This article argues that shame is fundamentally interpersonal. It is opposed to the leading interpretation of shame in the field of moral psychology, which is the cognitivist, morally rationally, autonomous view of shame as a negative judgment about the self. That view of shame abandons the social and interpersonal essence of shame. I will advance the idea, as developed by the tradition of philosophical anthropology and, in particular, in the works of Helmuth Plessner, Erwin Straus, F. J. J. Buytendijk, and (...) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that shame is a heteronomous affective response that is caused by a breakdown in our fundamental interpersonal connection with others. It is a feeling that comes from the denial of our basic need to live with others in a state of trusting acceptance. (shrink)

Philosophical anthropology aims to discover what makes us human, but it has produced accounts that exclude some members of our species. It relies often on a non-naturalistic “philosophy of consciousness” and locates humanity in the cognitive capacity to objectively represent things, to reason teleologically and use tools, to use symbols and language, or to be self-conscious and question existence. This work pursues an alternative, thoroughly naturalistic philosophical anthropology in the tradition of Arnold Gehlen. Combining Gehlen’s theory of our behaviorally-detached and (...) culturally-determined impulses with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s views on intersubjectivity, affect, sexuality, and social institutions, the present work locates the human within the unique structure of human feeling. This produces a truly inclusive account of “the human as the other” or Homo alter. The human is deeply and thoroughly dependent on affective, bodily, communicative bonds, in which others appear as sources of meaning, norms, pleasure, and approbation and disapprobation. This socio-biological account of the human makes institutionality central to our form of life but rejects any political anthropology that attempts to use human nature to prescribe a necessary form to institutions such as the home. Such a social and affective account of the human produces a novel approach to the affect of shame as the feeling of institutional rejection. Ultimately, this work uses philosophical anthropology to combat dehumanization. Our unique form of dependency on others and institutions is present, for example, in infants and the severely disabled who may not possess the forms of consciousness and cognition that traditionally are identified with being human. (shrink)

The first work to offer a comprehensive pragmatist anthropology focusing on sensibility, habits, and human experience as contingently yet irreversibly enlanguaged.

The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer. In supporting their claim, the authors, Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, marshal evidence (...) from mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and biology, setting up their book around three central questions: What are the essential marks of human intelligence? What is it that researchers try to do when they attempt to achieve "artificial intelligence" (AI)? And why, after more than 50 years, are our most common interactions with AI, for example with our bank’s computers, still so unsatisfactory? Landgrebe and Smith show how a widespread fear about AI’s potential to bring about radical changes in the nature of human beings and in the human social order is founded on an error. There is still, as they demonstrate in a final chapter, a great deal that AI can achieve which will benefit humanity. But these benefits will be achieved without the aid of systems that are more powerful than humans, which are as impossible as AI systems that are intrinsically "evil" or able to "will" a takeover of human society. (shrink)

The Anthropocene debate is one of the most ambitious scientific programmes of the past 15 or 20 years. Its main argument is that, from a geological point of view, humans are considered a major force of nature, thus implying that our current geological epoch is dominated by human activity. The Anthropocene has slowly become a contemporary meta-narrative that seeks to make sense of the ‘earth-system’ as a whole, and one whose vision of the future is dystopian rather than progressive: as (...) the exploitation of the planet’s natural resources reaches tipping point, the very prospects of the continuity of human life are being questioned. This article aims to explore the implicit notions of the human – indeed of the anthropos – that are being mobilized in the Anthropocene debate. It will proceed in two stages: first, the article will spell out the main arguments of the Anthropocene debate with a particular focus on trying to unpack its implicit ideas of the human. Second, it will use my approach to philosophical sociology to highlight some of the limitations and contradictions of the ideas of agency, reflexivity and responsibility that underpin the Anthropocene debate. (shrink)

Beginning with a survey of the shortcoming of theories of organology/media-as-externalization of mind/body—a philosophical-anthropological tradition that stretches from Plato through Ernst Kapp and finds its contemporary proponent in Bernard Stiegler—I propose that the phenomenological treatment of media as an outpouching and extension of mind qua intentionality is not sufficient to counter the ̳black-box‘ mystification of today‘s deep learning‘s algorithms. Focusing on a close study of Simondon‘s On the Existence of Technical Objectsand Individuation, I argue that the process-philosophical work of Gilbert (...) Simondon, with its critique of Norbert Wiener‘s first-order cybernetics, offers a precursor to the conception of second-order cybernetics (as endorsed byFrancisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, and Ricardo B. Uribe) and, specifically, its autopoietic treatment of information. It has been argued by those such as Frank Pasquale that neuro-inferential deep learning systems premised on predictive patterning, suchas AlphaGo Zero, have a veiled logic and, thus, are ̳black boxes‘. In detailing a philosophical-historical approach to demystify predictive patterning/processing and the logic of such deep learning algorithms, this paper attempts to shine a light on such systems and their inner workingsàla Simondon. (shrink)

Scholars have long recognized the existence of myriad widespread deep disagreements on values, justice, morality, and ethics. In order to come to terms with such deep disagreements, resistant to rational solution, this article asserts the need for developing an ethics of disagreement. The reality that theoretical disagreements often turn into practical conflicts is a major justification for why such an ethics is necessary. This paper outlines an ethics of deep disagreement that is primarily conceived of as a form of virtue (...) ethics. Such an ethics asks opposing parties in moral and intellectual conflicts to acknowledge that (a) deep disagreements exist, (b) opposing positions should be recognized as worthy of respect, and that (c) one should seek dialogue and mutual understanding. This ethical approach conceives of toleration as a moral and political virtue and presents an argument for toleration based on deep disagreements. (shrink)

Summary The movement of repetition is irrevocably linked to the constitution of the human body and is therefore a human condition. The process of hominisation makes this clear. In the body of Homo sapiens and in his movements a connection between nature and culture is created. The movement of repetition is of central importance. Repetition is essential for the evolution of Homo sapiens, the development of communities and individuals. Repetitions are mimetic; they lead to productive imitations in which new elements (...) and events also emerge. Mimetic movements and the repetitive aspects they contain open up the historical and cultural world to people. Repetitions in rituals lead to the acquisition of an implicit silent practical body knowledge. The emotions arising in mimetic processes are movements through which an orientation in the world takes place. The imaginations based on the eccentricity of the human being and on movements of repetition contribute to the development of a collective and individual imaginary. (shrink)

The article presents the conceptual groundwork for an understanding of the essentially improvisational dimension of human rationality. It aims to clarify how we should think about important concepts pertinent to central aspects of human practices, namely, the concepts of improvisation, normativity, habit, and freedom. In order to understand the sense in which human practices are essentially improvisational, it is first necessary to criticize misconceptions about improvisation as lack of preparation and creatio ex nihilo. Second, it is necessary to solve the (...) theoretical problems that derive from misunderstandings concerning the notions of normativity, habit, and freedom – misunderstandings that revolve around the idea that rationality is a form that is developed out of itself and thus works in a way similar to algorithms. One can only make sense of normativity, habit, and freedom if one understands that they all involve conflictual relationships with the world and with others, which in turn enables one to adequately take into account their constitutive connection to improvisation, properly understood. In outlining these conceptual connections, we want to prepare the foundations for an explanation of rational practices as improvisational practices. The article concludes by stating that human rational life is improvisatory because the conditions of human practice arise out of practice itself. (shrink)

The goal of creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – or in other words of creating Turing machines (modern computers) that can behave in a way that mimics human intelligence – has occupied AI researchers ever since the idea of AI was first proposed. One common theme in these discussions is the thesis that the ability of a machine to conduct convincing dialogues with human beings can serve as at least a sufficient criterion of AGI. We argue that this very ability (...) should be accepted also as a necessary condition of AGI, and we provide a description of the nature of human dialogue in particular and of human language in general against this background. We then argue that it is for mathematical reasons impossible to program a machine in such a way that it could master human dialogue behaviour in its full generality. This is (1) because there are no traditional explicitly designed mathematical models that could be used as a starting point for creating such programs; and (2) because even the sorts of automated models generated by using machine learning, which have been used successfully in areas such as machine translation, cannot be extended to cope with human dialogue. If this is so, then we can conclude that a Turing machine also cannot possess AGI, because it fails to fulfil a necessary condition thereof. At the same time, however, we acknowledge the potential of Turing machines to master dialogue behaviour in highly restricted contexts, where what is called “narrow” AI can still be of considerable utility. (shrink)

Arguing that our attachment to Aristotelian modes of discourse makes a revision of their conceptual foundations long overdue, the author proposes the consideration of unacknowledged factors that play a central role in argument itself. These are in particular the subjective imprint and the dynamics of argumentation. Their inclusion in a four-dimensional framework and the focus on thesis validity allow for a more realistic view of our discourse practice. Exhaustive analyses of fascinating historical and contemporary arguments are provided. These range from (...) Columbus’s advocacy of the Western Passage to India, over the trial of King Louis XVI during the French Revolution, to today’s highly charged controversies surrounding euthanasia and embryo research. Excavating foundational issues such as the purpose of argument itself and the contested role of argument as a generator of knowledge, the book culminates in a discussion of the relationship between rationality and reasonableness and criticizes the restrictions of ‘rational’ argument relying on fixed logical, economic or cultural criteria that in reality are mutable. Here, a true, open argument requires the infusion of Paul Lorenzen’s principle of ‘transsubjectivity’, which recognizes but transcends the partiality of the individual and which can be seen in the pragmatic and expanding consensus that humanity can control itself to safeguard the future of a fragile, damaged world. (shrink)

This article is a conceptual contribution on how to make human habitat more sustainable. Taking Heidegger’s conception of “dwelling” as a starting point, a new form of understanding the organization of the city as a human habitat is proposed. It is argued that human habitat is today in crisis and that such crisis has its roots in a spatial understanding of human dwelling, disregarding its temporal-historical dimension. For long time, the city has been considered as a physical “place” and its (...) organization—the urban planning—has been addressed in terms of “locating”. Many of the challenges in organizing habitat are the result of reducing the organization of the city to the organization of physical space. One of these is the conflict between preservation and development, a central issue in approaching sustainability. The aim of this article is to propose a new perspective on the organization of human dwelling, which overcomes the spatial-based conception of habitat and involves its temporal dimension. The meaning of human “habitat” as a historical process for developing “habits” will be recovered, and the implications for organization of the city considered. Human habitat is above all an ethical space, constituted in a spatial–temporal process of developing learning and capabilities. This habitat can be shared and developed infinitely so that a pathway is opened for overcoming the logic of competition and the conflict between sustainability and development. Finally, three forms of the human habitat as an “ethical space” are proposed. (shrink)

Using a base of philosophical athropology, this article suggests that an ethical analysis of persuasion must include not just the logic human response, but culture and experience as well. The authors propose potential maxims for ethical behavior in advertising and public relations and applies them to two case studies, political advertising and the Bridgestone/Firestone controversy.

Vulnerability has become a popular though controversial topic in bioethics, notably since 2000. As a result, a common body of knowledge has emerged distinguishing between different types of vulnerability, criticizing the categorization of populations as vulnerable, and questioning the practical implications. It is argued that two perspectives on vulnerability, i.e., the philosophical and political, pose challenges to contemporary bioethics discourse: they re-examine the significance of human agency, the primacy of the individual person, and the negativity of vulnerability. As a phenomenon (...) of globalization, vulnerability can only be properly addressed in a global bioethics that takes the social dimension of human existence seriously. (shrink)

Technoscientific progress brings into question both anthropocentric epistemology and anthropocentric/humanistic ontology, which considers the human being as a self-constructing and self-sufficient entity. Even though, Darwinism recomposes the humanistic disjunction between reality and representation: by defining the human being as the result of an adaptive reflection, it reveals the idealistic character of post-Cartesian thought, which is the backbone of philosophical anthropocentrism. The non-human can be a dialogic entity if and only if it is considered not as “animal-by” but “animal-with”, that is, (...) free to express its authenticity in terms of subjectivity, diversity and uniqueness. Whilst the post-human laboratory celebrates the power of human beings, the post-humanistic perspective emphasizes the conjugation with the non-human. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to reassess the conceptual link between politics and our capacity to create images. Although a lot has been written on what we can call the ‘politics of imagination’, much less has been done to critically assess the conceptual link between the two in a systematic way. This paper introduces the concept of imaginal, understood simply as what is made of images, to go beyond the current impasse of the opposition between theories of imagination as (...) an individual faculty, on the one hand, and theories of the imaginary as a social context, on the other. As such, I also argue that the concept of imaginal is the theoretical tool most adapted to capture the nature of the conceptual link between politics and our capacity to produce images. This analysis is finally applied to contemporary politics and it is shown to be able to bring light to many of its paradoxes, including that of a political world full of images, but deprived of imagination. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relationship between humans and nature as it relates to the ability of human societies to solve large-scale environmental problems. We assert that humans are not unique in their relationship with nature; all species have the ability to externalize their being into the world thus creating environmental problems. We also argue that human consciousness and rationality do not provide ready answers to these problems. Unless we better understand the pretheoretical and pragmatic nature of human consciousness, rational/scientific attempts (...) to deal with large-scale environmental problems will fail. We use a framework derived from Schutzian phenomenology to explain how human consciousness both provides the motivation for creating environmental problems and also impedes any real solutions. Thus, we explore a dialectic of human consciousness that has profound implications for discussions about the ability of humans to solve environmental problems. (shrink)

Body & Society started in 1995. The journal has been continuously exploring and problematizing critical issues which have been opening up new horizons in the field of body studies. As an interdisciplinary journal, it has engaged with a wider range of innovative approaches to the body, which includes sociology, cultural studies, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, history, science and technology studies, sensory studies and media studies. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Body & Society, managing editor Tomoko Tamari invited Professor Bryan S (...) Turner, who was one of the journal’s founders (with Mike Featherstone), to reflect on the academic and historical background of Body & Society along with his own academic trajectory over the last 40 years. (shrink)

This article argues for the need to recover the concept of political myth in order to understand the crucial phenomena of our epoch. By drawing on Blumenberg’s philosophical reflections on myth, it proposes to understand political myth as the continual process of work on a common narrative by which the members of a social group can provide significance to their political conditions and experience. In order to show how this understanding of political myth can throw light on important aspects of (...) contemporary politics, the article analyses the work on one of the most conspicuous political myths of our time: the clash of civilizations. By reconstructing the mechanisms through which this myth works, the article shows how a paradigm that has been strongly criticized as too simplistic and scientifically inadequate could have turned into a successful political myth, i.e. into a self-fulfilling prophecy. (shrink)

This article discusses the common ground between William James and the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Recent commentators on this overlap have characterised philosophical anthropology as combining science (in particular biology and medicine) and Kantian teleology, for instance in Kant’s seminal definition of anthropology as being concerned with what the human being makes of itself, as distinct from what attributes it is given by nature. This article registers the tension between Kantian thinking, which reckons to ground experience in a priori categories, (...) and William James’s psychology, which begins and ends with experience. It explores overlap between James’s approach and the characteristic holism of 18th-century philosophical anthropology, which centres on the idea of understanding and analysing the human as a whole, and presents the main anthropological elements of James’s position, namely his antipathy to separation, his concerns about the binomial terms of traditional philosophy, his preference for experience over substances, his sense that this holist doctrine of experience shows a way out of sterile impasses, a preference for description over causation, and scepticism. It then goes on to register the common ground with key ideas in the work of anthropologists from around 1800, along with some references to anthropologists who come in James’s wake, in particular Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, in order to reconceptualise the connection between James’s ideas and the tradition of anthropological thinking in German letters since the late 18th-century, beyond its characterisation as a combination of scientific positivism and teleology. (shrink)

The goal of our article is to review the widespread anthropological figure, according to which we can achieve a better understanding of humans by contrasting them with animals. This originally Herderian approach was elaborated by Arnold Gehlen, who characterized humans as “deficient beings” who become complete through culture. According to Gehlen, humans, who are insufficiently equipped by instincts, indirectly stabilize their existence by creating institutions, i.e., complexes of habitual actions. On the other hand, Maurice Merleau-Ponty shows that corporeal relationship to (...) the world is already indirect because it is based on preestablished and readjusted “standards” or “norms” of interaction with the environment. Merleau-Ponty then calls these norms “institutions” and views culture as readjustment of institutions which operate already on the level of corporeal existence. The anthropological figure of confronting humans and animals thus cannot produce, as in Gehlen, a contrast between an allegedly “direct” relationship to the world in animals and a supposedly “indirect” relationship to the world in humans. The Herderian approach can be meaningfully retained only if interpreted as an invitation to confront the norms of indirect interaction with the world in animals and in people, that is, if viewed as a comparison of their respective institutions. (shrink)

I argue that the lived experience of disabled people should be validated instead of a facile categorization. Thus far, a disabled sensibility is reduced to a categorical interpretation. Through my examination of a theoretical performance I illustrate how a disabled/able persona negates a disabled sensibility and allows an audience to experience the exotic disabled without examining their own `ableism'. Sobchack's and Clark's examinations demonstrate how both the techno-body and the cyberbody continue to devalue a disabled embodiment and sensibility. In the (...) final section of the article I explore how Deleuze's concept of `difference in itself' can free disabled people from the concepts of identity, hierarchy, representation and categorization that have been employed to devalue their embodiment and sensibility. Moreover, I believe that Deleuze's alternative theory of `difference in itself' can validate a disabled embodiment and sensibility. (shrink)

Latour is widely considered a critic and renewer of research in the social sciences. The ecologically minded Left has also acclaimed him as a theorist interested in bringing nature back both into sociological theory and into society and politics. To enable a more detailed discussion of Latour’s claims, I will here outline his theory and the ways in which it is related to classical theory, such as Durkheim, and the methodology of the interpretive paradigm, such as Schütz. My thesis is (...) that Latour’s empirical studies may be read as unfolding the methodological consequences of the interpretive paradigm, and that his early work is a brilliant proof of Durkheim’s theory of the morphology of social facts. Latour has now elaborated the insights he gained from concrete laboratory studies toward a general theory of the social, of society, and of politics. These generalizations have made his theory at least partly problematic. The political implication of Latour’s theory of society is a generalization of the call for equality to encompass everything; in other words, Latour criticizes the exclusion of nonhuman entities from political representation. The paper closes by discussing the political consequences of this proposal. (shrink)

In twentieth-century continental philosophy, German philosophical anthropology can be seen as a sort of conceptual laboratory devoted to human/animal research, and, in particular, to the discontinuity between human and non-human animals. Its main notion—the idea of the special position of humans in nature—is one of the first philosophical attempts to think of the specificity of humans as a natural and qualitative difference from non-human animals. This school of thought correctly rejects both the metaphysical and/or religious characterisations of humans, and the (...) positivistic gradualism, that sees the human being as an animal endowed with a greater degree of certain faculties. At the same time, German philosophical anthropology still takes it for granted that such natural-qualitative novelty is unique in the realm of the living, that in correspondence with humans there is the hiatus, the discontinuity par excellence. The semiotic side of this view is the distinction between signs and symbols developed by Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer: animal signs would be mere proxies for perceptive elements or stimuli, whereas only human symbols could convey complex representation of objects and situations. The goal of this contribution is to criticise the alleged uniqueness of the hiatus and its semiotic implications through the opposite approach of the diffuse discontinuities. This approach that focuses on the semiotic traits of different species-specific environments can be traced back to Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiotical phenomenology, which thinks of discontinuities as a normal phenomenon of animal life. (shrink)

This analysis places the English translation of Heinrich Popitz’s Phenomena of Power: Authority, Domination, and Violence in the broader tradition of philosophical anthropology. It is argued anthropological arguments such as that offered by Popitz give insights not otherwise available to strict disciplinary inquiries. Poptiz’s discussion of power also suggests an important tension in philosophical anthropology. While Popitz contends power relations are “humanly produced realities” not “imposed by nature,” he nevertheless provides some support that physical and biological factors might contribute to (...) an understanding of power. This discussion illustrates this tension using examples drawn from Popitz discussion of power, threats of violence, and the exercise of authority. (shrink)

The concept of second nature has a long and complex history, having been widely employed by several philosophers and even scientists. In recent times, the most famous thinker who has employed the concept of second nature, and has actually grounded his philosophical program precisely on this notion, is probably John McDowell. However, it is also possible to find some occurrences of the concept of second nature, “zweite Natur”, in Nietzsche’s writings, both published and unpublished. In this contribution I will develop (...) a discussion of this important topic, the nature of the human being, in Nietzsche and McDowell, and attempt to establish a comparison between them on the basis of this concept. It is the guiding idea of this article that McDowell’s “Naturalism of Second Nature”, though representing one of the most original and indeed ambitious philosophical programs today, actually suffers from some problems in defining the peculiar nature of the human being, and that referring to some of Nietzsche’s ideas on this topic may be of help in order to broaden and strengthen McDowell’s own philosophical perspective. There is almost no reference to Nietzsche in McDowell’s several philosophical works, notwithstanding his great interest in, and his careful attention to, other authors belonging to the tradition of modern German philosophy, and nobody has inquired yet into the potential Nietzsche/McDowell relationship. The paper will trace the development of certain philosophical-anthropological insights from 19th- and 20th-century German thought up to the present age, and provide an original and relevant contribution both to the specific field of Nietzsche studies and to the more general domain of inquiries into contemporary philosophical problems. Comparing the ideas of Nietzsche/ McDowell on the question concerning the nature of the human being relationship is intriguing from a philosophical point of view and may lead to a better understanding of this subject and disclose new perspectives in this field. There is a lot of philosophical insight to be gained in comparing these two figures. (shrink)

From a subjective point of view, we take the existence of integrated entities, i.e., ourselves as the most unproblematic given, and blithely project such integrity onto untold many “entities” far and wide. However, from a naturalistic perspective, accounting for anything more integral than the attachments and attractions that are explicable in terms of the four fundamental forces of physics has been anything but straightforward. If we take it that the universe begins as an integral unity and explodes into progressive stages (...) of internal detachment, then we can also fathom the idea that eddies of relative detachment becoming increasingly integral. Helmuth Plessner made a powerful case for the onset of “positionality” constituting one of the major transitions in nature. Surely, the emergence of “entities” that position themselves in relation to their surround marks a decisive transition in relative levels of detachment and some would say “autonomy.” It would follow, with no less force, that where and when entities can be seen to be normatively integrated, and indeed to be the agents of their own normativity, that another threshold of detachment has been crossed. The paper introduces and explores the idea that normativity, embedded in a wide-ranging theory of natural detachment, can be considered an emergent force of nature that is requisite to accounting for levels of integration beyond that which is explicable in terms of the four fundamental forces of physics. Following this line of enquiry, we argue that the first expression of a fully, normatively-integrated life-form is neither a spoken language user nor for that matter an individual but rather the neoteny-based, Homo erectus Group. In so doing we claim to have made an inroad into embedding the force of normativity into a wide-ranging naturalist framework, to have provided philosophical anthropology with a new point of departure, and at least playfully, to have given some naturalistic grist to Hegel’s proclamation that spirit is the truth of nature. (shrink)

The university today finds itself in a global state of emergency, at once financial, military and ecological. Teaching must assume this emergency as premise and responsibility: it must consider the grounds of the classroom, both figurative and literal, and generate emergent lines of inquiry that address the pressing global and local situation. For us, that means that teaching must take the university’s grounds of supposedly universal knowledge to be constitutively unstable and to require a reflexive teaching method that puts in (...) question disciplinary fields and discursive modalities of knowledge. And it must take in the physical grounds of the university too—because local space is increasingly articulated by technocapital interests that are fully implicated in this global state of emergency. Thus, we do not seek stability amidst such turbulence, but rather a seismotic overturning of the grounds of the university or, rather, a returning to its ground, through the deepened sense of purpose and place that ‘teaching the emergency’ provides. (shrink)

In this essay I propose an alternative theoretical framework for explicating human enhancement. The framework is based on the concepts of reciprocity, which I consider a fundamental aspect of human presence, and of mediation, which I consider a fundamental aspect of the relation between human beings and science and technology. I argue that enhancement is given by the way in which technological and scientific mediation alters the structure of the network of reciprocity characterising human presence. As a matter of fact, (...) technological mediation may turn the reciprocity of presence into a unilateral relation, which prevents any form of response. The lack of responsibility, here understood as the possibility to respond back, is determinant for the generation of a situation of power and for eliciting moral disengagement. The framework will be applied and discussed with reference to robotics technologies. (shrink)

A general dearth of theoretical engagements with the embodied, historical, and especially the religious dimensions of disablement pervades the social sciences. Paradoxically, the religious heritage of the West is commonly identified as the implicit catalyst of many disabling attitudinal barriers impinging on impaired bodies. Addressing this inconsistency, this article extends dominant disability conceptualizations through combining embodiment theories and humanities perspectives. Ultimately the article seeks to demonstrate how interdisciplinary investigation can produce fresh insights into the relationships between attitudes towards physical impairment (...) and Christianized forms of Western sociality. First, the radicalization of the definition of disability in the field of disability studies is briefly discussed. Second, aspects of the sociology of the body are examined in order to illustrate how the concepts of ‘effervescent’ and ‘emergent’ embodiment, through highlighting the persistence of the sacred in ‘somatic society’, can assist in the formulation of an analytical framework, suitable for analysing the religio-cultural dimensions of impairment. Finally, the dynamism of Christian attitudes towards physical impairment is illustrated through a survey of historical and contemporaneous theological examples. The confluence of these fields, it is argued, enables the interconnected terrain between impairment, embodiment and the sacred to be mapped. (shrink)