Alphonso Lingis is the author of many books and renowned for his translations of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Klossowski. By combining a rich philosophical training with an extensive travel itinerary, Lingis has developed a distinctive brand of phenomenology that is only now beginning to gain critical attention. Lingis inhabits a ready-made language and conceptuality, but cultivates a style of thinking which disrupts and transforms the work of his predecessors, setting him apart from the rest of his field. This essay sketches Lingis’ (...) phenomenology of sensation in order to give expression to some dimensions of Lingisian travel. As we see, Lingis deploys a theory of the subject which features the plasticity of the body, the materiality of affect, and the alimentary nature of sensation. (shrink)

Alphonso Lingis is the author of many books and renowned for his translations of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Klossowski. By combining a rich philosophical training with an extensive travel itinerary, Lingis has developed a distinctive brand of phenomenology that is only now beginning to gain critical attention. Lingis inhabits a ready-made language and conceptuality, but cultivates a style of thinking which disrupts and transforms the work of his predecessors, setting him apart from the rest of his field. This essay sketches Lingis’ (...) phenomenology of sensation in order to give expression to some dimensions of Lingisian travel. As we see, Lingis deploys a theory of the subject which features the plasticity of the body, the materiality of affect, and the alimentary nature of sensation. (shrink)

Tom Sparrow shows how, in the 21st century, speculative realism aims to do what phenomenology could not: provide a philosophical method that disengages the human-centred approach to metaphysics in order to chronicle the complex realm of nonhuman reality. -/- Through a focused reading of the methodological statements and metaphysical commitments of key phenomenologists and speculative realists, Sparrow shows how speculative realism is replacing phenomenology as the beacon of realism in contemporary Continental philosophy.

The essays collected here demonstrate that the philosophy of habit is not confined to the work of just a handful of thinkers, but traverses the entire history of Western philosophy and continues to thrive in contemporary theory. A History of Habit: From Aristotle to Bourdieu is the first book to document the richness and diversity of this history. It demonstrates the breadth, flexibility, and explanatory power of the concept of habit as well as its enduring significance. It makes the case (...) for habit’s perennial attraction for philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists. (shrink)

Sensation is a concept with a conflicted philosophical history. It has found as many allies as enemies in nearly every camp from empiricism to poststructuralism. Polyvalent, with an uncertain referent, and often overshadowed by intuition, perception, or cognition, sensation invites as much metaphysical speculation as it does dismissive criticism. -/- The promise of sensation has certainly not been lost on the phenomenologists who have sought to ‘rehabilitate’ the concept. In Plastic Bodies, Tom Sparrow argues that the phenomenologists have not (...) gone far enough, however. Alongside close readings of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, he digs into an array of ancient, modern, and contemporary texts in search of the resources needed to rebuild the concept of sensation after phenomenology. He begins to assemble a speculative aesthetics that is at once a realist theory of sensation and a philosophy of embodiment that breaks the form of the ‘lived’ body. Maintaining that the body is fundamentally plastic and that corporeal identity is constituted by a conspiracy of sensations, he pursues the question of how the body fits into/fails to fit into its aesthetic environment and what must be done to increase the body’s power to act and exist. (shrink)

Through six heterodox essays this book extracts a materialist account of subjectivity and aesthetics from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. More than a work of academic commentary that would leave many of Levinas’s pious commentators aghast, Sparrow exhibits an aspect of Levinas which is darker, yet no less fundamental, than his ethical and theological guises. This darkened Levinas provides answers to problems in aesthetics, speculative philosophy, ecology, ethics, and philosophy of race, problems which not only trouble scholars, but which (...) haunt anyone who insists that the material of existence is the beginning and end of existence itself. (shrink)

Alphonso Lingis is arguably the most intriguing American philosopher of the past fifty years. An extended encounter with the singular philosopher, The Alphonso Lingis Reader conducts us through Lingis’s early writing on phenomenology to his hybrid studies fusing philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, communication theory, aesthetics, and other disciplines, to his original, inspired arguments about everything from knowledge to laughter to death.

This essay conceives ecological life as radically dependent, vulnerable, and horrific. Epistemologically speaking, we are quite ignorant of the web of dependency that sustains our lives. Our ecological condition often prevents us from locating and identifying our dependencies and the many ways our actions impact the environment. This is the terror and danger that plagues the Anthropocene. Our ignorance bears an ontological weight that can be drawn out with the concept of trust. Trust, I argue, is not a choice. Trust (...) is a necessity to which we are riveted, and one that is always conditioned by our vulnerability and ignorance. The picture of ecological trust that I paint is not a hopeful one: it is dark, pessimistic, and urgent. It opposes visions of our future that are superstitious and optimistic about our ability to respond effectively to climate change. (shrink)

This essay uses Ulrich Beck’s concept of risk society to understand the threat of catastrophic climate change. It argues that this threat is “abstract-corporeal”, and therefore a special kind of threat that poses special kinds of epistemic and ecological challenges. At the center of these challenges is the problem of human vulnerability, which entails a complex form of trust that both sustains and threatens human survival.

Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis gathers a diverse collection of texts on Lingis’s life and philosophy, including poetry, original interviews, essays, book reviews, and a photo essay. It also includes an unpublished piece by Lingis, “Doubles,” along with copies of several of his letters to a friend.

The body is central to the philosophies of Spinoza and Nietzsche. Both thinkers are concerned with the composition of the body, its potential relations with other bodies, and the modifications which a body can undergo. Gilles Deleuze has contributed significantly to the relatively sparse literature which draws out the affinities between Spinoza and Nietzsche. Deleuze’s reconceptualization of the field of ethology enables us to bring Spinoza and Nietzsche together as ethologists of the body and to elaborate their common, physiological perspective (...) on ethico-political composition. This is accomplished by reading the concepts of force, power, and affect as they are mobilized in their discussions of corporeity and intercorporeity. What emerges is a metaphysics of bodies that can simultaneously be regarded as a physiology of encounters, one which renders the friend/enemy distinction indiscernible and opens the door for a rethinking of the nature of political alliances. Both Spinoza and Nietzsche are shown to be invaluable resources for helping us imagine the potential of the individual’s body and the body politic. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Jonathan Glover, a prominent advocate of human genetic engineering, relies on a limited naturalistic account of normal human function in his defense of genetic engineering as a means of decreasing future instances of disability. I show that his concept of disability and the normative argument informed by it in his Choosing Children: Genes, Disability, and Design fails to incorporate the phenomenological dimension of embodiment, and that this dimension should be included in any account of (...) disability and human flourishing. Such inclusion, however, requires us to consider seriously the counterintuitive view that racial minorities are constitutionally disabled in racist societies. (shrink)

This essay defends the view that, as embodied, our identities are necessarily dependent on the aesthetic environment. Toward this end, it examines the renewal of the concept of sensation (aisthesis) in phenomenology, but then concludes that the methodology and metaphysics of phenomenology must be abandoned in favor of an ontology that sees corporeal identity as generated by the materiality of aesthetic relations. It is suggested that such an ontology is available in the work of Spinoza, which helps break down the (...) natural/ artificial and human/nonhuman distinctions, and can thereby engender an environmental ethics grounded in aesthetic relations. An explication of body/ world dependence is provided via the concept of plasticity and a properly Spinozist aesthetics is invoked, but remains to be worked out. (shrink)

Continental philosophy is witnessing a global renaissance of speculative philosophy. And while some corners of this movement are gaining traction in art- and architecture-theoretical circles, its application to philosophical aesthetics has been forestalled in favor of metaphysical and, secondarily, epistemological inquiry. This essay tracks some of the ways that speculative aesthetics is emerging, and opening new pathways, within the renaissance. It accomplishes three primary tasks. First, it enumerates several of the ways that the name “speculative aesthetics” has been mobilized in (...) contemporary speculative philosophy. Second, it presents and develops one approach to speculative aesthetics, namely Graham Harman’s, and highlights its indebtedness to Levinas. Third, it briefly endorses a particular way forward for speculative aesthetics, one that is object-oriented and articulated in a recent essay by N. Katherine Hayles, the work of Steven Shaviro, and my book Plastic Bodies. (shrink)

Investigating the trail of philosophical leads in HBO’s chilling True Detective series, an elite team of philosophers examine far-reaching riddles including human pessimism, Rust’s anti-natalism, the problem of evil, and the ‘flat circle’.

Review of Markus Gabriel, Fields of Sense, Edinburgh University Press, 2015.

Review of Graham Harman, Speculative Realism: An Introduction, Polity, 2018.

In “The misguided quest for the ethics of enhancement”, Tom Murray makes two related claims. First, he argues that “understanding the ethics of enhancement is deeply dependent on context". Second, he suggests that, as a consequence, we should not look for “a single all-purpose ethics for every form of human enhancement”. In this brief response, I argue that while Murray is correct in the first of these claims, there is an important sense in which he is wrong in the second. (...) His focus on the ethics of enhancement in sport serves him well in illustrating how our reasons to embrace or resist technological change as it impacts on athletes and players depends crucially on “why we play” and, in particular, on nature of the excellences made possible by the current rules of the game. However, the thing about life is that the “rules” are unknown and the meaning of participation and the excellences it makes possible are widely disputed. For this reason, a focus on the ethics of sport serves us less well when it comes to the larger question of the attitude we should take towards “human enhancement”. In the context of the profound disputes about the nature of the good in modern liberal societies, we may indeed need a single, robust, theoretical framework through which to resolve questions about enhancement – although whether this is best thought of as an “ethics” or a “politics” of enhancement is a further (and difficult) question. Regardless of how such a framework is conceived, Murray’s observations about the importance of context, the significance of competition, and the attractions of a “public health ethics” approach, all serve to alert us to just how difficult the task of developing an ethics for human enhancement more generally is likely to be. (shrink)

The collection by Sparrow and Hutchinson gathers together philosophers and sociologists to discuss the ever fascinating yet surprisingly underplayed theme of habit: its history and place in the western philosophical tradition, from the ancients to the contemporary scene. A collection such as this has been long overdue, and surprisingly so, given the centrality of habits in our understanding and organization of ourselves and of the world. We human beings are in fact complex bundles of habits embodied in practices. Hence, (...) our limits and possibilities are at least partially governed by the way in which we habituate, dishabituate, and re-habituate ourselves. Although their presence is widely... (shrink)

The argument of Julian Savulescu’s 2001 paper, “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children” is flawed in a number of respects. Savulescu confuses reasons with obligations and equivocates between the claim that parents have some reason to want the best for their children and the more radical claim that they are morally obligated to attempt to produce the best child possible. Savulescu offers a prima facie implausible account of parental obligation, as even the best parents typically fail to (...) do everything they think would be best for their children let alone everything that is in fact best for their children. The profound philosophical difficulties which beset the attempt to formulate a plausible account of the best human life constitute a further independent reason to resile from Savulescu’s conclusion. Savulescu’s argument also requires parents to become complicit with racist and homophobic oppression, which is yet another reason to reject it. Removing the equivocation from Savulescu’s argument allows us to see that the assertion of an obligation to choose the “best child” has much more in common with the “old” eugenics than Savulescu acknowledges. (shrink)

More than twenty years after its original publication, The Case for Animal Rights is an acknowledged classic of moral philosophy, and its author is recognized as the intellectual leader of the animal rights movement. In a new and fully considered preface, Regan responds to his critics and defends the book's revolutionary position.

This paper makes the case for arms control regimes to govern the development and deployment of autonomous weapon systems and long range uninhabited aerial vehicles.

A disadvantage of adopting reductio ad absurdum as a mode of argument is that it multiplies the options available to one's critics. As with any argument, detractors may deny the argument's premises...

It is an important feature of creatures like us that our various motivations compete for control over our behaviour, including mental behaviour such as imagining and attending. In large part, this competition is adjudicated by the stimulation of affect — the intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant aspects of experience. In this paper I argue that the motivation-affect system controls a sub-type of attention called 'alerting attention' to bring various goals and stimuli to consciousness and thereby prioritize those contents for action. This (...) view allows me to flesh out the global workspace theory of consciousness, as well as some of the phenomenal characteristics of conscious experience. (shrink)

This paper uses the fictional case of the ‘Babel fish’ to explore and illustrate the issues involved in the controversy about the use of cochlear implants in prelinguistically deaf children. Analysis of this controversy suggests that the development of genetic tests for deafness poses a serious threat to the continued flourishing of Deaf culture. I argue that the relationships between Deaf and hearing cultures that are revealed and constructed in debates about genetic testing are themselves deserving of ethical evaluation. Making (...) good policy about genetic testing for deafness will require addressing questions in political philosophy and anthropology about the value of culture and also thinking hard about what sorts of experiences and achievements make a human life worthwhile. (shrink)

To understand Self-Representationalism you need to understand its family. Self-Representationalism is a branch of the Meta-Representationalist family, and according to theories in this family what distinguishes conscious mental representations from unconscious mental representations is that conscious ones are themselves the target of a mental meta¬-representational state. A mental state M1 is thus phenomenally conscious in virtue of being suitably represented by some mental state M2. What distinguishes the Self-Representationalist branch of the family is the claim that M1 and M2 must (...) be the same token mental state, so a mental state is phenomenally conscious in virtue of suitably representing itself. This Self-Representationalist branch of the family divides into further branches, giving us specific implementations of the Self-Representationalist approach. But before asking whether we should adopt Self-Representationalism, and in what form, we should reflect on why Meta-Representationalism is an attractive family in the first place. After all, Self-Representationalist theories trade on their family name, claiming to deliver on the promises that drive the Meta-Representationalist approach. The two most important promises of Meta-Representationalism are: a) the promise of capturing the transitivity of consciousness and; b) the promise of rendering consciousness naturalisable. I discuss each in turn. (shrink)

Abstract Temporal Externalism is the view that future events can contribute to determining the present content of our thoughts and utterances. Two objections to Temporal Externalism are discussed and rejected. The first is that Temporal Externalism has implausible consequences for the epistemology of biology and other taxonomic sciences (Brown, 2000). The second is that it is committed to implausible claims about dispositions.

If we were to connect two individuals’ brains together, how would this affect the individuals’ conscious experiences? In particular, it is possible for two people to share any of their conscious experiences; to simultaneously enjoy some token experiences while remaining distinct subjects? The case of the Hogan twins—craniopagus conjoined twins whose brains are connected at the thalamus—seems to show that this can happen. I argue that while practical empirical methods cannot tell us directly whether or not the twins share conscious (...) experiences, considerations about the locality of content processing in the brain entails that they most likely do so. (shrink)

How wrong is it to deceive someone into sex by lying, say, about one's profession? The answer is seriously wrong when the liar's actual profession would be a deal breaker for the victim of the deception: this deception vitiates the victim's sexual consent, and it is seriously wrong to have sex with someone while lacking his or her consent.

‘Liberal eugenics’ has emerged as the most popular position amongst philosophers writing in the contemporary debate about the ethics of human enhancement. This position has been most clearly articulated by Nicholas Agar, who argues that the ‘new’ liberal eugenics can avoid the repugnant consequences associated with eugenics in the past. Agar suggests that parents should be free to make only those interventions into the genetics of their children that will benefit them no matter what way of life they grow up (...) to endorse. I argue that Agar's attempt to distinguish the new from the old eugenics fails. Once we start to consciously determine the genetics of future persons, we will not be able to avoid controversial assumptions about the relative worth of different life plans. Liberal eugenicists therefore confront the horns of a dilemma. Whichever way they try to resolve it, the consequences of widespread use of technologies of genetic selection are likely to look more like the old eugenics than defenders of the new eugenics have acknowledged. (shrink)

The ‘marketplace of ideas’ is an influential metaphor with widespread currency in debates about freedom of speech. We explore a number of ways competition between ideas might be described as occurring in a marketplace and find that none support the use of the metaphor. We suggest that an alternative metaphor, that of the ‘garden of ideas’, may offer more productive insights into issues surrounding the regulation of speech.

It is often claimed that the development of nanotechnology will constitute a “technological revolution” with profound social, economic, and political consequences. The full implications of this claim can best be understood by imagining a scenario in which a political revolutionary made all the same claims that are commonly made by enthusiasts for nanotechnology. I argue that most people would be outraged to learn that the members of an unelected group were planning to radically reshape society in this fashion. I survey (...) a number of arguments that might be used to block this analogy and argue that none of them justify drawing a sharp distinction between social change due to technology and change due to other political causes. Two things follow for discussions of the social impacts of nanotechnology. First, we need to reconsider the appropriateness of the language of technological revolution when talking about nanotechnology. The likely impacts of nanotechnology may be less dramatic than is often claimed. Second, if we do decide that the language of revolution is the appropriate one to use when talking about nanotechnology then we should acknowledge that any such revolution should be delayed until the public has had a chance to make a democratic decision about whether they wish their lives to be transformed in this way. (shrink)

Concern for “reproductive liberty” suggests that decisions about embryos should normally be made by the persons who would be the genetic parents of the child that would be brought into existence if the embryo were brought to term. Therapeutic cloning would involve creating and destroying an embryo, which, if brought to term, would be the offspring of the genetic parents of the person undergoing therapy. I argue that central arguments in debates about parenthood and genetics therefore suggest that therapeutic cloning (...) would be prima facie unethical unless it occurred with the consent of the parents of the person being cloned. Alternatively, if therapeutic cloning is thought to be legitimate, this undermines the case for some uses of reproductive cloning by implying that the genetic relation it establishes between clones and DNA donors does not carry the same moral weight as it does in cases of normal reproduction. (shrink)

When doubts were first raised about the veracity of the dramatic advances in stem cell research announced by Professor Hwang Woo-Suk, a significant minority response was to question the qualifications of journalists to investigate the matter. In this paper I examine the contemporary relationships between science, scientists, the public, and the media. In the modern context the progress of science often relies on the media to mobilise public support for research and also for the purpose of communication within the scientific (...) community. As a result, attempts to counterpose "science" and "the media" should be treated with some caution. I argue that because of the essential role played by ethics in good science, journalists may in fact sometimes be well placed to investigate scientists. At the conclusion of my paper I draw out some of the implications of my analysis for the ethics of investigative journalism directed towards scientific research. (shrink)