Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 44, Issue 4, Page 373-390, December 2021.

The essay analyses the emergence of Rilke’s angel-and-puppet from (the watching of) the nothing as indicative of the fascination with artificial creatures which, according to Mladen Dolar, resulted from the Enlightenment ambition to posit a "zero subjectivity" at the point where the spiritual would directly spring from the material. This zero subjectivity, described here as the autonomization of the automaton, amounts to a subtraction of the machine from the Cartesian understanding of the animal. The question that Rilke’s Duino Elegies posit (...) is, hence, not a question of the humanization of the animal and the animalization of man (as Heidegger believed), but, rather, of the subtraction of the puppet-and-angel from the animal-and-man. The drama of this subtraction, with its indefinable residue, destabilizes the anthropogenetic machine analysed by Agamben and fuels the project which Badiou has recently brought forth as the 20th century project of a new man. (shrink)

In her conceptualization of the human as defined by the capacity for revolt Kristeva unavoidably touches upon issues of robotization, technology, and the virtual. The concepts of animal and machine, however, although they do appear occasionally and in important ways, are never at the focus of her inquiries and are absent in her “New Forms of Revolt.” Yet these two concepts to a large extent define the field of contemporary philosophical debates of the human giving rise to three major theoretical (...) orientations. On the one hand, there is the trend which tries to come to terms with technological novelties and the merging of human and machine that they imply. This trend unfolds under the rubric of “transhuman” or “posthuman” and of the “enhancement” of man. The second trend predominates in animal studies. Mostly in an ethical perspective but also ontologically, this trend, to which Derrida’s later writing made a significant contribution, questions the idea of the “human exception” and the rigorous distinction between man and animal on which this exception rests. While apparently antagonistic, both trends align the human with the animal and oppose it to technology. The third trend collapses the distinctions on which the previous two rely through the lens of biopolitics: drawing on Heidegger, Kojève, and Foucault, it regards contemporary technological transformations as amounting to the animalization of man. The human disappears in the animal, in the machine, or in the indistinguishability of the two, confirming what Agamben has described as the inoperativeness of the anthropological machine. The present text turns to Kristeva’s conceptions of motherhood and revolt as introducing a powerful inflection in this tripartite field. Remarkably, it is precisely new sagas of rebellious machines like Battlestar “Galactica” that foreground the relevance of Kristeva’s approach. (shrink)

The present review takes into consideration the existing literature on Professor Dr. Miglena Nikolchina's new monograph, “God with a Machine: Extracting the Human”, with a particular focus on the science-fictional aspects of the book, tracking their culmination in the debates about the future and the inquiries that construct the very notion of humanity.

Dual-processes theories of cognition implicitly assume universality of the human mind. However, research has shown that large-scale differences exist in thinking styles across cultures. Thereby, the universality of the effects found in Western samples remains an open empirical question. Here, we explored whether effects predicted by prospect theory, such as the framing effect, would be observed in a sample of 312 Bulgarian students. Overall, the size of the framing effect was smaller than in the original studies. Most notably, we failed (...) to reproduce the framing effect in the famous Asian Disease problem, using a rating response format. In a between-subjects design, decision- making performance was completely independent of university admission grades. We propose that studying the size of the effects across cultures is needed in order to establish the effects’ level of universality. More broadly, we suggest ways in which knowledge of cultural settings can help elaborate or test dual-process predictions. (shrink)