Hub Zwart

This article addresses the question whether skiing as a nature sport enables practitioners to develop a rapport with nature, or rather estranges and insulates them from their mountainous ambiance. To address this question, I analyse a recent skiing movie from a psychoanalytical perspective and from a neuro-scientific perspective. I conclude that Jean-Paul Sartre’s classical but egocentric account of his skiing experiences disavows the technicity involved in contemporary skiing as a sportive practice for the affluent masses, which actually represents an urbanisation of the sublime, symptomatic for the current era.

Friedrich Engels’ dialectical assessment of modern science resulted from his fascination with the natural sciences in combination with his resurging interest in the work of “old Hegel.” Engels became especially interested in what he saw as the molecular essence of life, namely proteins or, more specifically, albumin, seeing life as the mode of existence of these enigmatic substances. Hegelian dialectics is crucial for a dialectical materialist understanding of contemporary technoscience. The dialectical materialist understanding of technoscience as a research practice builds on Engels, but also on later authors who were inspired by his writings, e.g., life scientists such as Haldane and Bernal. Considering the criticism raised against Engels’ dialectics by 20th-century Marxists, a dialectical diagnostic of contemporary technoscience can be achieved, which shifts the focus from artificial albumin as “living matter” to contemporary research on synthetic cells

Much has been said about the need for improving the current definitions of scientific authorship, but an aspect that is often overlooked is how to formulate and communicate these definitions to ensure that they are comprehensible and useful for researchers, notably researchers active in international research consortia. In light of a rapid increase in international collaborations within natural sciences, this article uses authorship of this branch of sciences as an example and provides suggestions to improve the comprehensibility of the definitions of authorship in natural sciences. It assesses whether the definition of authorship provided by the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity can deal with current issues and problems of scientific authorship. Notably, problems that are experienced in project groups with researchers coming from multiple countries. Using theories developed by Jürgen Habermas and Robert Merton, a normative framework is developed to articulate ethical authorship in natural sciences. Accordingly, enriching the current definition of authorship with normative elements and using discipline-specific metaphors to communicate them are introduced as possible ways of improving the comprehensibility of the definition of authorship in international environments. Finally, this article provides a proposal to be considered in the future revisions of the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity.

This paper addresses the cultural impact of genomics and the Human Genome Project on human self-understanding. Notably, it addresses the claim made by Francis Collins that the genome is the language of God and the claim made by Max Delbrück that Aristotle must be credited with having predicted DNA as the soul that organises bio-matter. From a continental philosophical perspective I will argue that human existence results from a dialectical interaction between two types of texts: the language of molecular biology and the language of civilisation; the language of the genome and the language of our socio-cultural, symbolic ambiance. Whereas the former ultimately builds on the alphabets of genes and nucleotides, the latter is informed by primordial texts such as the Bible and the Quran. In applied bioethics deliberations on genomics, science is easily framed as liberating and progressive, religious world-views as conservative an...

“Nature” is one of the most challenging concepts in philosophy, and notoriously difficult to define. In ancient Greece, two strategies for coming to terms with nature were developed. On the one hand, nature was seen as a perfect geometrical order, analysable with the help of geometry and deductive reasoning. On the other hand, a more Dionysian view emerged, stressing nature’s unpredictability, capriciousness and fluidity. This view was exemplified by De Rerum Natura, a philosophical masterpiece in verse. In a philosophy course for science students, participants use both approaches. They are asked to give a definition of nature, and subsequently to capture nature in a poem. Quite consistently, their poetry proves more convincing than their definitions. In this paper, an anthology of student poetry is presented and analysed. To what extent may verse-writing as a philosophical assignment enable science students to come to terms with their understanding of nature?

Tussen zijn veertigste en zijn zestigste levensjaar was Jan Hendrik van den Berg (1914) een uitermate succesvol en populair auteur. Boeken van zijn hand, zoals Metabletica (1956) en Medische macht en medische ethiek (1969), waren ongekende bestsellers. Hij was de Nederlandse vertegenwoordiger van een belangrijke Europese stroming in de filosofie: de historische fenomenologie. In de jaren zeventig raakte hij echter in conflict met zijn tijd. Terwijl de Nederlandse publieke opinie een wending naar links doormaakte, bond Van den Berg de strijd aan tegen verloedering, hooliganisme en anarchisme. Dit ging ten koste van zijn populariteit, maar niet van zijn productiviteit, noch van zijn innovativiteit. Tot op de dag van vandaag werkt hij aan een indrukwekkend , panoramisch oeuvre. Hij is de belangrijkste Nederlandse filosoof sinds Bolland. Deze studie wil het werk van Van den Berg reconstrueren, situeren en beoordelen. Reconstrueren door de methodische en thematische coherentie ervan zichtbaar te maken. Situeren door het te confronteren met dat van andere, verwante auteurs zoals Husserl, Freud, Bachelard en Foucault. Beoordelen door na te gaan in hoeverre Van den Berg de inzet van zijn project, zowel inhoudelijk als methodologisch, waarmaakte. Het werk van Van den Berg is geen curiosum, maar opvallend actueel. Hij onderzoekt het begin, de aanvang van wetenschappelijke en maatschappelijke ontwikkelingen waarvan het belang in de huidige situatie met nadruk zichtbaar wordt. Zijn beeldende stijl wekt de geschiedenis van de wetenschap tot leven, maar werd vaak als ‘anekdotisch’ afgedaan; zijn talent voor polemiek lokte soms felle reacties uit en zijn methodologische flexibiliteit maakte hem een gemakkelijk doelwit van academische kritiek. Aan de positieve kant van de balans staan echter zijn intellectuele enthousiasme en zijn internationale faam. Zijn werk verdient een rehabilitatie.

This contribution addresses the anthropocenic challenge from a dialectical perspective, combining a diagnostics of the present with a prognostic of the emerging future. It builds on the oeuvres of two prominent dialectical thinkers, namely Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Hegel himself was a pre-anthropocenic thinker who did not yet thematise the anthropocenic challenge as such, but whose work allows us to emphasise the unprecedented newness of the current crisis. I will especially focus on his views on Earth as a planetary process, emphasising that the “spirit” of technoscience is basically monitoring the impacts of its own activities on geochemistry and evolution. Subsequently, I will turn attention to Teilhard de Chardin, a palaeontologist and philosopher rightfully acknowledged as one of the first thinkers of the Anthropocene whose oeuvre provides a mediating middle term between Hegel’s conceptual groundwork and the anthropocenic present. Notably, I will discuss his views on self-directed evolution, on the on-going absorption of the biosphere by the noosphere, and on emerging options for “sublating” the current crisis into a synthetic convergence towards the Omega point. I will conclude that, after disclosing the biomolecular essence of life, biotechnology must now take a radical biomimetic turn ; that reflection itself must become distributed and collective; and, that the anthropocenic crisis must be sublated into the noocene.

Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project (HGP), needs no further introduction I suppose. For more than a decade (from 1993 onwards) he has headed the HGP as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). One of the highlights in his career was the moment when, on June 26 2000, together with President Clinton and Craig Venter, he announced that the deciphering of the human genome was rapidly approaching its completion. On this occasion, Clinton stated that “today, we are learning the language in which God created life”. In The language of God, Collins not only discloses the fact that he acted as Clinton’s ghost-writer, urging the latter to include these lines (p.3), but he also explains his reasons for doing so. For him, DNA really is the language of God. The book is his “coming out”, so to speak, as a Christian. For Collins, the famous announcement on June 26 of the year 2000 was not only a highlight in the history of the life sciences. It was also a moment of religious significance, a religious “celebration”, an “occasion of worship”.

This paper indicates how continental philosophy may contribute to a diagnostics of contemporary life sciences research, as part of a “diagnostics of the present”. First, I describe various options for an oblique reading of emerging scientific discourse, bent on uncovering the basic “philosophemes” of science. Subsequently, I outline a number of radical transformations occurring both at the object-pole and at the subject-pole of the current knowledge relationship, namely the technification of the object and the anonymisation or collectivisation of the subject, under the sway of automation, ICT and big machines. Finally, I further elaborate the specificity of the oblique perspective with the help of Lacan’s theorem of the four discourses. Philosophical reflections on contemporary life sciences concur neither with a Master’s discourse, nor with university discourse, nor with what Lacan refers to as hysterical discourse, but rather with the discourse of the analyst, listening with evenly-poised attention to the scientific files in order to bring to the fore the cupido sciendi which both inspires and disrupts contemporary life sciences discourse.

This article aims to develop a Lacanian approach to bioethics. Point of departure is the fact that both psychoanalysis and bioethics are practices of language, combining diagnostics with therapy. Subsequently, I will point out how Lacanian linguistics may help us to elucidate the dynamics of both psychoanalytical and bioethical discourse, using the movie One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone as key examples. Next, I will explain the ‘topology’ of the bioethical landscape with the help of Lacan’s three dimensions: the imaginary, the symbolical and the real. This will culminate in an assessment of the dynamics of bioethical discourse with the help of Lacan’s theorem of the four discourses. Bioethics, I will argue, is not a homogeneous discourse. Rather, four modalities of bioethical discourse can be distinguished, all of them displaying specific weaknesses and strengths, opportunities and threats. This will be elucidated with the help of two case studies, namely the debates on human reproductive technologies and on the use of animals as biomedical research models.

In 2003, biophysicist and Nobel Laureate Maurice Wilkins published his autobiography entitled The Third Man. In the preface, he diffidently points out that the title was chosen by his publisher, as a reference to the famous 1949 movie no doubt, featuring Orson Welles in his classical role as penicillin racketeer Harry Lime. In this paper I intend to show that there is much more to this title than merely its familiar ring. If subjected to a comparative analysis, multiple correspondences between movie and memoirs can be brought to the fore. Taken together, these documents shed an intriguing light on the vicissitudes of budding life sciences research during the post-war era. I will focus my comparative analysis on issues still relevant today, such as dual use, the handling of sensitive scientific information and, finally, on the interwovenness of science and warfare. Thus, I will explain how science autobiographies on the one hand and genres of the imagination on the other may deepen our comprehension of tensions and dilemmas of life sciences research then and now. For that reason, science autobiographies can provide valuable input for teaching philosophy and history of science to science students.

The Biblical story of the Art (a floating, zoo-like device, constructed to survive climate turmoil and mass extinction) can be regarded as an archetypal image (in the terminology of Gaston Bachelard), capturing structural components of the human-animal relationship. Building on the contributions by Larson and Barr, Keulartz, Bovenkerk and Verweij, and Ramp and Bekoff, I will argue that, in the course of history, the Ark has evolved from a fictional (imaginary) icon into something increasingly real. The agricultural village of the Neolithic era already functioned as a sheltered enclave, a survival machine designed to allow a select number of humans and accompanying species to withstand environmental fluctuations and survival pressure. In the current situation, however, the Ark has developed into a Gestell of planetary dimensions. The concept of the anthropocene basically conveys the idea that we have entered a global symbolical Ark, conceptualised by Teilhard de Chardin as the noosphere (the world-wide web of intelligence and policies, technologies and engineering, research and regulations) and emerging against the backdrop of a necro(s)cene: an ambiance of mass extinction. Increasingly, prospects for survival of a disconcertingly large number of species depend on human behaviour and human decision: on our ability or failure to collectively address the daunting challenges of the present.

Neuroenhancement involves the use of neurotechnologies to improve cognitive, affective or behavioural functioning, where these are not judged to be clinically impaired. Questions about enhancement have become one of the key topics of neuroethics over the past decade. The current study draws on in-depth public engagement activities in ten European countries giving a bottom-up perspective on the ethics and desirability of enhancement. This informed the design of an online contrastive vignette experiment that was administered to representative samples of 1000 respondents in the ten countries and the United States. The experiment investigated how the gender of the protagonist, his or her level of performance, the efficacy of the enhancer and the mode of enhancement affected support for neuroenhancement in both educational and employment contexts. Of these, higher efficacy and lower performance were found to increase willingness to support enhancement. A series of commonly articulated claims about the individual and societal dimensions of neuroenhancement were derived from the public engagement activities. Underlying these claims, multivariate analysis identified two social values. The Societal/Protective highlights counter normative consequences and opposes the use enhancers. The Individual/Proactionary highlights opportunities and supports use. For most respondents these values are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that for many neuroenhancement is viewed simultaneously as a source of both promise and concern.

This paper considers Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, published in 1897, as a window into techno-scientific and sociocultural developments of the fin-de-siècle era, ranging from blood transfusion and virology up to communication technology and brain research, but focusing on the birth of psychoanalysis in 1897, the year of publication. Stoker’s literary classic heralds a new style of scientific thinking, foreshadowing important aspects of post-1900 culture. Dracula reflects a number of scientific events which surfaced in the 1890s but evolved into major research areas that are still relevant today. Rather than seeing science and literature as separate realms, moreover, Stoker’s masterpiece encourages us to address the ways in which techno-scientific and psycho- cultural developments mutually challenge and mirror one another, so that we may use his novel to deepen our understanding of emerging research practices and vice versa (Zwart 2008, 2010). Psychoanalysis plays a double role in this. It is the research field whose genealogical constellation is being studied, but at the same time (Lacanian) psychoanalysis guides my reading strategy. Dracula, the infectious, undead Vampire has become an archetypal cinematic icon and has attracted the attention of numerous scholars (Browning & Picart 2009). The vampire complex built on various folkloristic and literary sources and culminated in two famous nineteenth-century literary publications: the story The Vampyre by John Polidori (published in 1819)2 and Stoker’s version. Most of the more than 200 vampire movies released since Nosferatu (1922) are based on the latter (Skal 1990; Browning & Picart 2009; Melton 2010; Silver & Ursini 2010). Yet, rather than on the archetypal cinematic image of the Vampire, I will focus on the various scientific ideas and instruments employed by Dracula’s antagonists to overcome the threat to civilisation he represents. Although the basic storyline is well-known, I will begin with a plot summary.

Limitless is a movie (released in 2011) as well as a novel (published in 2001) about a tormented author who (plagued by a writer’s block) becomes an early user of an experimental designer drug. The wonder drug makes him highly productive overnight and even allows him to make a fortune on the stock market. At the height of his career, however, the detrimental side-effects become increasingly noticeable. In this article, Limitless is analysed from two perspectives. First of all, building on the views of the French novelist Emile Zola, the novel is seen as the report of a closely monitored experiment. Subsequently, building on the phenomenology of Ludwig Binswanger, I will show how the cognitive enhancement drug not only boosts the protagonist’s information processing capacities, but also modifies his experience of space and time, his sense of spatiality, his way of being-in-the-world. On the basis of these (complementary) analyses I will indicate how genres of the imagination (such as movies and novels) may play a significant role in assessing the societal implications of emerging technological developments such as neuro-enhancement, especially during the preparatory or anticipatory stage

A Life Decoded is an exhilarating document, to begin with, reading like a novel or even a science epic. In the author’s own words, it is “a tale of seemingly impossible quests and grand objectives”, of “great rivalries and bitter disputes”, of “battles of ideologies, morals and ethics” and of “clashes of egos” (p. 2), an adventure that swept the author “from peaks of incredible exhilaration as I marshaled a relatively small but dedicated army of scientists, computers and robots to achieve what seemed almost impossible, and then plunged me into black pits of depression as I faced opposition from Nobel laureates and senior government officials, my colleagues, and even my wife” (p. 2). Moreover, besides being an autobiography proper, the book also contains a series of reflections on the genes present in the author’s own genome, one of the first individual genomes that was sequenced and made publicly available on the web – the “recipe” that made Craig Venter, as he himself describes it. In separate boxes dedicated to his sequenced genome, he especially focuses on genes that are associated with behavioural characteristics such as thrill-seeking behaviour, ADHD and the ability to cope with almost superhuman amounts of stress. Thus, in Venter’s case, autobiography and the genome are connected in more than one way with one another.

In 1990 the Human Genome Project (HGP) was launched as an important historical marker, a pivotal contribution to the time-old quest for human self-knowledge. However, when in 2001 two major publications heralded its completion, it seemed difficult to make out how the desire for self-knowledge had really been furthered by this endeavor (IHGSC 2001; Venter et al. 2001). In various ways mankind seems to stand out from other organisms as a unique type of living entity, developing a critical perspective on its own behavior and consciously engaged in building a complex society of its own making—and therefore increasingly able to determine the conditions of its own evolution. However, this uniqueness is not easily and ..

In various writings Michel Foucault has shown how, in the beginning of the 19th century, in settings such as army barracks, psychiatric hospitals and penitentiary institutions, the modern human sciences were ‹born› as an ensemble of disciplines (medical biology, psychiatry, psychology, criminology, and the like) From the beginning, the nature-nurture de- bate has been one of its key disputes. Are human individuals malleable by environmental factors (such as psychiatric treatments or disciplinary regimes), or do they rather display inborn predispositions for delin- quency and other forms of antisocial behaviour? In the current era of genetic testing, in behavioural genomics and neuroscience, this issue is as controversial and topical as ever. Büchner’s unfinished drama Woyzeck (written in 1836) is a remarkable anticipation of this debate, staging the birth of the human individual as a research subject. It is the story of a destitute soldier who, according to his superiors, displays er- rant behaviour and is therefore recruited to serve as a research subject in an experiment. His army physician turns him into a ‹case›, which can be meticulously monitored and studied so as to record the genesis of a crime. In this paper, Büchner’s unsettling play is analysed in detail as one of the great anticipatory literary documents of the 19th century, ex- ploring the idea of predictive psychiatry and the quest for genetic pre- dispositions: a primal scene as it were of the nature-nurture debate as it unfolds from predictive criminology up to behavioural genomics.

Drama is a relatively unexplored tool in academic science education. This paper addresses in what way the use of drama may allow science students to deepen their understanding of recent developments in the emerging and controversial field of neuro-enhancement, by means of a case study approach. First, we emphasise the congruency between drama and science, notably the dramatic dimension of experimental research. Subsequently, we draw on educational literature to elaborate the potential of using drama as a teaching modality, specifically focusing on the ethical and moral dimensions of future techno-scientific innovations. Our case study consisted of a drama experiment as a module in a philosophy course on human enhancement. Twenty-two students from various science disciplines performed multiple roles, as authors, actors, audience and reviewers. Qualitative data were collected on the educational process and student performance during the course, i.e. observations and video recordings of class discussions, group work and plays, interviews and questionnaires. Our drama experiment proved to be effective in enabling students to explore and relate to a future life world affected by enhancement technologies. It allowed them to deepen their awareness of social and ethical implications of neuro-technologies and of the different viewpoints people may have on this issue in academic, professional or everyday settings. Moreover, drama allowed them to develop a reflexive position of their own in the neuro-enhancement debate by enacting a moral dilemma in front of an audience. Our results confirm the potential of drama as a tool for exploring techno-scientific futures in science education.