{"title":"Will Postmortal Catholics Have “The Right to Die”?\u2028 The Transhumanist and Catholic Perspectives on Death and Immortality","authors":"Anna Bugajska","doi":"10.35765/forphil.2019.2402.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35765/forphil.2019.2402.17","url":null,"abstract":"The article discusses the transhumanist and Catholic perspectives on death and immortality within the speculation on the rise of a postmortal society, and asks the question if Catholics have the right to reject immortalist technologies. To address this problem, I first outline the ideas and technology leading to the rise of a postmortal society, and accept Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon as a counterfactual scenario. Further, the naturalistic and Catholic understandings of death are compared, and it is shown that despite superficial similarities, they are fundamentally different. Finally, I consider insights from the current debates on end-of-life issues, such as euthanasia and the right to die, since some of the reasons and motivations behind choosing to die will be different in the postmortal society. The analysis allows to provide a set of arguments and problems for further consideration when it comes to the rejection of immortalist technologies.","PeriodicalId":34385,"journal":{"name":"Forum Philosophicum","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47334484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intelligence, Artificial and Otherwise","authors":"P. Dumouchel","doi":"10.35765/forphil.2019.2402.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35765/forphil.2019.2402.11","url":null,"abstract":"The idea of artificial intelligence implies the existence of a form of intelligence that is “natural,” or at least not artificial. The problem is that intelligence, whether “natural” or “artificial,” is not well defined: it is hard to say what, exactly, is or constitutes intelligence. This difficulty makes it impossible to measure human intelligence against artificial intelligence on a unique scale. It does not, however, prevent us from comparing them; rather, it changes the sense and meaning of such comparisons. Comparing artificial intelligence with human intelligence could allow us to understand both forms better. This paper thus aims to compare and distinguish these two forms of intelligence, focusing on three issues: forms of embodiment, autonomy and judgment. Doing so, I argue, should enable us to have a better view of the promises and limitations of present-day artificial intelligence, along with its benefits and dangers and the place we should make for it in our culture and society.","PeriodicalId":34385,"journal":{"name":"Forum Philosophicum","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47751642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transhumanism, Posthumanism, and the Catholic Church","authors":"Alcibiades Malapi-Nelson","doi":"10.35765/forphil.2019.2402.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35765/forphil.2019.2402.16","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, I engage the foreseeable consequences for the future of humanity triggered by Emerging Technologies and their underpinning philosophy, transhumanism. The transhumanist stance is compared with the default view currently held in many academic institutions of higher education: posthumanism. It is maintained that the transhumanist view is less inimical to the fostering of human dignity than the posthuman one. After this is established, I suggest that the Catholic Church may find an ally in a transhumanist ethos in a two‑fold manner. On the one hand, by anchoring and promoting the defense of “the human” already present in transhumanism. On the other, rethinking the effectiveness of the delivery of sacraments in a humanity heavily altered by these technologies.","PeriodicalId":34385,"journal":{"name":"Forum Philosophicum","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47441527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"David I. Dubrovsky and Merab Mamardashvili: Adam’s Second Fall and the Advent of the Cyber-Leviathan","authors":"I. Yanes-Fernandez","doi":"10.35765/forphil.2019.2402.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35765/forphil.2019.2402.14","url":null,"abstract":"In his speech “The European Responsibility,” the Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili summarizes his utopia of a fulfilled humanity by presenting it as an integration of two main traditions: the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian ones. In contrast, David Dubrovsky launches a new perspective for present and future human evolution: the cyber-superman, i.e. the perfect merging of human mind and digital brain—or the bio-digital interface. “Intelligence” here is not just an artificial by-product of a highly organized technological structure, but the reproduction of mental operations through the techno-replication of the bio-brain as material substrate: the Dubrovskyan avatar. In the present article, I focus on Dubrovsky’s and Mamardashvili’s anthropological paradigms, and their relationship to the phenomena of cyberbeing and cyberculture. I examine the phenomenon of cyberbeing as a “built-in” feature of a bio-electronic, transhuman ontology that impacts and transforms personhood into “cyborghood” in the context of an interactive digital framework of fictional transcendences, body-deconstruction and bio-technological interplays. My aim is to develop a critical approach to Dubrovsky’s cybernetic anthropology and avatar-theory, along with its meaning and implications for our world-epoch, in contrast to Mamardashvili’s ontology, which proves essentially incompatible with the moment of technological singularity—i.e. with the creation of a transhuman bio-digital avatar as envisioned and prophesized by Dubrovsky.","PeriodicalId":34385,"journal":{"name":"Forum Philosophicum","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48886358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reviewers of Articles Submitted in 2019","authors":"David E. Pratt","doi":"10.35765/forphil.2019.2402.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35765/forphil.2019.2402.21","url":null,"abstract":"David E. Pratt Saint Martin’s University, USA Graham McAleer Loyola University Maryland, USA Hans Pedersen Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA Jeremiah Alberg International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan Agata Bielik-Robson University of Nottingham, UK Andrea Salvatore Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” Italy Andreas Wilmes West University of Timisoara, Romania Andrew O’Shea Dublin City University, Ireland Andrzej Sarnacki Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow, Poland Bernard Perret Association Recherches Mimétiques, Paris, France Brian Sudlow Aston University Birmingham, UK George Dunn University of Indianapolis, USA Guy Vanheeswijck Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium Adam Romejko Uniwersytet Gdański, Poland Iwona Janicka University of Warwick, UK James Murphy Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA","PeriodicalId":34385,"journal":{"name":"Forum Philosophicum","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44565789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thinking with René Girard","authors":"","doi":"10.35765/forphil.2019.2401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35765/forphil.2019.2401","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":34385,"journal":{"name":"Forum Philosophicum","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47792447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"René Girard and the Deferral of Violence","authors":"E. Gans","doi":"10.35765/forphil.2018.2302.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35765/forphil.2018.2302.09","url":null,"abstract":"René Girard’s anthropology goes beyond Durkheim and Freud in seeking knowledge in literary, mythical, and religious texts. Girard’s primary intuition is that human culture originated in response to the danger of violent mimetic crises among increasingly intelligent hominins, whose imitation of each other’s desires led to conflict. These crises were resolved by the mechanism of emissary murder: the proto-human community came to focus its aggression on a single scapegoat whose unanimous lynching, by “miraculously” bringing peace, led to its ritual repetition in sacrifice. Because this theory fails to found the signs of human language and worship on the deferral of spontaneous action, Girard can only attribute the internal peace necessary to the human community to the exhaustion of violent aggression. Instead, generative anthropology proposes that, beginning from the premise that the need to control internecine violence was the source of the human, an appropriative gesture toward an object of common desire, deferred out of fear of violence, becomes understood as a sign of the object’s sacred/interdicted status, after which it can be peacefully divided among the group. Following this originary event, the sacred/signifying universe of language and religion gradually comes to include the totality of human activity.","PeriodicalId":34385,"journal":{"name":"Forum Philosophicum","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48171517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reviewers of Articles Submitted in 2018","authors":"B. Perret","doi":"10.35765/forphil.2018.2302.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35765/forphil.2018.2302.21","url":null,"abstract":"Bernard Perret Association Recherches Mimétiques, Paris, France Christopher Wojtulewicz Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium Dariusz Łukasiewicz Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland Stefano Tomelleri Università degli studi di Bergamo, Italy Tadeusz Biesaga The Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow, Poland Roger Pouivet Université de Lorraine, France Michele Farisco Uppsala University, Sweden Richard M. Capobianco Stonehill College, USA Adam Workowski Jagiellonian Univeristy, Poland Andrey Tikhonov Southern Federal University at Rostov-on-Don, Russia Carlos Segovia Saint Louis University – Madrid Campus, Spain Deepak Pandiaraj Indian Institute of Technology. Bombay University, India Salvatore Spina University of Messina, Italy Jim Harries William Carey International University, University of Birmingham, UK Maria Korusiewicz University of Bielsko-Biała Allen Anderson University of Birmingham, UK","PeriodicalId":34385,"journal":{"name":"Forum Philosophicum","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49298365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Małgorzata Hołda. Paul Ricœur’s Concept of Subjectivity and the Postmodern Claim of the Death of the Subject [Book Review]","authors":"","doi":"10.35765/forphil.2018.2302.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35765/forphil.2018.2302.19","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":34385,"journal":{"name":"Forum Philosophicum","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47536623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}