David Gunkel

Žižek's reading of Hegel is, as he and many of his readers explicitly recognize, distinctly unorthodox. Efforts to appraise these readings often make reference to and mobilize the "real Hegel," a recognized standard and authorized understanding of Hegelian philosophy against which a particular interpretation may be compared and evaluated. This concept of "the real" is rooted in fundamental ontological assumptions that are at least as old as Plato. Žižek's critical interventions in the ontology of the real expose these assumptions and contest their procedures and outcomes. In doing so, Žižek not only questions the metaphysical foundations of traditional forms of criticism but provides for an alternative approach for evaluating his own readings and interpretations. This essay applies Žižek's understanding of the Real to an evaluation of his reading of Hegelian philosophy. In doing so, it asks a number of related questions: Who or what gets to determine and authorize the "real Hegel?" What metaphysical propositions justify and legitimate these decisions? And what is at stake in continuing to operate according to these standards and protocols? In pursuing this investigation, the essay stages a critical reflection that not only reevaluates typical approaches to evaluation but sketches the basic contours of a distinctly Žižekian theory of reading and literary criticism

The thesis of this essay can be stated quite directly: Slavoj Žižek, despite having little to say about mashup and remixing in any direct way, engages this new media phenomena in both theory and practice, providing contemporary culture with both a conceptual understanding of the mashup and a carefully executed illustration of its methodology. The examination of this will proceed by way of two movements. The first investigates how Žižek's work, especially his general interest in "short circuiting," provides theoretical insight for understanding the mashup and its cultural significance. The second turns things around, demonstrating how the mashup explains and describes Žižek's own compositional practices. In other words, the first part explains the mashup by way of Žižek, while the second explains Žižek by way of the mashup

In this brief article we reply to Michal Piekarski’s response to our article ‘Facing Animals’ published previously in this journal. In our article we criticized the properties approach to defining the moral standing of animals, and in its place proposed a relational and other-oriented concept that is based on a transcendental and phenomenological perspective, mainly inspired by Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. In this reply we question and problematize Piekarski’s interpretation of our essay and critically evaluate “the ethics of commitment” that he offers as an alternative.

Ethics is ordinarily understood as being concerned with questions of responsibility for and in the face of an other. This other is more often than not conceived of as another human being and, as such, necessarily excludes others – most notably animals and machines. This essay examines the ethics of such exclusivity. It is divided into three parts. The first part investigates the exclusive anthropocentrism of traditional forms of moral␣thinking and, following the example of recent innovations in animal rights philosophy, questions the mechanisms of such exclusion. Although recent work in animal- and bio-ethics has successfully implemented strategies for the inclusion of the animal as a legitimate subject of moral consideration, its other, the machine, has remained conspicuously excluded. The second part looks at recent attempts to include these machinic others in moral thinking and critiques the assumptions, values, and strategies that have been employed by these various innovations. And the third part proposes a means for thinking otherwise. That is, it introduces an alternative way to consider these other forms of otherness that is not simply reducible to the conceptual order that has structured and limited moral philosophy’s own concern with and for others.

One of the enduring concerns of moral philosophy is deciding who or what is deserving of ethical consideration. This special issue of Philosophy and Technology investigates whether and to what extent machines, of various designs and configurations, can or should be considered moral subjects, defined here as either a moral agent, a moral patient, or both. The articles that comprise the issue were competitively selected from papers initially prepared for and presented at a symposium on this subject matter convened during the AISB/IACAP 2012 World Congress, held in at the University of Birmingham in Birmingham, UK.

This essay responds to the machine question in the affirmative, arguing that artifacts, like robots, AI, and other autonomous systems, can no longer be legitimately excluded from moral consideration. The demonstration of this thesis proceeds in four parts or movements. The first and second parts approach the subject by investigating the two constitutive components of the ethical relationship—moral agency and patiency. In the process, they each demonstrate failure. This occurs not because the machine is somehow unable to achieve what is considered necessary and sufficient to be a moral agent or patient but because the characterization of agency and patiency already fail to accommodate others. The third and fourth parts respond to this problem by considering two recent alternatives—the all-encompassing ontocentric approach of Luciano Floridi’s information ethics and Emmanuel Levinas’s eccentric ethics of otherness. Both alternatives, despite considerable promise to reconfigure the scope of moral thinking by addressing previously excluded others, like the machine, also fail but for other reasons. Consequently, the essay concludes not by accommodating the alterity of the machine to the requirements of moral philosophy but by questioning the systemic limitations of moral reasoning, requiring not just an extension of rights to machines, but a thorough examination of the way moral standing has been configured in the first place

This article seeks to reconsider how traditional notions of ethics-ethics that privilege reason, truth, meaning, and a fixed conception of "the human"-are upended by digital technology, cybernetics, and virtual reality. We argue that prevailing ethical systems are incompatible with the way technology refigures the concepts and practices of identity, meaning, truth, and finally, communication. The article examines how both ethics and technology repurpose the liberal humanist subject even as they render such a subject untenable. Such an impasse reformats the question of ethics by introducing questions of radical alterity, making it possible for new ethical systems to emerge.

In this brief response to Mark Coeckelbergh’s contribution, I demonstrate how the author introduces an important shift in the way we approach technology. Instead of focusing on the new and often-times dramatic existential vulnerabilities supposedly introduced by technological innovation, Coeckelbergh targets the way technology already transforms our existential vulnerabilities. And I show how this shift in focus has three very important consequences: a different way to ask about and investigate the question concerning technology, the importance of hacking as a mode of responding to this question and the significance of questioning as a philosophical project.