The legitimacy of the contemporary

Die Vorlesung des Autors enthält anthropologische Reflexionen zur Natur des Menschen und zur Legitimität der Moderne. Im Anschluss an Odo Marquards und Hans Blumenbergs Überlegungen zur Geschichtsphilosophie wird zunächst die Frage diskutiert, wie über den sozialen Wandel ohne Geschichtsphilosophie nachgedacht werden könne und wie eine Anthropologie ohne eine festgelegte Konzeption des Menschen möglich ist. Angesichts des Wandels der Biologie und der Entstehung neuer Lebenswissenschaften stellt sich ferner die Frage, welcher Logos des Bios der Gegenwart zugrundegelegt werden kann. Der Autor geht hierzu unter anderem auf die wissenschaftliche Entdeckung des "Drosophila"-Genoms im Jahr 2000 ein und erörtert die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur im Zusammenhang der Sozialphilosophie von Jürgen Habermas. Seine weiteren Reflexionen beziehen sich auf die Problemstellungen der Bioethik, auf die Frage des Humanismus in der Gegenwart, auf Sicherheit, Gefahr und Risiko in der Postmoderne sowie auf die Positionen von Niklas Luhmann zur Risikogesellschaft. (ICI

Organizational Meeting for TDF\u27s 2nd Annual Creative Writers Festival Poster

Providence College Department of Theatre, Dance & Film Lobby of Smith Center Organizational Meeting for TDF\u27s 2nd Annual Creative Writers Festival Wednesday, March 4, 2015https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/cwf_2015_pubs/1004/thumbnail.jp

The development of a manual of policies and procedures

This item was digitized by the Internet Archive. Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Hebbel's portraiture of women

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1928. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Responsible research and innovation: A manifesto for empirical ethics?

In 2013 the Nuffield Council on Bioethics launched their report Novel Neurotechnologies: Intervening in the Brain. The report, which adopts the European Commission's notion of Responsible Research and Innovation, puts forward a set of priorities to guide ethical research into, and the development of, new therapeutic neurotechnologies. In this paper, we critically engage with these priorities. We argue that the Nuffield Council's priorities, and the Responsible Research and Innovation initiative as a whole, are laudable and should guide research and innovation in all areas of healthcare. However, we argue that operationalising Responsible Research and Innovation requires an in-depth understanding of the research and clinical contexts. Providing such an understanding is an important task for empirical ethics. Drawing on examples from sociology, science and technology studies, and related disciplines, we propose four avenues of social science research which can provide such an understanding. We suggest that these avenues can provide a manifesto for empirical ethics.The paper derives from a project that was funded by Wellcome Trust (Wellcome Trust Biomedical Strategic Award 086034)

What is a Laboratory in the Human Sciences?

ARC Working Paper No.

Quantified Bodies – A Design Practice

Self-trackers are a diffuse and diverse group that quantify their lives. From the ordinary to the extraordinary, intimate and vital happenings that occur on (infra)-empirical planes are cast as legible events. Blood pressure, heartbeat rate, testosterone levels, posture, diet, muscle tension, social activity, geographical position. These are now happenings to be intervened upon and rendered as units of measurement and comparable variables. These measurements may give insight to help rebuild a re-cognition of oneself (Catani 2015), or allow a brooding recall of lost moments (Kalina 2012) – this is the manifest quantified body, a body read and a body written. Yet the quantified body is a veneer, it is the outward appearance of control, awareness and care-for-self: we were cynical subjects (Sloterdijk 1987) long before we were quantified bodies. However, self-tracking intrinsically disassociates from the ubiquitous cynical condition. The cynical self-tracker gropes for independence whilst submitting to a life of mediated self-discovery, it is a renunciation of independent vitality so as to act “as if”, to appear to be whilst never being – to fall short of realising difference. It is argued here that the quantified body allocates us all to be designers – reading and writing in culture. And as such, our actions must be critiqued as a symptom of a design practice, where the condition of subjectivity is at the forefront of value-making in taste, style and fashion. How does the cynic self-track? What is the value of design in the field of new media and digital culture

Pasos hacia un laboratorio antropológico*

The challenge is to invent new forms of inquiry, writing, and ethics for an anthropology of the contemporary. The problem is: how to rethink and remake the conditions of contemporaryknowledge production, dissemination, and critique, in the interpretive sciences? The direction forward does not include yet another attempt to have anthropology imitate a natural science model anymore than it implies a foreclosure of anthropology finding a form as a distinctive knowledge practice. Mimicry has proved to be neither prophetic of the course of disciplinary change nor empirically fruitful. It has, however, been fertile in bringing forth and fueling polemics. The twentieth century has taught us that polemics and prophecy do not lead to an exit from epistemological or ethical immaturity.El reto es inventar nuevas formas de indagación, nuevas formas de escritura y de ética para una antropología de lo contemporáneo. Y el problema es el siguiente: ¿cómo repensar y rehacer, en las ciencias interpretativas, las condiciones contemporáneas de producción de conocimientos,de diseminación y crítica? La dirección a tomar no pasará por una nueva apuesta con la cual la antropología vuelva a imitar el modelo de las ciencias naturales, ya que esto no significaría otra cosa que una claudicación en los intentos de la antropología por encontrar para ella una forma distintiva en tanto que práctica de conocimiento. Se ha constatado que la imitación ni es profética para lo que atañe al curso del cambio disciplinar ni tampoco es empíricamente fructuosa. Es cierto que ha servido para fertilizar e impulsar las polémicas. Pero el siglo XX nos ha enseñado que ni las polémicas ni la profecía nos pueden llevar a una salida de la inmadurez epistemológica o ética

Dewey and Foucault: What's the Problem?

This article explicates a valuable but undernoticed point of contact between John Dewey and Michel Foucault. Both agreed that thinking arose in the context of problems such that the work of thought for both proceeds by way of working through and working over problems. Both affirmed that thinking arose in problematic situations; that it was about clarifying those situations, and that ultimately it was directed towards achieving a degree of resolution of what was problematic in the situation. Both agreed that thinking—or inquiry—was not fundamentally about the representations of a situation; either those produced by a contemporary thinker or as an exercise directed at historical materials. Both agreed that a history of ideas as autonomous entities, distorted not only the process of thinking as a practice, but also the reasons for which it had been engaged in, often with a certain seriousness and urgency, the first place: that is to say, such approaches covered over the stakes. Both agreed that the stakes involved something experiential and entailed a form of logic (or in Foucault’s later vocabulary a mode of ‘veridiction’), in which the thinker could not help but be involved