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By Louis René Beres

“In the end,” says Goethe, “we are creatures of our own making.” Although offered as a sign of optimism, this insight seems to highlight the underlying problem of human wrongdoing. After all, in the long sweep of human history, nothing is more evident and palpable than the unending litany of spectacular crimes. Most spectacularly of all, these properly codified public wrongs include genocide, terrorism, and crimes against humanity.

After Nuremberg, after the Holocaust, one might have expected a far-reaching change in human conduct, a welcome reduction of egregious harms occasioned by both new knowledge and new law. Yet, let us look around us at the present moment. The views are not encouraging. Look at Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Sudan, Uganda, and the Congo. Let us try to figure out the presumptively democratic but also riotous ethos sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East. Not to be forgotten, there is present-day Iran. Today, its faith-based leaders openly declare a determinedly genocidal intent against Israel. Let us also consider Cambodia, Argentina, Rwanda, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia.

War and genocide are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Sometimes, war is simply the optimal means by which an intended genocide can be most efficiently carried out. How has an entire species, miscarried from the start, scandalized its own creation? Are we all potential murderers of those who live beside us?

What about slavery? In every form and permutation, this “natural” crime continues to grow, insidiously but without evident disguise, in Mali and Mauritania, and in other more conspicuous places. Shall we recall the murderous diamond mines of Sierra Leone and Liberia? And let us not forget the ever-widening radius of human child trafficking, an ancient and medieval practice, now especially visible in Nigeria and Benin.

Where is civilization? These devastating crimes are still far-flung and robust. Paradoxically, they are flourishing even now, in the “developed” and thoroughly “modern” 21st century.

For as long as we can identify the tangled skeins of world history, the corpse has been in fashion. Today, on several continents, whole nations of corpses are the rage. As for the international community, it stands by as it has so often, incredulously, with self-righteous indignation, sheepish, yet also arrogant, simultaneously calculating and lamenting its own self-reinforcing impotence.

Why? The answer has several intersecting levels, and several overlapping layers of pertinent meaning. At one level, certainly the one most familiar to political scientists and legal scholars, the basic problem lies in the changing embrace of power politics. Representing a transformation of traditional political realism, the relentless deification of states has finally reduced billions of prospective individuals to barely residual specks of significance.

In such an world, wherein the “self-determination of peoples” is a weighty value, sanguinary executions of the innocent must always be expected and applauded. Moreover, such executions, sometimes a thinly disguised or expressly secular form of religious “sacrifice,” are heralded defiantly as “sacred.” To prevent terrorism, genocide, and crimes against humanity, nation-states must first be shorn of their presumed sacredness.

Before even this can happen, however, individuals must first be allowed to discover alternative and equally attractive sources of belonging. Somehow, humanity must finally conquer the continuing incapacity of individual persons to draw true, vital, and existential meaning from within themselves.

Although generally unseen, the core problem we face on earth is the universal and omnivorous power of the herd in human affairs. This power is based upon individual submission. Ultimately, the problem of international criminality is always one of distraught and unfulfilled individuals. Ever fearful of having to draw meaning from their own inwardness, most human beings, like a moth to a flame, will draw closer and closer to the nearest collectivity.

Whatever the gripping claims of the moment, the herd spawns contrived hatreds of dissimilarity that can make even mass murder seem warm, welcome, and reasonable. Fostering a persistent refrain of “us” versus “them,” it encourages each submissive member to ceremoniously celebrate the death of “outsiders.”

The overriding task, then, must be to discover the way back to ourselves as persons. Understood in terms of the contemporary prevention of genocide, terrorism, and crimes against humanity, we are thus commanded to look beyond ordinary politics, and toward a determinedly worldwide actualization of authentic persons.

At its source, the unrecognized but critical human task is to migrate from the Kingdom of the Herd, to the Kingdom of the Self. In succeeding with this very nuanced and unambiguously grand movement, one must first want to live in the second kingdom. We must fix the fragmented and fractionated world at its most elementary individual source. Then, after so many millennia of brutishness and exclusion, we could do whatever is needed to enable our fellow human beings to find sufficient comfort and reassurance outside the segregating and always-potentially murderous herd.

Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is the author of many books and articles dealing with international relations and international law. He was born in Zürich, Switzerland. Dr. Beres is Professor of Political Science at Purdue. He is a frequent contributor to OUPblog.

If you are interested in this subject and want to learn more, The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies is the first book to subject both genocide and the young discipline it has spawned to systematic, in-depth investigation. Thirty-four renowned experts study genocide through the ages by taking regional, thematic, and disciplinary-specific approaches. The work is multi-disciplinary, featuring the work of historians, anthropologists, lawyers, political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers.

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To celebrate the publication of our second Philosophy Bites book, Philosophy Bites Back, authors Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds released a 39 minute podcast episode of a wide range of philosophers answering the question ‘Who’s Your Favourite Philosopher?’

Listen to Who’s Your Favourite Philosopher?

[See post to listen to audio]

Twitter Competition
We also asked you to let us know on Twitter who your favourite philosopher is and why. The competition is now closed and we received over 150 entries, which you can view on Storify. We can now reveal the winning entries,  as chosen by Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds!

View the story “Philosophy Bites Back: The Winning Tweets” on Storify

David Edmonds is an award-winning documentary maker for the BBC World Service and a Research Associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University. Nigel Warburton is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University. They are co-authors of Philosophy Bites (OUP, 2010) and Philosophy Bites Back (OUP, 2012), which are based on their highly successful series of podcasts. You can also follow @philosophybites on Twitter.

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Are the political ideals of liberty and equality compatible? In this video, OUP author James P. Sterba of University of Notre Dame, joins Jan Narveson of University of Waterloo, to debate the practical requirements of a political ideal of liberty. Not only Narveson but the entire audience at the libertarian Cato Institute where this debate takes place is, in Sterba’s words,  ”hostile” to his argument that the ideal of liberty leads to (substantial) equality.  Sterba goes on to further develop that argument in From Rationality to Equality.

Click here to view the embedded video.

James P. Sterba is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. His latest work, From Rationality to Equality, publishes in February 2013. His previous publications include Three Challenges to Ethics (OUP, 2001), The Triumph of Practice over Theory in Ethics (OUP, 2005) and Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? A Debate, with Warren Farrell (OUP, 2007). He is past president of the American Philosophical Association (Central Division).

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By Peter W. Sinnema

Self-help isn’t what it used to be. At least, its early renditions were cast in a style alien to the contemporary ear.

The concept was first named (and voluminously expounded) by Samuel Smiles in his 1859 best-seller, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance. Erstwhile apothecary, railway secretary, newspaper editor, and biographer, Smiles’ birth in Haddington, Scotland marks its bicentennial on December 23. If this populist Victorian sage is worth remembering for anything, it must be for his original self-help book, translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Danish, Japanese, Croatian, Czech, Arabic, Turkish, and various native languages of India within his own lifespan, and purchased by more than a quarter-million readers by the time of the author’s death in 1904.

Smiles’ own moral and professional diligence embodied the cardinal virtue of his homespun philosophy: perseverance. He outlined his gospel of “energetic individualism” in refreshingly simple terms, encouraging humble mechanics and beleaguered artisans to own and cultivate the “power of self-help, of patient purpose, resolute working, and steadfast integrity” as they struggled to improve their lot in the new age of mass industry. Smiles promoted self-help as practiced or habitual independence, a disciplined husbandry of the inner man “effected by means of … action, economy, and self-denial.”

Given that Smiles published his aphoristic opus at a time when the nascent welfare state was represented by the grim apparatus of the workhouse—that infamously unpleasant asylum for the destitute reorganized under the oppressive Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834—present-day readers may be taken aback by the animosity with which Smiles condemned all “help from without”: states and statutes could do nothing to “make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.” Smiles denied the power of institutions to ameliorate individual vice and ignorance, and in anticipation of Margaret Thatcher’s notorious declaration that “there is no such thing as society,” he regarded nations as nothing more than aggregates of individual conditions. The remedy for social evil and decay thus resided “not so much in altering laws and modifying institutions, as in helping and stimulating men to elevate and improve themselves by their own free and independent individual action.”

Smiles ran with his self-help idea for some forty years, enjoying social and commercial success with books on related themes such as Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1880). Dying only three years after the state funeral of Queen Victoria, Smiles was quickly typecast as a spokesman for the worst hypocrisies of his era. In his socialist masterpiece The Ragged-Torusered Philanthropists (1906), Robert Tressell lambasted Self-Help as bourgeois propaganda “suitable for perusal by persons suffering from almost complete obliteration of the mental faculties,” while more recently E. J. Hobsbawm added Smiles to his list of “self-made journalist-publishers who hymned the virtues of capitalism” (The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848: 1961). Surely these are justifiable indictments of a man whose best-known work opens with the parsimonious bromide, “Heaven helps those who help themselves”!

Before we relegate Smiles’ invocation of self-mastery and laborious endurance to the dustbin of history, however, we’d do well to recall the singular contribution made by his account of “indefatigable industry” to our contemporary culture of self-help. True, Smiles’ highly repetitive and at-times cumbrous tribute to the “spirit of self-help” can read like a naïve, even perverse plumping of mere doggedness in the face of a hostile world. But then, repetition is of decisive rhetorical importance for Smiles, just as it is for any effective self-help author of the twenty-first century.

Smiles’ secular hagiography of “labourers in all ranks and conditions of life, cultivators of the soil and explorers of the mine, inventors and discoverers, manufacturers, mechanics and artisans, poets, philosophers, and politicians” derives its affective grit, its capacity to inspire and reform, from iterative structure. Self-Help’s biographical exemplars (there are literally hundreds of them, from Charles Abbott and Peter Abelard to John Ziska and Francesco Zuccarelli) are invariably martyred—to unsympathetic wives, malicious priests, ruthless state functionaries, failed technologies—but ultimately to the requisites of gripping narrative and readerly pleasure. In the end we want to emulate these suffering stalwarts because, as Smiles himself pointed out in his revised 1866 preface to Self-Help, the redundant plotline of affliction-perseverance-success “proved attractive … by reason of the variety and anecdotal illustrations of life and character which it contains, and the interest which all more or less feel in the labours, the trials, the struggles, and the achievements of others.”

Even the most erudite self-help guru must embrace the compositional obligations of repetition and (auto)biographical exemplarity that originated with Smiles. Kathleen Norris’s moving exploration, at once recondite and unsentimental, of the acedia that grips our Western culture, the spiritual torpor that is self-help’s universal, symptomological object, is a case in point. Her study of the “restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that plagues us today,” driving millions to the bottle or the therapist’s office, acquires its poignancy from her insistence that the pressing question, “Why care?” can only be answered “by relating [her] personal history with acedia, telling stories from … infancy, childhood, and adolescence” (Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life: 2008). Norris’ self, exposed, diagnosed, and at least partly healed through the telling of personal history, is the modern-day version of Smiles’ paradigmatic, self-motivated individual in expectant pursuit of “elevation of character, without which capacity is worthless and worldly success is naught.”

Peter W. Sinnema is Professor of English at the University of Alberta. His teaching and research focuses on Victorian literature and culture. He is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Self-Help by Samuel Smiles. A bestseller immediately after its publication in 1859, Self-Help propelled its author to fame and rapidly became one of Victorian Britain’s most important statements on the allied virtues of hard work, thrift, and perseverance.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Image credit: By Samuel Smiles (d. 1904) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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To celebrate the publication of our second Philosophy Bites book, Philosophy Bites Back, authors Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds have released a 39 minute podcast episode of a wide range of philosophers answering the question ‘Who’s Your Favourite Philosopher?’

Listen to Who’s Your Favourite Philosopher?

[See post to listen to audio]

Twitter Competition
We’d like to hear who is your favourite philosopher. Pick your favourite philosopher and let us know why in a tweet (140 characters or fewer), incorporating the hashtag #philosophybites. We’ll be monitoring your suggestions from @oupacademic and @philosophybites. The competition closes on  10 January 2013 and our top five entrants will receive a copy of Philosophy Bites Back. The winning entries and a selection of shortlisted tweets will be posted to OUPblog in January 2013, and may well also appear in the next book in the Philosophy Bites series. To get you started, here are a few of ideas:

TIM CRANE: Descartes. Not because what I think what he said was true, but because he was incredibly clear in his vision of things.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Nietzsche has a fascinating metaphysical structure to his thought, writes beautifully, and has a sense of humour.

RAYMOND GEUSS: Thucydides. My favourite philosopher because nobody else thinks he’s a philosopher, but I think he is.

BRIAN LEITER: Oh Fred. Nietzsche. I call him Fred. Because he’s a great writer, and he’s more right than wrong about most of the things he has views on.

GALEN STRAWSON: Kant. Every time I hear the words the Critique of Pure Reason I involuntarily salivate.

Good luck!

David Edmonds is an award-winning documentary maker for the BBC World Service and a Research Associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University. Nigel Warburton is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University. They are co-authors of Philosophy Bites (OUP, 2010) and Philosophy Bites Back (OUP, 2012), which are based on their highly successful series of podcasts. You can also follow @philosophybites on Twitter.

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Image credit: Twitter ‘t’ icon by mfilej, Flickr.

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By David Sugarman

This recording of my lengthy interview with H.L.A. Hart (1907–1992) has been resurrected from my audio tapes and given new life. Dusted and digitalized, the result is something quite beautiful. Here is Hart in his own words recorded in 1988, reviewing his life, his work, and his significance. The interview presents Hart as three individuals: legal philosopher, interviewee, and critic. The recording adds another dimension to our understanding of Hart that must be incorporated into our collective memory.

Within the English-speaking world, Hart is frequently regarded as the twentieth century’s foremost legal philosopher. He revived the moribund discipline of jurisprudence, re-orientating it so that the qualities associated with analytical philosophy in the second half of the 20th century — rigorous standards of rational argument, clarity and lucidity, a preoccupation with subtle conceptual distinctions, and a sensitivity to language and its logic — were applied to the investigation of the most fundamental concepts of law and to major public issues, notably, the complex relation between law and morality. As a colleague, teacher, mentor and author, Hart exercised a profound influence, an influence that extended to the “real world” and “real issues”. From the late 1950’s onwards, he championed a new humaneness in punishment, speaking and writing for a right to abortion and against both the death penalty and the prosecution of people because of their sexual preferences. His exploration of the balance between the modern welfare state and individual liberty — in particular, the legitimate use of state power to impose standards of private morality — produced an eloquent and highly influential manifesto for modern political liberalism. As Tony Honoré, his close colleague at Oxford, put it, “He was the most widely read British legal philosopher of the twentieth century and his work will continue to be a focus of discussion.”

The present interview with Hart took place in his rooms at University College, Oxford, on 9 November 1988. The interview delineates the particulars of Hart’s life and work: his background, early education, and undergraduate studies; learning law, practising at the Bar, and journalism; working in military intelligence; the early years as a philosophy don and the principal philosophical influences that shaped his work; and the state of Oxford jurisprudence in the 1940s and 1950s. It then addresses Hart’s work and ideas between 1945 and the 1980’s: his appointment to the Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford; the Hart-Fuller Debate and his year at Harvard; the writing of Causation in the Law and The Concept of Law ; the 1950’s, the Cold War, and the 1960’s; “The Hart-Devlin Debate”; and what Hart called, “the Thatcher world”. The interview also illuminates Hart’s work beyond legal and political philosophy — the seminars to Labour Party groups on closing loopholes in the tax law; and the duties he undertook for the Monopolies Commission (1967-73) and the Oxford University Committee on Staff-Student Relations (the “Hart Report”, 1968-69). The interview includes Hart’s assessement of Bentham, Nozick and Dworkin, a general discussion of the virtues and limitations of sociology, sociological jurisprudence and analytical jurisprudence, of legal education, and the relationship between university legal education and the legal profession. A succinct summary of Hart’s contribution to legal philosophy brings the interview to a close. The interview is published verbatim — save for one brief comment by Hart that he asked me not to reproduce. Whilst the ordering of the interview was broadly chronological, the too-and-fro of conversation meant that subjects were returned to or introduced out of sequence.

The interview was one of a series that I have undertaken since 1986 with leading British legal scholars as part of an on-going research project mapping the history of modern English legal education and scholarship. Nicola Lacey’s illuminating biography of Hart used this interview as one of its main sources, and an edited version of the interview, excluding the material on legal education at Oxford, was published in 2005. Since its publication, the interview has been frequently cited. It was one of the main sources used by Brian Simpson in his Reflections on ‘The Concept of Law’. Simpson told me that he listened to the audio tape of the interview again and again as he was writing the book, and that hearing Hart’s voice inspired him in his struggle to complete it during his final battle with cancer.

At the time of the interview, Hart was 81 and physically frail. But he was one of the cleverest people I have ever met. His mind was sharp, and he tended to respond quickly and very clearly. Once the interview was under way, we both started to relax and enjoyed what became a friendly but challenging exchange. The interview reveals an unpretentious, reserved man, concise, diffident, and with a wry sense of humour. He talks of the enormous intellectual stimulus afforded by his visit to the United States in 1967-7 at the invitation of Harvard University, the pleasure he derived from his membership of the Monopolies Commission, and his outrage at the policies of the Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher. The intellectual, moral, and political underpinnings of his work are apparent. Likewise, his limited intellectual interest in law and legal education, his elevation of the value of a philosophical approach to legal material, and his suspicion of sociology and the sociology of law are evident, as is his preoccupation with challenges to his work, in particular, by his successor in the Oxford chair, Ronald Dworkin. Also apparent is a poignant tension between intellectual confidence and self-doubt about his legacy.

At the end of the interview, and with the tape recorder switched off, Hart continued to talk about a variety of topics. He encouraged me to learn Italian, so that I could read the work of the Italian legal and political philosopher, Norberto Bobbio (1909-2004). Hart said that he knew, and corresponded with, Bobbio; and that Bobbio was the contemporary legal and political philosopher he most admired and related to. There was also more talk that evinced Hart’s sensitivity to criticism; and his preoccupation with writing an “Answer to Dworkin”, as Hart called it. Hart concluded by saying that I was free to publish the interview, and that he had no wish to review or revise it.

H.L.A. Hart on Childhood and Early Career
[See post to listen to audio]

H.L.A. Hart on Major Philosophical Influences
[See post to listen to audio]

H.L.A. Hart on his Early Philosophical Work
[See post to listen to audio]

H.L.A. Hart on his Harvard visit and Fuller Exchange
[See post to listen to audio]

H.L.A. Hart on the Major Works
[See post to listen to audio]

H.L.A. Hart on Dworkin and the Nature of Legal Philosophy
[See post to listen to audio]

H.L.A. Hart on Public Work
[See post to listen to audio]

H.L.A. Hart on Analytic Philosophy and Legal Scholarship
[See post to listen to audio]

H.L.A. Hart on his Political Views, Legal Education, and Legacy
[See post to listen to audio]

I feel sure that the importance of the interview rests primarily in the fact that you hear Hart’s voice, both his vivid cadences and also aspects of his character that other work on Hart tends not to evoke. Part of Hart was confused and diffident. Part of him was confident, acerbic and somewhat intolerant of anything beyond his own approach. Yet he was always open to argument and persuasion. These contradictions are the essence of his complexity.

It is in listening to Hart’s voice that we can get closer to Hart. There has been much critical analysis of his ideas — most recently in the context of commemorating the 50th anniversary of his landmark work, The Concept of Law. The images of Hart derived from his scholarship, diaries and other sources, including photographs, and from his personal relations, as a teacher, mentor, colleague, husband and friend, have generated multiple discourses in which commentators have appraised Hart the jurist and Hart the person. In the interview we hear Hart in conversation. As he and I speak about Hart’s ideas and the evolution of his life, there are interruptions, hesitations, and awkward silences which, like a work of scholarship or a diary entry, can be interpreted in many ways. One can imagine the conversation, the glances back and forth between the legal philosopher and his interviewer. Nervousness and unease are apparent; but so are authority and certainty.

The wider availability of this recording will generate new opportunities to understand and assess Hart’s personality and scholarly reputation. The poet, Sylvia Plath, wrote in her journal, “Recreate life lived: that is renewed life.” In bringing Herbert Hart’s voice to us now, this interview will do just that.

Professor David Sugarman, FRHistS, is the Director of the Centre for Law and Society at Lancaster University Law School. HLA Hart was Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University and the Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford. He authored The Concept of Law, one of the seminal works of English-language jurisprudence. He passed away in 1992.

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In popular culture, the philosopher Nietzsche is usually associated with moral nihilism. We might define nihilism as the absence of the highest values. Associated with moral nihilism is moral relativism. Moral relativism is the belief that all values, precisely because there are no higher values, are merely the expression of personal preference. Ironically, however, is it exactly this kind of moral viewpoint that Nietzsche is criticising. Rather than being a nihilist he is an anti-nihilist. Nihilism is a diagnosis of the decadence of Western culture, rather than a position that Nietzsche wants, and still less, wants us to aspire to (more...)

Given my double passion for science and philosophy, the problem of clarifying the links between the two and between what I refer to as local orabstract modes of thought (such as the sciences, the arts and politics) has always been of utmost importance to me. To treat this problem, I wished to challenge both the solutions that subject these different modes to philosophical authority (be it ontological, transcendental, epistemological, encyclopedic or other), and the solutions which – inversely – subject philosophy to the model furnished by one of these modes, to the detriment of the others (as, for example, Husserl’s conception of philosophy as archi-science, Heidegger’s conception of philosophy as archi-poetry, or Levinas’s conception of philosophy as archi-ethics). In Benjamin’s theory of translation, I found a solution capable of satisfying two presumably irreconcilable constraints: 1) that of not yielding on the delocalized or transversal nature of philosophical work compared to different local modes of thought – and thus avoiding any potential identification with one of these modes; and 2) that of refusing any dominant position of philosophy toward said modes of thought. In short, Benjamin’s text allowed me to construe the connections between local modes of thought and philosophy by following the model offered by the connection between national languages and the regulatory idea of a delocalized and voluntarily impure language produced by the work of transposition and transfer undertaken by “translation”. To translate, it’s not enough to flit through the space of languages: you must master each of the languages involved by giving yourself over to their irreducible sovereignty. The conception of philosophy that results is that of an organon of composition between the different local modes of thought – an organon which, rather than speaking about these modes, must make possible free circulation between them. In this way, the philosopher’s task is to compose the “untranslatables” within a vaster linguistic space in which each language finds its place and time. The philosopher is the stalker of this space. In Lacanian terms, we might say that philosophical love alone is able to supplement the non-relationship between the different modes of thought – that is, to potentiate their connectedness while affirming their irreducible “untranslatability”. Philosophy alone is able to construct mediators – herein lies its truly angelic dimension – capable of probing the interzones that separate and connect the various modes of thought, in order to incessantly build what I refer to as a musaic language, following on from Benjamin.

“Translation: the philosopher’s task”, interview with Gabriel Catren.

Sad to hear of the death of critical theorist Mark Poster:

It is with deep sadness that we share the news that our esteemed colleague Mark Poster, Emeritus Professor of History and Film & Media Studies, passed away in the hospital earlier this morning. Mark Poster was a vital member of the School of Humanities, and for decades one of its most widely read and cited researchers. He made crucial contributions to two different departments, History and Film & Media Studies, and played a central role in UCI's emergence as a leading center for work in Critical Theory...

Mark Poster was a major figure in the rapid development of media studies and theory in the USA and internationally. While as an intellectual historian he could draw on Frankfurt School thought as well as on cybernetics, he was particularly interested in the potential of poststructuralism for media studies. From his translations of Baudrillard to his dissemination of Foucault, Poster played a highly influential role in the study of media culture, including television, databases, computing, and the Internet; he continued to offer crucial commentary on the relevance to technology and media of cultural theory, and his numerous articles and books have been translated into a number of different languages. Reflective of the breadth of his interests and expertise, Poster held courtesy appointments in the Department of Information and Computer Science and in the Department of Comparative Literature. First hired at UCI in 1968, Poster had recently retired after 40 years of service to the School and the Campus (more...)

"Contemporary Western culture makes the peace of solitude difficult to attain. The telephone is an ever-present threat to privacy...and the invention of the car telephone has ensured that drivers who install it are never out of touch with those who want to talk to them." So wrote Anthony Storr in his book Solitude: A Return [...]

But how did Agamben get here, to this radicalized nihilism, where he swims delighting in the fact he has overcome (or concluded) Heidegger’s project? He has come across a long journey that is articulated in two directions: one a truly political-judicial critique, the other an archeological one (a theological-political dig). Carl Schmitt is at the center of this journey: he guides the two directions, the one that leads to qualifying power as exception and therefore as force and destiny, an absolute instrumentation without any technical quality and the sadism of finality; on the other hand, one that leads to the qualification of potency as theological illusion, i.e. impotency, in the sense of the impossibility of relying on its effectiveness. Therefore, he incites unproductiveness, thus denouncing the necessary frustration of will, of the masochism of duty. The two go together. It is nearly impossible, recovering the actuality of the Schmittian concepts of the “state of exception” and the “theological-political”, to understand if they represent the biggest danger or instead if they are simply an opening to their truth. Metaphysics and political diagnostics surrender to indistinctness. But that would be irrelevant if this indistinctness didn’t drown any possible resistance. Let’s go back to the two identified lines: the whole journey that follows Homo Sacer develops on this double track. The second track is summarized in The Kingdom and the Glory...

The sacred dilemma of inoperosity. On Giorgio Agamben’s Opus Dei by Antonio Negri.

Graham Harman with his new ontology proposes a veritable semantic descent (or we could call it an “objectal descent”), to reverse the linguistic turn, and to replace it with an ontological turn... My thesis is that much of OOO is a badly flawed epistemology masquerading as an ontology...

Provocative critique of Harman's OOO from Terence Blake. Blake picks up on a fear of mine that, having offered us the really real world, OOO seems to renege on the promise and simply re-instate, at a different level of abstraction, the Kantian distinction between phenomenon and noumenon...

In other words, I think I’m giving an even stronger critique of authorial intention than is usually the case. Not only do authors fail to master the infinite dissemination of their texts, they probably don’t even put the text in the right shape in the first place. Most of them should have written better texts. Just as social surroundings fail to exhaust a literary work, the exact written form of a literary work fails to exhaust the deeper spirit of that work...

Graham Harman responds to Dan Green (who in turn was writing in response to Harman's The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism [pdf]).

Speculative Realism and OOO have much of interest to say on literature and literary criticism. In particularly, Harman's concept of a withdrawing ontology, of objects that can't be fully known, has some potentially interesting literary critical applications. The conversation between Green and Harman opens up some interesting avenues, but I think there is yet a lot more to say on this...

"Celebrating the 90th anniversary of Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) Multimedia Institute and Institut Français Zagreb coorganized a 2-day meeting in Zagreb (June 22-23, 2012 / net.culture club MaMa), presenting the series MétaphysiqueS." And here is Graham Harman on the philosophy of Tristan Garcia...

Today sees the launch of a major new publishing initiative from Oxford University Press: Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO). OSEO will provide trustworthy and reliable critical online editions of original works by some of the most important writers in the humanities, such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, as well as works from lesser-known writers such as Shackerley Marmion. OSEO is launching with over 170 scholarly editions of material written between 1485 and 1660, and annual content additions will cover chronological periods until it contains content from Ancient Greek and Latin texts through to the modern era. This is exciting stuff, and here Project Director Sophie Goldsworthy explains why!

By Sophie Goldsworthy

Anyone working in the humanities is well aware of the plethora of texts online. Search for the full text of one of Shakespeare’s plays on Google and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of results. Browse popular classics on Amazon, and you’ll find hundreds available for free download to your device in 60 seconds or less. But while we’re spoilt for choice in terms of availability, finding an authoritative text, and one which you can feel confident in citing or using in your teaching, has paradoxically never been more difficult. Texts aren’t set in stone, but have a tendency to shift over time, whether as the result of author revisitings, the editing and publishing processes through which they pass, deliberate bowdlerization, or inadvertent mistranscription. And with more and more data available online, it has never been more important to help scholars and students navigate to trusted primary sources on which they can rely for their research, teaching, and learning.

Oxford has a long tradition of publishing scholarly editions — something which still sits at the very heart of the programme — and a range and reach unmatched by any other publisher. Every edition is produced by a scholarly editor, or team, who have sifted the evidence for each: deciding which reading or version is best, and why, and then tracking textual variance between editions, as well as adding rich layers of interpretative annotation. So we started to re-imagine how these classic print editions would work in a digital environment, getting down to the disparate elements of each — the primary text, the critical apparatus, and the explanatory notes — to work out how, by teasing the content of each edition apart, we could bring them back together in a more meaningful way for the reader.

We decided that we needed to organize the content on the site along two axes: editions and works. Our research underlined the need to preserve this link with print, not only for scholars and students who may want to use the online version of a particular edition, but also for librarians keen to curate digital content alongside their existing print holdings. And yet we also wanted to put the texts themselves front and centre. So we have constructed the site in both ways. You can use it to navigate to a familiar edition, travelling to a particular page, and even downloading a PDF of the print page, so you can cite from OSEO with authority. But you can also see each author’s works in aggregate and move straight to an individual play, poem, or letter, or to a particular line number or scene. Our use of XML has allowed us to treat the different elements of each edition separately: the notes keep pace with the text, and different features can be toggled on and off. This also drives a very focused advanced search — you can search within stage directions or the recipients of letters, first lines or critical apparatus — all of which speeds your journey to the content genuinely of most use to you.

As a side benefit — a reaffirmation, if you like, of the way print and online are perfectly in step on the site — many of our older editions haven’t been in print for some time, but embarking on the data capture process has made it possible for us to make them available again through on-demand printing. These texts often date back to the 1900s and yet are still considered either the definitive edition of a writer’s work or valued as milestones in the history of textual editing, itself an object of study and interest. Thus reissuing these classic texts adds, perhaps in an unanticipated way, to the broader story of dissemination and accessibility which lies at the heart of what we are doing.

For those minded to embark on such major projects, OSEO underlines Oxford’s support for the continuing tradition of scholarly editing. Our investment in digital editions will increase their reach, securing their permanence in the online space and making them available to multiple users at the same time. There are real benefits brought by the size of the collection, the aggregation of content, intelligent cross-linking with other OUP content — facilitating genuine user journeys from and into related secondary criticism and reference materials — and the possibility of future links to external sites and other resources. We hope, too, that OSEO will help bring recent finds to an audience as swiftly as possible: new discoveries can simply be edited and dropped straight into the site.

Over the past century and more, Oxford has invested in the development of an unrivalled programme of scholarly editions across the humanities. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online takes these core, authoritative texts down from the library shelf, unlocks their features to make them fully accessible to all kinds of users, and makes them discoverable online.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sophie Goldsworthy is the Editorial Director for OUP’s Academic and Trade publishing in the UK, and Project Director for Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. To discover more about OSEO, view this series of videos about the launch of the project.

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“The Catholic Church was derived from three sources. Its sacred history was Jewish, its theology was Greek, its government and canon law were, at least indirectly, Roman… In Catholic doctrine, divine revelation did not end with the scriptures, but continued from age to age through the medium of the Church, to which, therefore, it was the duty of the individual to submit his private opinions. Protestants, on the contrary, rejected the Church as a vehicle of revelation; truth was to be sought only in the Bible, which each man could interpret for himself. If men differed in their interpretation, there was no divinely appointed authority to decide the dispute. In practice, the State claimed the right that had formerly belonged to the Church, but this was a usurpation. In Protestant theory, there should be no earthly intermediary between the soul and God.

The effects of this change were momentous. Truth was no longer to be ascertained by consulting authority, but by inward meditation. There was a tendency, quickly developed, toward anarchism in politics, and, in religion, toward mysticism, which had always fitted with difficulty into the framework of Catholic orthodoxy. There came to be not one Protestantism, but a multitude of sects; not one philosophy opposed to scholasticism, but as many as there were philosophers; not, as in the thirteenth century, one Emperor opposed to the Pope, but a large number of heretical kings. The result, as thought in literature, was a continually deepening subjectivism, operating at first as a wholesome liberation from spiritual slavery, but advancing steadily toward a personal isolation inimical to social sanity.

Modern philosophy begins with Descartes, whose fundamental certainty is the existence of himself and his thoughts, from which the external world is to be inferred. This was only the first stage in a development, through Berkeley and Kant, to Fichte, for whom everything is only an emanation of the ego. This was insanity, and, from this extreme, philosophy has been attempting, ever since, to escape into the world of everyday common sense.”

– Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

Myth: A Very Short Introduction

By Robert A. Segal

It is trite to say that one’s pet subject is interdisciplinary. These days what subject isn’t? The prostate? But myth really is interdisciplinary. For there is no study of myth as myth, the way, by contrast, there is said to be the study of literature as literature or of religion as religion. Myth is studied by other disciplines, above all by sociology, anthropology, psychology, politics, philosophy, literature, and religious studies. Each discipline applies itself to myth. For example, sociologists see myth as something belonging to a group.

Within each discipline are theories. A discipline can harbor only a few theories or scores of them.  What makes theories theories is that they are generalizations. They presume to know the answers to one or more of the three main questions about myth:  the origin, the function, or the subject matter.

The question of origin asks why, if not also how, myth arises. The answer is a need, which can be of any kind and on the part of an individual, such as the need to eat or to explain, or on the part of the group, such as the need to stay together. The need exists before myth, which arises to fulfill the need. Myth may be the initial or even the sole means of fulfilling the need. Or there may be other means, which compete with myth and may best it. For example, myth may be said to explain the physical world and to do so exceedingly well — until science arises and does it better. So claims the theorist E. B. Tylor, the pioneering English anthropologist.

Function is the flip side of origin. The need that causes myth to arise is the need that keeps it going. Myth functions as long as both the need continues to exist and myth continues to fulfill it at least as well as any competitor. The need for myth is always a need so basic that it itself never ceases. The need to eat, to explain the world, to express the unconscious, to give meaningfulness to life – these needs are panhuman. But the need for myth to fulfill these needs may not last forever. The need to eat can be fulfilled through hunting or farming without the involvement of myth. The need to express the unconscious can be fulfilled through therapy, which for both Sigmund Freud and his rival C. G. Jung is superior to myth. The need to find or to forge meaningfulness in life can be fulfilled without religion and therefore without myth for secular existentialists such as Albert Camus.

For some theorists, myth has always existed and will always continue to exist. For others, myth has not always existed and will not always continue to exist. For Mircea Eliade, a celebrated Romanian-born scholar of religion, religion has always existed and will always continue to exist. Because Eliade ties myth to religion, myth is safe. For not only Tylor but also J. G. Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, myth is doomed exactly because myth is tied to religion. For them science has replaced religion and as a consequence has replaced myth. “Modern myth” is a contradiction in terms.

The third main question about myth is that of subject matter. What is myth really about? There are two main answers: myth is about what it is literally about, or myth symbolizes something else. Taken literally, myth is usually about gods or heroes or physical events like rain. Tylor, Eliade, and the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski all read myth literally. Myth taken literally may also mean myth taken historically, especially in myths about heroes.

The subject matter of myth taken symbolically is open-ended. A myth about the Greek god Zeus can be said to symbolize one’s father (so Freud), one’s father archetype (so Jung), or the sky (so nature mythologists).  The religious existentialists Rudolf Bultmann and Hans Jonas would contend that the myth of the biblical flood is to be read not as a explanation of a supposedly global event from long ago but as a description of what it is like for anyone anywhere to live in a world in which, it is believed, God exists and treats humans fairly.

To call the flood story a myth is not to spurn it. I am happy to consider any theory of myth, but not the crude dismissal of a story or a belief as a “mere myth.” True or false, myth is never “mere.” For to call even a conspicuously false story or belief a mere myth is to miss the power that that story or belief holds for those who accept it. The difficulty in persuading anyone to give up an obviously false myth attests to its allure.

Robert A. Segal is Sixth Century Chair in Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen.  He is the author of Myth: A Very Short Introduction and of Theorizing about Myth. He is presently at work editing the Oxford Handbook of Myth Theory. He directs the Centre for the Study of Myth at Aberdeen.

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Who Was Who online, part of Who’s Who online, has granted free access for a limited time to the entries for the philosophers and scholars mentioned in the above article.

Image credit: Thetis and Zeus by Anton Losenko, 1769. Copy of artwork used for the purposes of illustration in a critical commentary on the work. Source: Wikimedia Commons. 

By Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson

First published in Philosophy Now Issue 91, July/Aug 2012.

For the vast majority of our 150,000 years or so on the planet, we lived in small, close-knit groups, working hard with primitive tools to scratch sufficient food and shelter from the land. Sometimes we competed with other small groups for limited resources. Thanks to evolution, we are supremely well adapted to that world, not only physically, but psychologically, socially and through our moral dispositions.

But this is no longer the world in which we live. The rapid advances of science and technology have radically altered our circumstances over just a few centuries. The population has increased a thousand times since the agricultural revolution eight thousand years ago. Human societies consist of millions of people. Where our ancestors’ tools shaped the few acres on which they lived, the technologies we use today have effects across the world, and across time, with the hangovers of climate change and nuclear disaster stretching far into the future. The pace of scientific change is exponential. But has our moral psychology kept up?

With great power comes great responsibility. However, evolutionary pressures have not developed for us a psychology that enables us to cope with the moral problems our new power creates. Our political and economic systems only exacerbate this. Industrialisation and mechanisation have enabled us to exploit natural resources so efficiently that we have over-stressed two-thirds of the most important eco-systems.

A basic fact about the human condition is that it is easier for us to harm each other than to benefit each other. It is easier for us to kill than it is for us to save a life; easier to injure than to cure. Scientific developments have enhanced our capacity to benefit, but they have enhanced our ability to harm still further. As a result, our power to harm is overwhelming. We are capable of forever putting an end to all higher life on this planet. Our success in learning to manipulate the world around us has left us facing two major threats: climate change – along with the attendant problems caused by increasingly scarce natural resources – and war, using immensely powerful weapons. What is to be done to counter these threats?

Our Natural Moral Psychology
Our sense of morality developed around the imbalance between our capacities to harm and to benefit on the small scale, in groups the size of a small village or a nomadic tribe – no bigger than a hundred and fifty or so people. To take the most basic example, we naturally feel bad when we cause harm to others within our social groups. And commonsense morality links responsibility directly to causation: the more we feel we caused an outcome, the more we feel responsible for it. So causing a harm feels worse than neglecting to create a benefit. The set of rights that we have developed from this basic rule includes rights not to be harmed, but not rights to receive benefits. And we typically extend these rights only to our small group of family and close acquaintances. When we lived in small groups, these rights were sufficient to prevent us harming one another. But in the age of the global society and of weapons with global reach, they cannot protect us well enough.

There are three other aspects of our evolved psychology which have similarly emerged from the imbalance between the ease of harming and the difficulty of benefiting, and which likewise have been protective in the past, but leave us open now to unprecedented risk:

1. Our vulnerability to harm has left us loss-averse, preferring to protect against losses than to seek benefits of a similar level.
2. We naturally focus on the immediate future, and on our immediate circle of friends. We discount the distant future in making judgements, and can only empathise with a few individuals based on their proximity or similarity to us, rather than, say, on the basis of their situations. So our ability to cooperate, applying our notions of fairness and justice, is limited to our circle, a small circle of family and friends. Strangers, or out-group members, in contrast, are generally mistrusted, their tragedies downplayed, and their offences magnified.
3. We feel responsible if we have individually caused a bad outcome, but less responsible if we are part of a large group causing the same outcome and our own actions can’t be singled out.

Case Study: Climate Change and the Tragedy of the Commons
There is a well-known cooperation or coordination problem called ‘the tragedy of the commons’. In its original terms, it asks whether a group of village herdsmen sharing common pasture can trust each other to the extent that it will be rational for each of them to reduce the grazing of their own cattle when necessary to prevent over-grazing. One herdsman alone cannot achieve the necessary saving if the others continue to over-exploit the resource. If they simply use up the resource he has saved, he has lost his own chance to graze but has gained no long term security, so it is not rational for him to self-sacrifice. It is rational for an individual to reduce his own herd’s grazing only if he can trust a sufficient number of other herdsmen to do the same. Consequently, if the herdsmen do not trust each other, most of them will fail to reduce their grazing, with the result that they will all starve.

The tragedy of the commons can serve as a simplified small-scale model of our current environmental problems, which are caused by billions of polluters, each of whom contributes some individually-undetectable amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Unfortunately, in such a model, the larger the number of participants the more inevitable the tragedy, since the larger the group, the less concern and trust the participants have for one another. Also, it is harder to detect free-riders in a larger group, and humans are prone to free ride, benefiting from the sacrifice of others while refusing to sacrifice themselves. Moreover, individual damage is likely to become imperceptible, preventing effective shaming mechanisms and reducing individual guilt.

Anthropogenic climate change and environmental destruction have additional complicating factors. Although there is a large body of scientific work showing that the human emission of greenhouse gases contributes to global climate change, it is still possible to entertain doubts about the exact scale of the effects we are causing – for example, whether our actions will make the global temperature increase by 2°C or whether it will go higher, even to 4°C – and how harmful such a climate change will be.

In addition, our bias towards the near future leaves us less able to adequately appreciate the graver effects of our actions, as they will occur in the more remote future. The damage we’re responsible for today will probably not begin to bite until the end of the present century. We will not benefit from even drastic action now, and nor will our children. Similarly, although the affluent countries are responsible for the greatest emissions, it is in general destitute countries in the South that will suffer most from their harmful effects (although Australia and the south-west of the United States will also have their fair share of droughts). Our limited and parochial altruism is not strong enough to provide a reason for us to give up our consumerist life-styles for the sake of our distant descendants, or our distant contemporaries in far-away places.

Given the psychological obstacles preventing us from voluntarily dealing with climate change, effective changes would need to be enforced by legislation. However, politicians in democracies are unlikely to propose such legislation. Effective measures will need to be tough, and so are unlikely to win a political leader a second term in office. Can voters be persuaded to sacrifice their own comfort and convenience to protect the interests of people who are not even born yet, or to protect species of animals they have never even heard of? Will democracy ever be able to free itself from powerful industrial interests? Democracy is likely to fail. Developed countries have the technology and wealth to deal with climate change, but we do not have the political will.

If we keep believing that responsibility is directly linked to causation, that we are more responsible for the results of our actions than the results of our omissions, and that if we share responsibility for an outcome with others our individual responsibility is lowered or removed, then we will not be able to solve modern problems like climate change, where each person’s actions contribute imperceptibly but inevitably. If we reject these beliefs, we will see that we in the rich, developed countries are more responsible for the misery occurring in destitute, developing countries than we are spontaneously inclined to think. But will our attitudes change?

Moral Bioenhancement
Our moral shortcomings are preventing our political institutions from acting effectively. Enhancing our moral motivation would enable us to act better for distant people, future generations, and non-human animals. One method to achieve this enhancement is already practised in all societies: moral education. Al Gore, Friends of the Earth and Oxfam have already had success with campaigns vividly representing the problems our selfish actions are creating for others – others around the world and in the future. But there is another possibility emerging. Our knowledge of human biology – in particular of genetics and neurobiology – is beginning to enable us to directly affect the biological or physiological bases of human motivation, either through drugs, or through genetic selection or engineering, or by using external devices that affect the brain or the learning process. We could use these techniques to overcome the moral and psychological shortcomings that imperil the human species. We are at the early stages of such research, but there are few cogent philosophical or moral objections to the use of specifically biomedical moral enhancement – or moral bioenhancement. In fact, the risks we face are so serious that it is imperative we explore every possibility of developing moral bioenhancement technologies – not to replace traditional moral education, but to complement it. We simply can’t afford to miss opportunities. We have provided ourselves with the tools to end worthwhile life on Earth forever. Nuclear war, with the weapons already in existence today could achieve this alone. If we must possess such a formidable power, it should be entrusted only to those who are both morally enlightened and adequately informed.

Objection 1: Too Little, Too Late?
We already have the weapons, and we are already on the path to disastrous climate change, so perhaps there is not enough time for this enhancement to take place. Moral educators have existed within societies across the world for thousands of years – Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, to name only three – yet we still lack the basic ethical skills we need to ensure our own survival is not jeopardised. As for moral bioenhancement, it remains a field in its infancy.

We do not dispute this. The relevant research is in its inception, and there is no guarantee that it will deliver in time, or at all. Our claim is merely that the requisite moral enhancement is theoretically possible – in other words, that we are not biologically or genetically doomed to cause our own destruction – and that we should do what we can to achieve it.

Objection 2: The Bootstrapping Problem
We face an uncomfortable dilemma as we seek out and implement such enhancements: they will have to be developed and selected by the very people who are in need of them, and as with all science, moral bioenhancement technologies will be open to abuse, misuse or even a simple lack of funding or resources.

The risks of misapplying any powerful technology are serious. Good moral reasoning was often overruled in small communities with simple technology, but now failure of morality to guide us could have cataclysmic consequences. A turning point was reached at the middle of the last century with the invention of the atomic bomb. For the first time, continued technological progress was no longer clearly to the overall advantage of humanity. That is not to say we should therefore halt all scientific endeavour. It is possible for humankind to improve morally to the extent that we can use our new and overwhelming powers of action for the better. The very progress of science and technology increases this possibility by promising to supply new instruments of moral enhancement, which could be applied alongside traditional moral education.

Objection 3: Liberal Democracy – a Panacea?
In recent years we have put a lot of faith in the power of democracy. Some have even argued that democracy will bring an ‘end’ to history, in the sense that it will end social and political development by reaching its summit. Surely democratic decision-making, drawing on the best available scientific evidence, will enable government action to avoid the looming threats to our future, without any need for moral enhancement?

In fact, as things stand today, it seems more likely that democracy will bring history to an end in a different sense: through a failure to mitigate human-induced climate change and environmental degradation. This prospect is bad enough, but increasing scarcity of natural resources brings an increased risk of wars, which, with our weapons of mass destruction, makes complete destruction only too plausible.

Sometimes an appeal is made to the so-called ‘jury theorem’ to support the prospect of democracy reaching the right decisions: even if voters are on average only slightly more likely to get a choice right than wrong – suppose they are right 51% of the time – then, where there is a sufficiently large numbers of voters, a majority of the voters (ie, 51%) is almost certain to make the right choice.

However, if the evolutionary biases we have already mentioned – our parochial altruism and bias towards the near future – influence our attitudes to climatic and environmental policies, then there is good reason to believe that voters are more likely to get it wrong than right. The jury theorem then means it’s almost certain that a majority will opt for the wrong policies! Nor should we take it for granted that the right climatic and environmental policy will always appear in manifestoes. Powerful business interests and mass media control might block effective environmental policy in a market economy.

Conclusion
Modern technology provides us with many means to cause our downfall, and our natural moral psychology does not provide us with the means to prevent it. The moral enhancement of humankind is necessary for there to be a way out of this predicament. If we are to avoid catastrophe by misguided employment of our power, we need to be morally motivated to a higher degree (as well as adequately informed about relevant facts). A stronger focus on moral education could go some way to achieving this, but as already remarked, this method has had only modest success during the last couple of millennia. Our growing knowledge of biology, especially genetics and neurobiology, could deliver additional moral enhancement, such as drugs or genetic modifications, or devices to augment moral education.

The development and application of such techniques is risky – it is after all humans in their current morally-inept state who must apply them – but we think that our present situation is so desperate that this course of action must be investigated.

We have radically transformed our social and natural environments by technology, while our moral dispositions have remained virtually unchanged. We must now consider applying technology to our own nature, supporting our efforts to cope with the external environment that we have created.

Biomedical means of moral enhancement may turn out to be no more effective than traditional means of moral education or social reform, but they should not be rejected out of hand. Advances are already being made in this area. However, it is too early to predict how, or even if, any moral bioenhancement scheme will be achieved. Our ambition is not to launch a definitive and detailed solution to climate change or other mega-problems. Perhaps there is no realistic solution. Our ambition at this point is simply to put moral enhancement in general, and moral bioenhancement in particular, on the table. Last century we spent vast amounts of resources increasing our ability to cause great harm. It would be sad if, in this century, we reject opportunities to increase our capacity to create benefits, or at least to prevent such harm.

© Prof. Julian Savulescu and Prof. Ingmar Persson 2012

Julian Savulescu is a Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and Ingmar Persson is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Gothenburg. This article is drawn from their book Unfit for the Future: The Urgent Need for Moral Enhancement (Oxford University Press, 2012).

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"A refusal to think philosophy as simply content..."

I want to argue that works of art are machinic rather than hermeneutic. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari say that the unconscious is a factory, not a theater. By this they mean that the unconscious does not represent or mean, but that it produces. I want to say that works of arts are factories or machines, not theaters. They don’t have meanings, but are powers of producing differences in the world. They are real actors. They do not represent, even in the tradition of realism, but make. I read Proust, for example, and his exquisite discussion of various emotional states has the power to actually create new forms of affect in me that I never before had. I begin to love as Proust’s characters do. The work of art is thus a factory that both transforms the artist that creates it (artists tell me that they become something else as a result of their work) and that transforms the audiences that encounter the work. Works of art are difference engines that circulate throughout the world and that transform the people and things that encounter them. Picasso’s Guernica does not represent the bombing of Guernica, but both transforms the event of that bombing, giving it a new sense, and creates an affect for the slaughter of the innocents everywhere....

Machinic Art: The Matter of Contradiction

Enter the psychedelic time tunnel and hang on for an inspirational and amazing story. Zen teacher Don Lubov gives us Story Ten of the One series. It is available now from Trestle Press for ONLY 99 Cents and you can get it here: http://goo.gl/JkFJs

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