Identity in a Technological Culture

Education Period: 4

Contact hours/week: 2

Start Education: 4

Examen Period: none

ECTS: 4

Content

Who are we? What are we?Are we the same person throughout our lives? Are we our bodies? Are we our minds? Are we our brains? Are we our experiences? These questions still land us in great difficulties and confusion. Common sense and traditional philosophical thinking, strongly determined by Aristotle, proceed from the assumption that we have a durable and independent essence that fixes our nature. Although we change continuously, there must be something that remains the same and secures that we do not fall apart. This view has been radically criticized in modern philosophy. Nietzsche, for example, argues that there is nothing in our body or mind that remains the same. We are not one person but rather a multitude of characters that are continuously constructed and destroyed through our personal history. Other modern philosophers have stressed the importance of relations and interactions in the constitution of our identity.In our post-modern culturetechnology is playing an ever more important role in shaping our identities. Prosthetics like eyeglasses and hearings aids have become customary. Mobile phones and hand held computers have become an intrinsic part of how we communicate and how we retrieve information. In virtual words like "Second Life" we seem to be able to experiment with various identities (young, old, male, female, animal, object, etc.). Transhumanists predict that ultimately we will embody so much technology (artificial limbs, neural implants, genetic manipulation) that we will overcome our physical limitations and become perfect cyborgs.presuppositions in this debate.These developments raise important questions regarding our individual and social identity. In this course we will investigate these questions from a philosophical point of view: 1) we will discuss the most important philosophical views of identity (Aristotle, Locke, Nietzsche, Peirce, Parfit, Shoemaker); 2) we will discuss contributions of philosophers of technology who have focussed on the influence of technology on our identities (Gehlen, Anders, Ihde, Clark, Haraway, Bostrom, Turkle); 3) we will solicit students to develop their own view of how technology has shaped and is shaping our identities. We will also analyse different anthropological, ethical and religious assumptions and presuppositions in this debate.

Study Goals: insight in the current debate regarding the influence of technology on the constitution of identity; philosophical analysis of the anthropological, ethical and religious assumptions and presuppositions in this debate.

Course language: English

Education method: Lecture/discussion

Assesment: Paper

Literature (selection of chapters)

• Achterhuis, H. (2001). American Philosophy of Technology: the Empirical Turn. Bloomington/Minneapolis: Indiana University Press.
• Bostrom, N. (2005). The future of human evolution. In Charles Tandy (ed.), Death and AntiDeath, Ria University Press.
• Clark, A. and Chalmers, D., The Extended Mind, Analysis, 58/1, 1998, p. 7-19.
• Gehlen, A. (1940/1993). Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt, Gesamtausgabe Teilband 2, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann (in Engl. transl).
• Haraway, D. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In: Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, p.149-181.
• Perry, J. (ed.; 1978): Personal Identity. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press.
• Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet.
• Turkle, S. (1996). "Who Am We? We are moving from modernist calculation toward postmodernist simulation, where the self is a multiple, distributed system," Wired Magazine, 4.01, 1996.
• Wiley, N. ‘Pragmatism and the Dialogical Self’. International Journal for Dialogical Science, 1, 2006, p. 5-21.

More info: O.Aydin@tudelft.nl

Technology and the Future of Humanity

Code: WM0365TU
EC’s: 4 EC
Time: Tuesday, 13.45-15.30 uur; Period 2: 15-11-2011- 17-1-2012
Room: TBM-IZ F

Course Description:Are we good enough? If not, what may we do to improve ourselves? And how may we do that? In the past, human enhancement was foremost allied to physical or intellectual exercise. In the last three decades, human enhancement has become more and more associated with a large and ever expanding assortment of cutting-edge technologies: technologies that might radically extend the human lifespan, reconstruct bodily parts, enable cloning, or increase cognitive performance.
In social-ethical discussions about human enhancement, one can detect a fault line developing between, on the one side, bioconservatives who warn us for all the dangers and risks of technological enhancement and, on the other side, trans- and posthumanists who vividly depict all the great advantages of human enhancement.

Whether human enhancement is found ethically permissible is to a high degree dependent on what is considered as human nature. Bioconservatives, who are often inclined to give high normative weight to what they sometimes call the “wisdom of nature,” consider tempering with human traits and boundaries soon enough violation of a “species integrity,” which is risky enough to justify the application of the precautionary principle. Transhumanists, in contrast, who often conceive (human) nature as something that has evolved in response to an enormous array of environmental contingencies and stochastic genetic events, claim that it cannot tells us anything about what is good or desirable in terms of the traits humans should possess.

In this course we will investigate the presuppositions of bioconservatives and transhumanists regarding human nature from different perspectives: 1) we will discuss new developments in research of human enhancement that shed a different light on what human nature is (McLuhan, Clark, Harris, Habermas, Fukuyama); 2) we will discuss philosophical texts that problematize the view of both bioconservatives and transhumanst regarding human nature and human enhancement (Gehlen, Peirce, Foucault, Sloterdijk); 3) we will examine to what extent the presuppositions of bioconservatives and transhumansts are influenced by a) humanist and b) Christian conception of human nature and human enhancement.

Lecture; Type lecture

Examination: Paper

Literature
• Clark, A. and Chalmers, D., The Extended Mind, Analysis, 58/1, 1998, p. 7-19.
• Harris, J., Enhancing Evolution, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.
• Gehlen, A., Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt, Gesamtausgabe Teilband 2, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1940/1993; Anthropologische Forschung, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1961.
• Sloterdijk: Regeln für den Menschenpark, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999.
• Habermas, J., The Future of Human Nature, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003.
• Fukuyama, F. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of Biotechnology Revolution, New York: Profile Books, 2002.
• Augustine, Confessions, London: Penguin, 1961.
• Bostrom, N. In Defence of Posthuman Dignity, Bioethics, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2005, p. 202-214.