understanding of its role. In this volume he pays particular attention to cinema which occupies a unique position in the temporal war that is the cause of symbolic misery: at once industrial technology and art, cinema is the aesthetic experience that can combat conditioning on its own territory. This highly original work - the first in Stiegler’s Symbolic Misery series - will be of particular interest to students in film studies, media and cultural studies, literature and philosophy and will consolidate Stiegler’s reputation as one of the most original cultural theorists of our time. (shrink)

This text is an excerpt from the introduction to Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals: Disbelief and Discredit (Vol. 2) by Bernard Stiegler, translated into English by Daniel Ross © Polity Press, Cambridge 2012.

Même si Simondon, comme l’a bien relevé Jean-Hugues Barthélémy dans Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, souligne le rôle de stabilisateur du transindividuel dévolu à la technique, il n’analyse pas la dimension intrinsèquement technologique du pré-individuel. C’est pourquoi la religion, que Simondon origine pourtant dans la magie, n’est pas pensée depuis sa constitution profondément technique. Or, cette question revient là où Simondon s’avance du côté de la psychanalyse : la critique simondonienne de cette dernière n’a pas clairement formulé (...) l’objection qu’il faut lui adresser, à savoir qu’elle ne pense pas le rôle de la technique dans l’individuation, c’est-à-dire dans le désir.Even if Simondon, as Jean-Hugues Barthélémy well noted in Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, indeed stresses the stabilization part played by the trans-individual granted as it may be to technique, yet the latter never analyzes the intrinsically technological dimension of the pre-individual. That is why religion, which Simondon originates however amid the magical, is no longer thought since its deeply technical constitution. Now such a question goes back to where Simondon moves towards psychoanalysis : the Simondon criticism of the latter never clearly formulated the objection that should be addressed to it, i.e. never taking into thought the part played by technique in individuation, i.e. within desire. (shrink)

If performativity means that to say stupid things is to do stupid things, then today stupidity is a very large problem, both within and outside philosophy, stemming, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from a prostitution of the Aufklärung. But understanding stupidity seems almost to require becoming stupid oneself, as evidenced by Derrida's misunderstanding of Deleuze on just this topic, the former failing to grasp that the latter's account is founded on Simondon's theory of individuation, and on the difference between specific (...) individuation and psychic individuation. This failure comes despite the fact that différance itself must be understood as individuation, and thus what both Deleuze and Derrida help us to think, without quite managing to think it themselves, is that stupidity must be understood in terms of that psychic being who is pharmacologically and technologically capable of being disindividuated. (shrink)

In this brief essay Stiegler synthesizes his critical approach to Simondon’s philosophy of individuation. He states his debt toward Simondon’s concept of a systemic indeterminacy in the processes of transindividual individuation, and focusses on his underdeveloped intuition concerning the role played by technics in anthropogenic processes. Situating himself in the phenomenological lineage of Husserl through Derrida, Stiegler explains his own “pharmacological” understanding of “technical individuation” as, at the same time, the intrinsic condition of individuation and the inevitable risk (...) of disindividuation defining the political as such. On this basis he critically extends Simondon’s understanding of religion and psychanalysis. This allows him to move beyond the political optimism implicit in Simondon’s “theoretical indecision” concerning the binding power of technical individuation yet relying on his very study of the question of individuation, which “is political through and through.”. (shrink)

This article examines Aby Warburg’s enterprise as an anamnesis, as a question of memory in exosomatisation in relation to the pharmakon. Here the pharmakon is considered as a ‘support’ in relation to questions of ‘care’ and as a therapeutics, prescribing the way by which such a pharmakon can become or remain curative, rather than toxic. The discussion looks at how the pharmakon makes possible the transmission of the condition of knowledge, that is: as a preindividual milieu that contains, retains and (...) re-activates traumatypes, providing opportunities for bifurcations in the future. Warburg’s employment of photographic montage is considered as an exploration of pharmacological possibilities inherent to tertiary retentions and providing the condition for revenance. Such revenance is proposed as the return of the serpent in absentia: as a new form of tertiary retention that today appears as digital tertiary retention. At stake is the libido’s economisation, interactivity and algorithmic governmentality all of which effect the faculties for dreaming, imagination and knowledge. (shrink)

This article examines Aby Warburg’s enterprise as an anamnesis, as a question of memory in exosomatisation in relation to the pharmakon. Here the pharmakon is considered as a ‘support’ in relation to questions of ‘care’ and as a therapeutics, prescribing the way by which such a pharmakon can become or remain curative, rather than toxic. The discussion looks at how the pharmakon makes possible the transmission of the condition of knowledge, that is: as a preindividual milieu that contains, retains and (...) re-activates traumatypes, providing opportunities for bifurcations in the future. Warburg’s employment of photographic montage is considered as an exploration of pharmacological possibilities inherent to tertiary retentions and providing the condition for revenance. Such revenance is proposed as the return of the serpent in absentia: as a new form of tertiary retention that today appears as digital tertiary retention. At stake is the libido’s economisation, interactivity and algorithmic governmentality all of which effect the faculties for dreaming, imagination and knowledge. (shrink)

This interview with the philosopher Bernard Stiegler was conducted in Paris on 28 January 2015, and first appeared in Dutch translation in the journal De uil van Minerva. The conversation begins by discussing the fundamental place occupied by the concept of ‘technics’ in Stiegler’s work, and how the ‘constitutivity’ of technics does and does not relate to Kant and Husserl. Stiegler is then asked about his relationship with Deleuze, and he responds by focusing on the concept (...) of quasi-causality, but also by arguing that there is a certain trajectory in Deleuze’s thought, situating his own philosophy in relation to its various moments. Stiegler is then asked to respond to the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks carried out three weeks prior to the interview. After making a couple of precautionary remarks, Stiegler relates such occurrences to the problem of what he calls ‘spiritual poverty’, to the intensification of ‘negative sublimation’ that can occur when there is a disconnection between the generations, and more generally to the growth of nihilism. All of these phenomena relate to the exploitation of technology by a virulent capitalism that irrationally believes that only the market is rational. After consideration of the complex historical relationship between Islam and modernization, and of both of these to Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’, and after recalling the destructive role played by the West in the rise of fundamentalism and jihadism, Stiegler concludes by reflecting on the fact that, ultimately, ‘intellectuals’ have failed to use technologies in ways that produce alternatives to consumerism. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethical and conceptual implications of the findings from an empirical study (reported elsewhere) of decision-making capacity in anorexia nervosa. In the study, ten female patients aged thirteen to twenty-one years with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, and eight sets of parents, took part in semistructured interviews. The purpose of the interviews was to identify aspects of thinking that might be relevant to the issue of competence to refuse treatment. All the patient-participants were also tested using the (...) MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool—Treatment test of competence. This is a formalized, structured, interviewer-administered test of competence, which is a widely accepted clinical tool for determining capacity. The young women also completed five brief, self-administered questionnaires to assess their levels of psychopathology. The issues identified from the interviews are described under two headings: difficulties with thought processing and changes in values. The results suggest that competence to refuse treatment may be compromised in people with anorexia nervosa in ways that are not captured by traditional legal approaches. (shrink)

This biography, the first of Richard Spencer Childs, begins in the Progressive Era when Childs initiated and pursued two fertile ideas: the short ballot doctrine and the council-manager plan. Childs understood that the simplification of the task of the voter was a question pressing for solution and that the council-manager plan would transform municipal government. This comprehensive work discusses other aspects of Childs' broad reform agenda. His proposals included: county government reform; reform in state government administration; unicameral state legislatures; reapportionment (...) of state legislatures; selection of judges by appointment; replacement of elective county coroners with appointed professional medical examiners; democratization of state political parties; and reform of the Presidential nominating system. Based on Childs' papers and personal interviews with Childs, this biography advances scholarship on the Progressive Era and contributes to the historiographical debate on the nature of reform. (shrink)

Background Increase in global health research undertaken in resource poor settings in the last decade though a positive development has raised ethical concerns relating to potential for exploitation. Some of the suggested strategies to address these concerns include calls for providing universal standards of care, reasonable availability of proven interventions and more recently, promoting the overall social value of research especially in clinical research. Promoting the social value of research has been closely associated with providing fair benefits to various stakeholders (...) involved in research. The debate over what constitutes fair benefits; whether those that addresses micro level issues of justice or those focusing on the key determinants of health at the macro level has continued. This debate has however not benefited from empirical work on what stakeholders consider fair benefits. This study explores practical experiences of stakeholders involved in global health research in Kenya, over what benefits are fair within a developing world context. Methods and results We conducted in-depth interviews with key informants drawn from within the broader health research system in Kenya including researchers from the mainstream health research institutions, networks and universities, teaching hospitals, policy makers, institutional review boards, civil society organisations and community representative groups. The range of benefits articulated by stakeholders addresses both micro and macro level concerns for justice by for instance, seeking to engage with interests of those facilitating research, and the broader systemic issues that make resource poor settings vulnerable to exploitation. We interpret these views to suggest a need for global health research to engage with current crises that face people in these settings as well as the broader systemic issues that produce them. Conclusion Global health research should provide benefits that address both the micro and macro level issues of justice in order to forestall exploitation. Embracing the two is however challenging in terms of how the various competing interests/needs should be balanced ethically, especially in the absence of structures to guide the process. This challenge should point to the need for greater dialogue to facilitate value clarification among stakeholders. (shrink)

This interview with Bernard Stiegler’s long-time translator and collaborator, Daniel Ross, examines the connections between different periods of Stiegler’s work, thought, writing and activism. Moving from the three volumes of Technics and Time to the final large-scale collaborative project of The Internation, the discussion concentrates on Stiegler’s conceptualization of ‘protentionality’, hope and care for a world confronted by climate crises, entropy and computational economic reconfigurations of work, economy and imaginations for futural possibilities. The interview foreshadows the (...) special issue on The Internation project planned by Bishop and Stiegler for TCS that will appear in the near future. (shrink)

Dr Noel Semple, Professor Russell Pearce and Professor Renee Knake combine to compare legal profession regulation in the US with that of the countries closest to it institutionally and culturally: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Ireland. This enables them to develop an illuminating taxonomy of legal professional regulation, and to describe the assumptions and objectives underlying the different approaches to regulation. The US and Canada provide a 'professionalist-independent framework' that centres on 'a unified, hegemonic (...) occupation of lawyer' which promotes self-regulation, and the exclusion of non-lawyers from partnership and investment in law practices. By contrast, in other countries that they examine, 'consumerist-competitive approaches' predominate, opening up the profession to co-regulation with executive government and allowing for different forms of legal occupations and non-lawyer influence and investment in law practices. Of course, as they show, in some countries there are combinations and hybrids of these two approaches. Unlike Rhode, who endorses England and Wales' consumerist-competitive approach to regulation in the Legal Services Act 2007, Semple, Pearce and Knake consciously avoid stating a preference for one approach over the other. (shrink)

This book is a philosophically sophisticated and scientifically well-informed discussion of the moral and social issues raised by genetically engineering animals, a powerful technology which has major implications for society. Unlike other books on this emotionally charged subject, the author attempts to inform, not inflame, the reader about the real problems society must address in order to manage this technology. Bernard Rollin is both a professor of philosophy, and physiology and biophysics, and writes from a uniquely well-informed perspective (...) on this topic. The style is non-technical and anecdotal and will ensure that the book can be used on a wide range of courses on bioethics, biotechnology, veterinary medicine and public policy. The book could also appeal to a general, non-academic reader with a serious interest in genetic engineering. (shrink)

This collection of essays, addresses, and one interview come from the years 1966-73 and cover a wide spectrum of interest, dealing with such general topics as 'The Absence of God in Modern Culture' and 'The Future of Christianity.'.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, journalists and scholars noted differences between Asians and North Americans in their support for public mask use. These differences were primarily assumed to be due d to variations in ethnocultural norms and practices. To better ascertain people’s motives for wearing masks and potential cultural differences in these rationales, this comparative, mixed-methods research examines Chinese and non-East Asian Canadians’ mask use attitudes utilizing online group interviews and a nation-wide survey Study 1, conducted in the early stages (...) of the pandemic, captured an ambivalent, yet evolving attitude toward public mask use among the non-East Asian Canadians, which differed from their Chinese counterparts who more uniformly perceived mask use favorably. Study 2, conducted 2 months later, suggests that both groups primarily wore masks for disease protection- and prevention-related reasons. However, age and education appeared to influence the mask wearing frequency of the non-East Asian Canadians, for whom public mask use was less prevalent and normative. The attitudinal differences in public mask use call for targeted strategies to support mask wearing for different ethnocultural groups, which may be achieved partially through enhancing interethnic understanding on the diversified use of and opinions about masks. The findings suggest that favorable social norms, along with evidence-based information campaigns involving personal appeals may encourage greater mask use by the non-East Asian population. (shrink)

The Prague Philosopher Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848) has long been admired for his groundbreaking work in mathematics: his rigorous proofs of fundamental theorems in analysis, his construction of a continuous, nowhere-differentiable function, his investigations of the infinite, and his anticipations of Cantor's set theory. He made equally outstanding contributions in philosophy, most notably in logic and methodology. One of the greatest mathematician-philosophers since Leibniz, Bolzano is now widely recognised as a major figure of nineteenth-century philosophy. Praised by Husserl as “one (...) of the greatest logicians of all times,” he has also been recognised by Michael Dummett as one of the first modern analytic philosophers and by Alberto Coffa as the founder of the “semantic tradition.” This volume contains English translations of the essay “On the Mathematical Method,” a concise introduction to Bolzano’s logic and philosophy of mathematics, as well as substantial selections from his correspondence with Franz Exner, Professor of Philosophy at the Charles University in Prague in the 1830s and 40s. It will be of interest to students of Austrian philosophy, the development of analytic philosophy, the philosophy of language, and the history and philosophy of logic and mathematics. (shrink)

Professor Hannay’s biography on the famous Danish thinker is a welcome addition to those previously made available in English. Ever since Walter Lowrie’s monumental Kierkegaard was published several decades ago, those who read Søren Kierkegaard in English have had to sift through the historical details for themselves in order to distinguish among fact, fiction, and legend. Whereas the ghost of Lowrie’s Kierkegaard is virtually dead and gone, the Kierkegaard who took its place had a less sharply defined personality. This (...) changes, however, with Hannay’s new book. Hannay offers not a few of his own insights as he recreates the mind and personality of Kierkegaard, some of which are as interesting as they are speculative, but he offers the skeptical reader a host of sources by which to check his interpretation. (shrink)

Arnold Burms: Professor Williams has said that he is willing to answer some of our questions about his work. Given the amount of work he has to do here in a few days, this was a generous decision for which we are genuinely grateful. Professor Van de Putte will start the discussion with some questions about the relation between theory and practice.André Van de Putte: In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy you situate ethical thought in the context (...) of a movement of reflection. To quote from page 112: “It is too late at this stage to raise the prior question: `Why reflection?' — too late in terms of this inquiry, and always too late in terms of the question itself, since one could answer it without prejudice only by not considering it.” And just before that quotation you also said that “the drive to theory has roots in ethical thought itself” and a little bit further you say: “The important question at this point is why reflection should be taken to require theory.” Now I would like to elaborate a little bit on these remarks and ask you to comment on what I'm going to say.Three things should be stressed concerning ethical reflection which are important for moral philosophy and for our understanding of moral philosophy. The first one is this: the person who is reflecting is already part of a concrete society when he or she starts reflecting. That means that he or she has been socialized in a concrete ethos and has already an experience of a substantive ethical life. In this sense he or she does not need to invent ethical life.The second remark is this: ethical reflection is in itself already the expression of an ethical intention. By asking the question `How should one live?', one shows that one is interested in living an ethical life. In this sense I can agree with what I think you say in Ethics, namely that the question `Why should I be moral?' is not meaningful for a moral thinker. The answer to the moral question, the results of his reflection are not meant to convince him or his readers to be moral. On the contrary, he starts precisely from this interest in morality and tries to understand what it means to be moral, what his wish to be moral implies.My third point is the most important. In starting his reflection the thinker has as it were decided that his answer will only be acceptable if it is valid for all, if it can be justified for all. In the moral question itself, a norm of universality is implied. And given the fact that the moral question is itself the expression of an ethical intention, this is important. If he would not assume this norm, he would in my view not really be posing the question. We can immediately understand this if we consider the alternative.Suppose a moral thinker who assumes that an answer to the moral question will be valid only when it suits him. Would we say in this case that this person is really asking the moral question? I do not think so. To put this another way, my thesis is that in the reflection the person who reflects is subjecting himself to the law of thinking itself, to the law of reason, in other words, to the law of universality, of non-contradiction. In the question he discovers this law as a norm for himself asking the moral question and thus as a norm inherent in moral intention. I think that this is precisely what Kant discovered and why for so many there is an important link between ethics and reason and why we are, as you say, driven to theory: since we want a universal answer, since a moral norm implies universality, we are looking for a theory, for a universal justification. But this is not yet the full story. All that I have said only becomes visible on the reflective level. It is only visible, as it were, once one starts reflecting.This means that the norm of universality cannot and must not be understood as a concrete norm which can and should replace the norms of the concrete ethos we all already live in when we start reflecting. I think rationalism in ethics is precisely that: the belief that this norm and what one hopes to deduce from it can and should replace the concrete ethos. I think it must be clear that this cannot be done. As we all know the Kantian imperative is formal and negative and does not produce any content. If we need content — and of course we need it — it should come from our historical ethos. (shrink)

Researchers are required to seek consent from Indigenous communities prior to conducting research but there is inadequate information about how Indigenous people understand and become fully engaged with this consent process. Few studies evaluate the preference or understanding of the consent process for research with Indigenous populations. Lack of informed consent can impact on research findings. The Picture Talk Project was initiated with senior Aboriginal leaders of the Fitzroy Valley community situated in the far north of Western Australia. Aboriginal people (...) were interviewed about their understanding and experiences of research and consent processes. Transcripts were analysed using NVivo10 software with an integrated method of inductive and deductive coding and based in grounded theory. Local Aboriginal interpreters validated coding. Major themes were defined and supporting quotes sourced. Interviews with Aboriginal leaders were facilitated by a local Aboriginal Community Navigator who could interpret if necessary and provide cultural guidance. Participants were from all four major local language groups of the Fitzroy Valley; aged 31 years and above; and half were male. Themes emerging from these discussions included Research—finding knowledge; Being respectful of Aboriginal people, Working on country, and Being flexible with time; Working together with good communication; Reciprocity—two-way learning; and Reaching consent. The project revealed how much more there is to be learned about how research with remote Aboriginal communities should be conducted such that it is both culturally respectful and, importantly, meaningful for participants. We identify important elements in community consultation about research and seeking consent. (shrink)

"This edition can therefore be regarded as the most important republication of a Mandeville text in the last few decades, and should be required reading for anyone seriously concerned to understand the growth of his challenging ideas. " —Professor Irwin Primer in History of Political Thought Volume XXI Issue 4 "Mandeville's contributions to The Female Tatler are almost unknown but they are of fundamental importance for understanding The Fable of the Bees and a social theory that was to be (...) of central importance to the Enlightenment's conception of modernity. The letters belong to the polemical world of early eighteenth-century journalism and have the energy, intelligence and gaiety characteristic of Grub Street at its best. They deal with many of the subjects which Mandeville was to make his own. Unexpectedly and excitedly, they also show how closely his thinking about society was bound up with his interest in the position in contemporary society. Vintage Mandeville, in fact." —Professor Nicholas Phillipson This book collects for the first time since their original publication the 32 papers which Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), author of The Fable of the Bees (1st ed., 1714), contributed to The Female Tatler (1709-10), one of the many imitators of Richard Steele's Tatler. In these papers, Mandeville's protagonists, the sisters Lucinda and Artesia, discuss and debate the origin and basis of human society and its progress, honour and courage, the value of a life devoted to making money, and most importantly, the position and the virtues of women. The essays are fully annotated, providing significant information about Mandeville's sources and identifying historical and literary references. The volume also includes a substantive introduction by Maurice Goldsmith, a leading expert on Mandeville, explaining the relation of the papers to the social thought of the period and the development of Mandeville's views. The Female Tatler essays systematically address themes further developed in The Fable of the Bees, a work very widely read in the eighteenth century and which was a stimulus to the theories of (among others) David Hume and Adam Smith. The collection will be of interest to scholars of eighteenth-century English literature, history, political and economic thought, women's studies and philosophy. —first publication of these essays since the eighteenth century and the only available edition —extended debate on female virtue is an important element in the development of feminism —Mandeville's defence of luxury and consumption is significant in the history of the discussion of commercial society and capitalism. (shrink)

Bernard Mandeville was best known for The Fable of the Bees, in which he demolishes the supposed moral basis of society by a Hobbesian demonstration that civilization depends on vice. Today Mandeville is seen as a trenchant satirist of the manners and foibles of his age. He is also seen as a precursor of some of Adam Smith's doctrines, a forerunner in the field of sociology. A prescient analyst of the dynamics of our modern consumer society, Mandeville is author (...) of a striking naturalistic account of the gradual evolution of modern society from its primitive antecedents. His literary signature, in a manner of speaking, is his famous paradox, "private vices, public benefits." This new edition of Free Thoughts is prefaced by a lengthy and informative introduction by Irwin Primer, who recreates not only the literary, political, and religious atmosphere surrounding Mandeville, but also the controversies that surrounded his writing in mid-eighteenth-century England. Primer includes textual notes on the first and second editions of this classic work. To understand Mandeville's Free Thoughts, one needs to situate it within the context of the religious and political controversies, ongoing subversion, fear and dormant warfare of his times. Those would eventually erupt again and for the last time in the bloody Jacobite rebellion of 1745-46. The first five chapters of the book explore religious and theological issues including the nature of belief and knowledge, the significance of rites and ceremonies, and controversies about Christian mysteries such as the Trinity and free will and predestination. The next five chapters explore controversial issues of church politics, including persecution and toleration across the centuries, the basis of Mandeville's anticlericalism. In the eleventh chapter, he turns aside from matters of religion to review the balance of powers in Britain's government, a mixed or limited monarchy. The final chapter is essentially a repetition of Mandeville's pleas for civil and religious peace through mutual toleration by opposing religious parties. Mandeville's work is of continuing interest to students of culture and history, religion and theology, and political science. Irwin Primer is professor emeritus at Rutgers University who has written widely on Mandeville and the Scottish tradition in philosophy. (shrink)

This is a very important contribution to the slowly emerging literature on psychoanalysis and time. By examining the influences on Freud's thinking about time and the development of what were his mostly implicit ideas about temporality, Kelly Noel-Smith offers a lively and impeccably scholarly new way of understanding the background to current developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice." - Professor Stephen Frosh, Birkbeck, University of London, UK. "Dr Noel-Smith displays deep knowledge of Freud's oeuvre, the relevant Ancient (...) Greek sources that Freud drew upon, and modern philosophical thought. Her expertise is synthesized into a well-organized inquiry into what Freud thought about time. I learned a huge amount from reading this clear, well-informed and profound exposition." - Professor Charles Stewart, University College London, UK. Time and timelessness are fundamental principles of psychoanalysis yet Freud does not present a consolidated theory of temporality. In this book Kelly Noel-Smith pieces together Freud's scattered 'hints' and 'suspicions' about time and its negative, timelessness. She traces a careful temporal trail through Freud's published works and his daunting Nachlass, and provides a compelling reason as to why Freud kept his remarkable thoughts about time to himself. Kelly Noel-Smith combines a career in law with an academic interest in psychoanalysis and philosophy. (shrink)

The paper replies to Professor Alex Michalos'' keynote address, "Ethics Counsellors as a New Priesthood". Michalos argues that an intractable diversity of opinion about fundamental issues in ethical theory precludes substantive, well-founded ethical counselling. However, Michalos has inappropriately modelled his understanding of an acceptable structure and application for ethical theory on natural scientific theory. For we may countenance a less severe understanding of theory for ethical theory than in the hard sciences. In particular, instructive moral reasoning may tolerate a (...) degree of disagreement across human beings in their conception of moral good. On condition that such variance is not so considerable as to undermine a necessary commonality of language on ethical matters, there will be an adequate basis for warranted theory-construction in ethics and effective moral counselling underwritten by such theory. And, on the available historical evidence, such a condition can be met. (shrink)

BackgroundProfessional health care practice should be based on ethical decisions and actions. When there are competing ethical standards or principles, one must choose between two or more competing options. This study explores ethical dilemmas experienced by International Board Certified Lactation Consultants.MethodsThe investigator interviewed seven International Board Certified Lactation Consultants and analyzed the interviews using qualitative research methods.Results"Staying Mother-Centred" emerged as the overall theme. It encompassed six categories that emerged as steps in managing ethical dilemmas: 1) recognizing the dilemma; 2) (...) identifying context; 3) determining choices; 4) strategies used; 5) results and choices the mother made; and 6) follow-up. The category, "Strategies used", was further analyzed and six sub-themes emerged: building trust; diffusing situations; empowering mothers; finding balance; providing information; and setting priorities.ConclusionsThis study provides a framework for understanding how International Board Certified Lactation Consultants manage ethical dilemmas. Although the details of their stories changed, the essence of the experience remained quite constant with the participants making choices and acting to support the mothers. The framework could be the used for further research or to develop tools to support IBCLCs as they manage ethical dilemmas and to strengthen the profession with a firm ethics foundation. (shrink)

Although protected by the law on fixed prices for books, independent bookshops in France have struggled to maintain their market share against bookselling giants such as Amazon and the chains. In trying to do so, they have developed a rhetoric based on the singularity of the experience in physical shops, stressing a sense of intimacy akin to that associated with the domestic sphere. Their being independent – no matter how slippery the notion – has also been a key argument. Using (...) Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic goods, this paper aims to show that this strategy has been effective in singling out something that ‘only’ independent retail can provide, something that proves particularly attractive to certain categories of customers. The article draws on semi-structured interviews carried out with owners of small and medium-sized independent bookshops, together with observation during events and debates, to provide some insight into a key element of physical bookshops’ resilience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Necessity of TheaterNoël CarrollDespite the fact that theater was the first art form to be examined in depth by Western philosophers, it has not received a great deal of attention by contemporary philosophers of art. Essays on literature, music, and cinema are more likely to appear in journals such as the British Journal of Aesthetics and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism than are articles on (...) theater. But with the publication of Paul Woodruff's The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched, James Hamilton's The Art of Theater and the recent anthology Staging Philosophy, edited by David Zucker Saltz and David Krassner, the tide seems to be turning. Philosophers are interested in theater again. Perhaps some lovers of theater may regard this as bad news, recalling what Plato, Augustine, and Rousseau attempted to do to theater. But contemporary philosophers of theater belong more to the school of Aristotle than to that of Plato.Of these recent contributions to the philosophy of theater, Paul Woodruff's book is the one that most resembles Aristotle's Poetics, especially in terms of its analyses of plotting, characterization, conflict, choice, and mimesis. This is maybe no surprise, since Paul Woodruff is not only a professor of philosophy, but also a professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin. [End Page 435]One thing that is immediately striking about The Necessity of Theater is the elegance of its intellectual design. Woodruff begins with the hypothesis that theater is the art by which human beings make or find human action worth watching in measure time and place. That is, theater is art of being watched and watching. This distinction between being watched and watching, then, provides Woodruff with the means to, on the one hand, examine the elements that go into making theater, and, on the other hand, the elements that go into watching or appreciating theater.Creating theater involves making something worth watching—something that will hold the audience's attention. What sorts of things command our attention? Human action, notably as it is organized in terms of a plot which Woodruff, like Aristotle, emphasizes must be of a magnitude sufficient to be cognitively manageable. Since actions require choices, Woodruff follows his analysis of plot, naturally enough, with a discussion of the choices that give rise to those actions for much the same reason that Aristotle includes dialogue as one of the components of tragedy.In order to be worth watching, Woodruff recommends that these choices be free and coherent. Since choices derive—or are thought to derive—from character, theater, in order to hold our attention, needs characters. These characters must be agents and, in addition, they must be capable of engaging our emotions, not just pity and fear, but the gamut of emotions, although the most important of these, on Woodruff's view, would appear to be the elicitation of care on the part of the audience on behalf of the characters on stage. Woodruff contends that care for a character is engendered by giving the character a past as well as hopes for the future (an aim, a project, a problem) and by making that person a center of love (that is, someone who loves and/or is loved by or who cares and is cared for by other people).Theater primarily makes us interested in watching people by encouraging us to respond to characters emotionally. It is able to do this because it traffics in mimesis. Woodruff understand mimesis as a matter of a mimetic object, a theater piece, bringing to the fore certain effects of the object of which it is a representation. With respect to a theater piece, the relevant effects are emotional effects. Because mimesis is selective, it may be able to achieve those effects more intensely than its off-stage model can; the selectivity of the theater piece both places greater emphasis on the emotion-provoking features of situations while also blocking out otherwise [End Page 436] interfering detail. However, theater does require the complicity of the audience who must fill-in the model imaginatively.The introduction of the role of the audience's... (shrink)