After years of the welfare state, the rise of technology, combined with neoliberal governmental apparatuses, has established a new society of the precarious. In this new way of the world, productivity is not just connected to labor in the traditional sense of work hours, but more totally, to the formation of the self: work becomes performative and affective, and personal identities seep more and more into working ones. This new mode of being has another side, however: it can lead to (...) new forms of self-organization, resistance and exodus. In it we see the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious. (shrink)

Die philosophische Rede von der Schuld umgreift ein breites Bedeutungsspektrum, von der Existenz- und Religionsphilosophie bis zur Ästhetik. Hegel bestimmt den Begriff der Schuld jedoch vornehmlich im Zusammenhang seiner Lehre von der Handlung als einem konstitutiven Bestandteil seiner Moralitätskonzeption. Zentraler Gegenstand dieser Untersuchung sind deshalb Hegels Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts; sie bezieht jedoch auch handlungstheoretische Aspekte der Phänomenologie des Geistes, der Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte sowie der Wissenschaft der Logik ein. Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem von Hegel begründeten (...) und mit seiner Schuld- und Strafkonzeption untrennbar verwobenen Begriff der Handlung erfolgt jedoch nicht im rein philosophiehistorischen Interesse, sondern sie erweist Hegels Handlungskonzeption mit Blick auf aktuelle Diskussionen innerhalb der Rechtswissenschaft als bedeutenden historisch-systematischen Bezugspunkt sowie als mitunter notwendiges Korrektiv."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Lorey develops an original concept of a presentist democracy based on care and interrelatedness.

Should high‐income countries engage in solar geoengineering research and possible deployment? On the assumption that the speed of the energy transition will be insufficient to abate catastrophic climate impacts, research into solar geoengineering begins to look like a technically and socially feasible route to mitigate such impacts. But on the assumption that a rapid and relatively just energy transition is still within the realm of political possibility, research into solar geoengineering looks more like an ideological tool designed to divert time (...) and resources from less risky climate solutions. At the heart of debates over solar geoengineering, then, is disagreement over what political actors can be expected to do in the future. In this article, I argue that both objectors to and proponents of solar geoengineering research often make background assumptions regarding expected future actions that are either (a) inaccurate or (b) inconsistent. I propose an account of expected future actions that avoids these problems and sketch what the debate over solar geoengineering looks like with these assumptions in place. (shrink)

Die Kategorie des Menschseins wird aufgrund wechselnder Wissensbestände und Orientierungskrisen immer wieder neu bestimmt. Das Ästhetische ist damit eng verbunden. 'Aisthesis' ist erstens eine Form der sinnlichen und empfindenden Wahrnehmung, ein vorrationaler 'way of worldmaking' (Nelson Goodman), der den Bezug des Menschen zu sich und seiner Welt moduliert. Ästhetische Vorstellungen grundieren zweitens aber auch die Idee des Humanen und die Normen menschlicher Handlungs-weisen. Und drittens sind ästhetische Erkenntnis- und Ausdrucksformen Teil eines 'selbstgesponnenen Bedeutungsgewebes' (Clifford Geertz) der Kultur, das die Grenzen (...) und das 'Andere' des Menschen bestimmt. Der interdisziplinäre Sammelband vereint aus verschiedenen Fächern und Forschungsperspektiven heraus Einblicke in die Wechselwirkungen zwischen anthropologischen Fragestellungen und ästhetischen Formationen. Mit Beiträgen von Horst Bredekamp, Steffen Martus, Martin Seel, Christoph Wulf, Elisabeth Timm u.a. (shrink)

Metaphors abound in descriptions of the COVID-19 pandemic: it is described, among other things, as a war, a flood, and a marathon. However, not all metaphors may resonate equally well with members...

How do we switch between “playing along” and treating robots as technical agents? We propose interaction breakdowns to help solve this “social artifact puzzle”: Breaks cause changes from fluid interaction to explicit reasoning and interaction with the raw artifact. These changes are closely linked to understanding the technical architecture and could be used to design better human–robot interaction (HRI).

The Occupy movements in 2011 – this essay focuses mainly on Spain and the United States – have been more than moments of grassroots or direct democracy: they have been collective political practices testing forms of non-representationist democracy in the Europe of representative democracy to an unusually great extent. The precarious subjects of post-Fordism rejected political representation, and at the same time they struggled for a ‘real’ democracy. This oxymoron between representation and democracy structures the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière (...) and corresponds with his well-known distinction between police and politics. This is one of the reasons why his thinking is helpful to understand them as decidedly political ones. However, the assembly as one of the central topoi of theories of democracy plays no prominent role in Rancière’s political philosophy. In contrast to this, I focus on the central practice of the assemblies in the Occupy movements and develop a concept of presentist democracy. (shrink)

Precarisation means more than insecure jobs, more than the lack of security given by waged employment. By way of insecurity and danger it embraces the whole of existence, the body, modes of subjectivation. It is threat and coercion, even while it opens up new possibilities of living and working. Precarisation means living with the unforeseeable, with contingency. In this article I analyse how the new precarious living and working conditions and the privatisation of protection against precariousness are conditions of both (...) a prospering financial capitalism and its concomitant debt economy. This economy is based on the expansion of productivity that involves less work, in the traditional sense, than subjectivation. A new subjectivity is needed to assume responsibility, to take on debt, and to internalise the risks both as guilt and as debt: a personality that is doubly indebted and responsible for oneself.La precarización significa más que empleos inseguros, más que la falta de seguridad que proporciona el empleo asalariado. A través de la inseguridad y el peligro, la precarización abarca toda la existencia, el cuerpo, los modos de subjetivación. Es una amenaza y una forma de coerción, aunque también abre nuevas posibilidades de vivir y trabajar. Precarización significa vivir con lo imprevisible, bajo la contingencia. En este artículo analizo cómo las nuevas condiciones de vida y de trabajo precarias y la privatización de la protección contra la precariedad son condiciones, tanto de un próspero capitalismo financiero, como de su concomitante economía de la deuda. Esta economía se basa en la expansión de la productividad, la cual implica más bien procesos de subjetivación que lo que hemos entendido por trabajo en el sentido tradicional. Se necesita una nueva subjetividad para asumir responsabilidades, para endeudarse e internalizar los riesgos como culpa y como deuda: una personalidad doblemente endeudada y responsable de sí misma. (shrink)

Medical imaging has provided insight into the living body that were not possible beforehand. With these methods a revolution in medical diagnosis and biomedical research has begun. Problematic aspects on the other hand are arising from the highly constructive properties of image production, which use complicated physical and physiological effects. Images are established via highly complicated combinations of technology and contingently chosen mathematical and algorithmic solutions. In addition, image construction follows properties of the human visual and cognitive system to allow (...) for the discrimination of the desired categories. It is no wonder that the visualizations referring to the body also show effects which have no physiological correlation within the body. Still such images are often used as if they were one-to-one correlates of the body. This has impacts, e.g. for their use as standardizing instances, resulting in new definitions of the normed healthy body, sickness or pathologies, maleness and femaleness and in determinisms as opposed to the brain's plasticity and variability, both in time and space, inter- as well as intra-individually. (shrink)

Here moral problems created by the use of constructive imaging technologies within the life sciences are discussed. It specifically deals with the creation of dichotomies, such as gender, race and other differences, created and manifested through the contingent use of scientific and computational models and methods, channelling the production process of scientific results and images. Gender in technology studies has been concerned with destabilizing essentialist and dichotomous co-constructions of gender and technology. In the technological construction process gendered social constructions of (...) stereotypes and inequalities both of the technological models and of the presumptions in life sciences become structural properties of the artefacts, again flowing back into the seemingly objective results and knowledge of the life sciences. Here we will deal with the construction of gender differences via biomedical imaging and the creation of norms in atlases. Additionally, the de-contextualized images, showing idiosyncratic selections and reducing complexity are used to popularize gendered assumptions about biological facts. (shrink)

Considering two recent trends in the Humanities – the cultural turn and the increase of critical sociohistorical reflections on a global level – in this paper it should be looked at their influences especially on philosophy. One of these influences can be located in the emergence of “intercultural philosophy” since the 1990s which calls for a reorientation of philosophy in general. Regarding mainly one of the favored methods, the polylogue, it is important to take into account the postcolonial perspective, too. (...) For such an interculturally and postcolonially motivated approach there are two tasks which are highly relevant: 1) the deconstruction of history in direction towards a new critical historiography and 2) the due reflection of crucial philosophical concepts and categories in direction towards a conceptual decolonization. Mainly the latter, in my opinion, marks a necessary and already overdue project for rethinking the philosophical vocabulary and for overcoming its colonial impact. Perhaps this may finally become a really intercultural philosophical project in which philosophers engage wherever they may be from. (shrink)