What is the relation between the ethics, the law, and the governance of the digital? In this article I articulate and defend what I consider the most reasonable answer.

In his protracted study of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which extended from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, Heidegger considered Nietzsche’s political positions to be the inevitable consequence of modern metaphysics. The implication of his argument is that Nietzsche’s “overman” and the “last man,” though ideologically differentiated, are both captured by modern metaphysics in its orientation towards subjectivism and globalism. Heidegger classified Nietzsche’s politics under the headings of Machiavelli and Roman Culture, technique and imperium. These terms illustrate how the overman, who represents (...) subjectivism at its zenith, displaces the weaker subjectivism of the last man, who, nevertheless, also seeks dominion over the earth. This essay presents an analytic description of Heidegger’s definition of Nietzsche’s politics and vindicates its accuracy, along with his characterization of Nietzsche’s philosophy as fundamentally technological. (shrink)

In previous works (Floridi 2018) I introduced the distinction between hard ethics (which may broadly be described as what is morally right and wrong independently of whether something is legal or illegal), and soft or post-compliance ethics (which focuses on what ought to be done over and above existing legislation). This paper analyses the applicability of soft ethics to the General Data Protection Regulation and advances the theory that soft ethics has a dual advantage—as both an opportunity strategy and a (...) risk management solution. (shrink)

What I want to do in this essay is examine a notorious argument put forward by Galen Strawson. He advocates what he describes as an a priori argument against the possibility of ultimate (moral) responsibility. There have been many attempts at answering Strawson, but whether they have been successful is debatable. I attempt to employ Henri Bergson's approach to the free will debate and assess whether what he says has any purchase in terms of criticism of Strawson's position. I conclude (...) that Bergson's views offer a serious alternative in debates about free will. (shrink)

In this essay I intentionally employ Nietzsche's genealogical method as a means to critique the complex concept of ‘good’ teaching, and at the same time reconstitute ‘good’ teaching in a form that is radically different from contemporary accounts. In order to do this, I start out by undertaking a genealogical analysis to both reveal the complicated historical development of ‘good’ teaching and also disentangle the intertwining threads that remain hidden from us so we are aware of the core threads that (...) hold it together. Two major threads are identified in my analysis, which I refer to as: Genealogy I: Teaching as applied science or practice; and, Genealogy II: Teaching as a vocational calling or neutral profession. With this in mind, I take the two value systems presented in my critique of ‘good’ teaching, and rather than return to old, or create new values, I argue that the true task of any educational endeavour is to make human beings human. Therefore, in the spirit of Nietzsche, I revive and extend Nietzsche's account of Bildung as a dynamic way of living timeless educational aims, such as learning to see, think, speak, write and feel in becoming true human beings. (shrink)

This article responds to Johan Dahlbeck’s ‘Towards a pure ontology: Children’s bodies and morality’, 2014, pp. 8–23). His arguments from Nietzsche and Spinoza do not carry the weight he supposes, and the conclusions he draws from them about pedagogy would be ill-advised in practice.

While both Isaiah Berlin and William James are widely seen as pluralists, this paper contends that neither is a pluralist tout court. Berlin certainly is a pluralist when it comes to morality and politics, but he is a monist when it comes to nature. And James is, paradoxically, both a pluralist and a monist as regards all of reality. These claims are advanced by showing how both thinkers’ approaches contrast with those of monists, not least Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche. They (...) are also shown to be associated with different narrative genres: tragedy in Berlin’s case, and tragicomedy in James’. The paper then concludes with a brief discussion of an alternative approach, one that treads a path in between monism and pluralism and, because of this, favours a particular form of comedy. (shrink)

This paper examines how Gilles Deleuze addresses, and fail to address, the darker strata in Nietzsche’s work which has enabled his work to be claimed by almost every far-right European political movement since the 1890s to the Alt-Right today. Part I argues that four rhetorical strategies are present which serve to domesticate Nietzsche’s ideas concerning class and caste, race and sexuality, and his opposition to forms of liberalism, democracy, feminism and socialism: avoiding directly political subjects which Nietzsche returned to; catachrestic (...) use of political words to describe ostensibly supra- or non-political data; denials of Nietzsche’s rightist positions, followed by justifications which, upon analysis, do not support the denials but ‘change the subject’; openly erroneous misrepresentations of divisive subjects, led by Nietzsche on war. Part II looks at how these sophistical strategies are played out in two key passages in Nietzsche and Philosophy, concerning the second ‘selection’ in the eternal recurrence, with its ‘annihilation of all parasitical and degenerate elements’. Closing remarks address the situation today, and the paradoxes and limitations of Left Nietzscheanism in the academy. (shrink)

Cheryl Chase has argued that “the problem” of intersex is one of “stigma and trauma, not gender,” as those focused on medical management would have it. Despite frequent references to shame in the critical literature, there has been surprisingly little analysis of shame, or of the disgust that provokes it. This paper investigates the function of disgust in the medical management of intersex and seeks to understand the consequences—material and moral—with respect to the shame it provokes.Conventional ethical approaches may not (...) provide quite the right tools to consider this affective dimension of the medical management of intersex, but we find in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality a framework that allows us a profound appreciation of its moral significance (Nietzsche 1887/1998). Understanding doctors' disgust—and the disgust that they promote in parents of those born with atypical anatomies—as a contemporary expression of ressentiment directs us to not focus on the bodies of those born with intersex conditions, which have been the privileged objects of attention both in medical practice and in criticisms of it, but moves us to consider instead the bodies of those whose responses constitute the motivating force for normalizing practices in the first place. (shrink)

While aging research and policy aim to promote ‘health’ at all ages, there remains no convincing explanation of what this ‘health’ is. In this paper, I investigate whether we can find, implicit within the sciences of aging, a way to know what health is and how to measure it, i.e. a theory of health. To answer this, I start from scientific descriptions of aging and its modulators and then try to develop some generalizations about ‘health’ implicit within this research. After (...) discussing some of the core aspects of aging and the ways in which certain models describe spatial and temporal features specific to both aging and healthy phenotypes, I then extract, explicate, and evaluate one potential construct of health in these models. This suggests a theory of health based on the landscape of optimized phenotypic trajectories. I conclude by considering why it matters for more candidate theories to be proposed and evaluated by philosophers and scientists alike. (shrink)

Largely due to the popular allegation that contemporary science has uncovered indeterminism in the deepest known levels of physical reality, the debate as to whether humans have moral freedom, the sort of freedom on which moral responsibility depends, has put aside to some extent the traditional worry over whether determinism is true. As I argue in this paper, however, there are powerful proofs for both chronological determinism and necessitarianism, forms of determinism that pose the most penetrative threat to human moral (...) freedom. My ultimate hope is to show that, despite the robust case against human moral freedom that can be made without even relying on them, chronological determinism and necessitarianism should be regarded with renewed urgency. (shrink)

This paper argues that Friedrich Nietzsche presents a relatively new and thought-provoking challenge to Christian theologians, urging them to avoid committing what I call ‘gravitolatry’ – an idolatrous commitment to unconditional seriousness. Drawing upon his vivid metaphor of the Spirit of Gravity, the first section of this paper will analyze how and why Nietzsche suspects this form of idolatry is deeply embedded within Christian thought. The second section outlines the intellectual sources of this idolatrous tendency, examining interpretations of Plato, Jesus, (...) and select patristic theologians. The third section shows how gravitolatry illuminates Nietzsche’s suspicion that Christianity is a religion of ressentiment. The final section proposes a critical appropriation of Nietzsche’s insights along the lines of theological methodology and Christology. The conclusion is a plea for Christian theologians to heed the constructive challenge Nietzsche poses, which has not yet received sufficient recognition among theologians, by finding ways to reconcile levity with the gravity of theological discourse. By embracing the constructive dilemma Nietzsche presents here, theologians can pave the way for a more nuanced theological landscape that promotes laughter, strengthens joy, overcomes resentment, and fully affirms human life. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This review essay responds critically to the English translation of Domenico Losurdo’s monumental Friedrich Nietzsche: Aristocratic Rebel. It sets out to clearly identify and examine Losurdo’s two tasks in Nietzsche: firstly, his reconstruction of Nietzsche’s intellectual itinerary, from his earliest works until his descent into madness, in the context of later nineteenth-century social, political, philosophical, and eugenic sources; and secondly, to “interpret the interpretations”, and understand how Nietzsche’s avowed “aristocratic radicalism” could have informed thinkers from across the political spectrum, (...) at the same time as Losurdo contests the cogency of “progressive” readings of Nietzsche as based upon a selective “hermeneutics of innocence” which involves suppressing the recurrent, darker registers of his texts. The essay also unpacks Losurdo’s two hermeneutic strategies in this magnum opus. Firstly, we examine his “unifying” claim that Nietzsche, as a great thinker, had a coherent but evolving vision, from Birth of Tragedy through to his final works, unified by his metapolitical intention to overcome democratic, liberal and socialist modern egalitarianisms, by tracking them back to their roots in the Old Testament and classical antiquity. Secondly, we critique his contextualizing methodology which resituates the author of the “untimely meditations” within the debates of his day concerning modernity, slavery, liberalism, socialism, massification, Darwinism, and eugenics. To close, I proffer some brief comments concerning the significance of Losurdo’s work in the present moment, as the Far Right globally reasserts itself. (shrink)

This paper examines Alain Badiou’s critical engagement with religion. It is argued that there are two central points at which religion enters the scene of Badiou’s philosophy. First, in his critique, the ‘motif of finitude’ Badiou repeatedly refers to religion, claiming that ‘the obsession with finitude is a remnant of the tyranny of the sacred’. Second, Badiou stages his attempt to regenerate philosophy against the proclamation of its end as a confrontation with the religion, through philosophy’s detachment from the poetization (...) of philosophy and its reattachment to mathematics. By examining these two points, the paper aims to encircle Badiou’s notion of religion and thus clarify the role it plays in his philosophical system. This paper suggests that his notion of religion is a by-product of his polemics and therefore needs to be ‘extracted’ from his writings. Hence, the ‘critique of religion’ present in Badiou’s work is not straightforward and explicit critique. Another central aspect of Badiou’s critique of religion is related to his effort to separate the concept of truth from the category of meaning, which he understands as the emblem of religion. The paper sheds light on this matter and its setting in Jacques Lacan’s considerations on religion. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to propose a critique of the prevailing attitude of human health, what I refer to as the will to health, using a Nietzschean perspective. First, I briefly discuss the purpose and manner of Nietzsche’s methodological approach to philosophy and his problem with modernity. Second, I explicate the two current ideological paradigms of health that, in my view, constitute the prevailing will to health. Third, Nietzsche’s general understanding of human health is presented and following this, (...) a critique of some contemporary health matters from this perspective is undertaken. Strictly speaking, there is no specific thesis to be found in this paper. I do not presume to prove or disprove anything, rather I avail myself of Nietzsche’s unique insight into the human condition as a rubric from which to illuminate something of the nature of human health. (shrink)

From a prima facie point of view, Nietzsche’s use of virtue may appear to be a form of virtue ethics. Certainly, this is one position that has been established within the secondary literature; however, I argue that a more fruitful philosophical reading is to view his use of virtue as a part of his drive psychology. Indeed, what makes Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology relevant to this topic, is the way in which he characterises the “sovereign individual” as an agent that is (...) in control of good or appropriate actions because they are strong enough in character to sublimate their “drives” in the act of willing. Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology has important educational implications because an obvious place to cultivate the sovereign individual is through education, but to Nietzsche, education and educational institutions seem only interested in promoting certain Christian virtues (e.g., faith, hope, and charity), and herd forming virtues (e.g., obedience, guilt, and equality) that breed sick young people who are decadent and weak willed. In response to this dilemma, I turn my attention to how Nietzsche overcomes this problem by proposing new virtues that should figure in a new type of education which is concerned with educating the will of the sovereign individual. Central to Nietzsche’s new type of education is the painful labour of self-cultivation (Bildung), the revaluation of one’s values, and a ceaseless striving to overcome obstacles (will to power), so we are able to educate ourselves against life-negating virtues or vices that make us decadent and weak willed. (shrink)

The paper addresses some rhetorical uses of the figure of water management from the perspective of an affirmative approach to contamination which Derrida saw as constitutive of affirmation itself. Contaminated water and its discontents discussed in the text frequently appears in various kinds of writings as a frightening figure of contamination which simultaneously brings in the figure of water management as a way of controlling the purity of cultural exchanges and transmissions in which, as Caroline Petronius puts it, contagion journeys (...) out of medicine into culture. The paper also addresses water and its management from the perspective of Astrida Neimanis’s liquidizing of the border between the solid and the fluid as a border between the human and the inhuman. This perspective opens up the sphere of mutual contamination of the human and the inhuman and translates posthumanist theoretical positions into spheres of affirmative exchanges managed not by masters, but by Donna Haraway’s companion species whom, or which, we all are. (shrink)

All that is gold does not glitter,Not all those who wander are lost;The old that is strong does not wither,Deep roots are not reached by the frost.J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (2020...

Music is an inescapable part of social, cultural and political life, and has played a powerful role in mobilising support for popular movements demanding social justice. The impact of David Bowie, Prince and Bob Dylan, for example, on diversity awareness and legislative reform relating to sexuality, gender and racial equality respectively is still felt; with the latter receiving a Nobel Prize in 2016 for ‘having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. The influence of these composers and (...) performers reached far beyond the concert hall. Conversely, musical propaganda has been a common feature of many dictatorships, most notably Nazism’s Adolf Hitler and Communism’s Joseph Stalin, and is still instrumental in the election campaigns of political parties. US President Donald Trump’s winning retro classic rock campaign playlist conveyed an idealised version of the past which aligned with the tastes and interests of his core constituency, and evoked feelings of nationalistic pride and patriotism. The eclectic selection of upbeat music effectively masked the underlying capitalist initiatives, corporate greed and allegations of financial impropriety that characterised both the Democrat and Republican campaigns. Although unable to impart meaning with the same level of precision as language, music has a potentially broader semantic capacity due to its greater elasticity. It constitutes a common language which has the ability to create a community of people that sings, speaks, reasons, votes and even feels the same way. Accordingly, this article explores the symbiotic relationship between music and law, identity politics and social justice, via the lens of musical semiosis. (shrink)

Philosophy emerged for the first time in ancient Greece and, according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it arose decisively with Plato through a triple transformation. Even today, the thought and creation of philosophy still require a triple transformation, despite the fact that the historical preconditions under which a philosopher pursues his or her task have changed since Greek antiquity. In this article, I introduce the concept of the triple transformation, which ensues from my examination of What is Philosophy?, the (...) last jointly authored book of Deleuze and Guattari. Therein they define philosophy as the activity that consists of creating concepts in order to bring forth new events... (shrink)