Babette Babich

What Ivan Illich regarded in his Medical Nemesis as the ‘expropriation of health’ takes place on the surfaces and in the spaces of the screens all around us, including our cell phones but also the patient monitors and (increasingly) the iPads that intervene between nurse and patient. To explore what Illich called the ‘age of the show’, this essay uses film examples, like Creed and the controversial documentary Vaxxed, and the television series Nurse Jackie. Rocky’s cancer in his last film (submitting to chemo to ‘fight’ cancer) highlights what Illich along with Petr Skrabanek called the ‘expropriation of death’. In contrast to what Illich denotes as ‘Umsonstigkeit’ – grace or gift, given undeservedly, i.e., gratuitously – medical science tends to be tempted by what Illich terms scientistic ‘black magic’, taking over (expropriating) the life and the death of the patient in increasingly technological ways, a point underscored in the concluding section on the commercial prospects of xenotransplants using factory farm or mass‐produced human‐pig mosaics or chimeras.

By reading Kant on chemistry as a science, including his definition of science as such, this essay reviews Kant and the history of chemistry. Kant’s Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens is read in terms of contemporary axiomatic systems, via the astrophysicist Rudolf Kurth’s 1956 account, along with Nietzsche’s account of logic and causality. Nietzsche cites Kant’s theory in the context of a sustained discussion of Anaxagoras’ pre-Platonic cosmology. The paper includes reflections on alchemy, the history and historiography of chemistry, and recent contributions to the philosophy of chemistry. Since the foundations of chemistry are essentially non-mathematical, it cannot, following Kant, fully meet the criteria of a ‘science’. The same argument holds for alchemy (‘chymistry’ or spagyric), which is likewise not regarded as a science. Hermeneutic history and philosophy of science are useful, not only for developing an understanding of Kant’s conception of chemistry as a science, but also of his invocation of Stahl’s spagyric ‘art’, and his example of the mutable properties of a specific ore of mercury, Zinnober or cinnabar (HgS). A significant property of cinnabar (HgS) in this regard is that it changes colour, turning from red to black, depending on exposure to light. This can be interpreted as a metaphor illustrating problems of metamorphosis, and calling into question the widespread application of chemical principles. Together with his criticism of chemistry, Kant’s philosophical reflections open up possibilities for further research into concepts that first arose with alchemy.

Beginning with a reflection on ‘conceptual schemes’ and ‘very’ ideas and proceeding to examine different approaches to thinking philosophy of science not only with Kant but also between traditional analytic and hermeneutico-phenomenological approaches, this essay features a review of Kant’s 1755 solar nebular hypothesis and a reading of Nietzsche and Kant on cosmology along with a reflection on chemistry and the properties of cinnabar. Overall it is argued that a philosophy of science must be critical rather than normative/prescriptive. Seeking to raise the question of science along with the question of truth (via Nietzsche and Kant), the essay also raises the question of esoteric historiography in science, including alchemy.

Hermeneutic philosophies of social science offer an approach to the philosophy of social science foregrounding the human subject and including attention to history as well as a methodological reflection on the notion of reflection, including the intrusions of distortions and prejudice. Hermeneutic philosophies of social science offer an explicit orientation to and concern with the subject of the human and social sciences. Hermeneutic philosophies of the social science represented in the present collection of essays draw inspiration from Gadamer’s work as well as from Paul Ricoeur in addition to Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault among others. Special attention is given to Wilhelm Dilthey in addition to the broader phenomenological traditions of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger as well as the history of philosophy in Plato and Descartes. The volume is indispensible reading for students and scholars interested in epistemology, philosophy of science, social social studies of knowledge as well as social studies of technology.

As Warhol appropriated posters and prints already ‘ready-made’, Wang Guangyi ‘covers’ Andy Warhol. This essay discusses Warhol and death (Marilyn Monroe, James Dean), mirroring artist and viewer, along with a discussion of Arthur Danto on Warhol and on Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ (or not Duchamp’s because Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s ‘Fountain’) and Wang Guangyi’s New Religion Prophecy. The painting contest between Apelles and Protogenes is read via Ernst Gombrich (and Alois Riegl) on color and depth for the sake of an interpretation of Wang Guangyi’s ‘neonized’ theological aesthetics, including a discussion of political theology via Tracy Strong’s account of Carl Schmitt on sovereignty and Jean Baudrillard on simulation, Jacob Taubes on eschatology, and Ivan Illich’s critique of missionary imperialism.

Si Nietzsche, se référant à la philosophie morale de Kant, put invoquer ceux « qui promettent sans en avoir les moyens » et dérider le « menteur qui trahit sa parole dans le moment même où il l’a sur les lèvres », un examen de l’éthique de l’assistance de Heidegger souligne, de son côté, que nous nous trouvons toujours déjà dans l’assistance envers les autres, même si ce n’est que de manière négative ou défectueuse. En parcourant le chemin qui nous mène vers l’éthique de l’assistance chez Heidegger, nous aurons à discuter de la condition humaine chez Heidegger, de l’amitié, et aussi de lacets de soulier, de football, des anges, et du désire – et, pourquoi pas, du café.

Adorno, no less than Heidegger or Nietzsche, had his own critical notions of truth/untruth. But Adorno’s readers are unsettled by the barest hint of anything that might be taken to be antiscience. To protest scientism, yes and to be sure, but to protest “scientific thought,” decidedly not, and the distinction is to be maintained even if Adorno himself challenged it. For Adorno, so-called “scientistic” tendencies are the very “conditions of society and of scientific thought.” And again, Adorno’s readers tend to refuse criticism of this kind. Scientific rationality cannot itself be problematic and E. B. Ashton, Adorno’s translator in the mid-1960s, sought to underscore this with the word “scientivistic.” Rather than science, it is scientism that is to be avoided. So we ask: is Adorno speaking here of scientific rationality or scientistic rationality? How, in general, are we to read Adorno?

Günther Anders’s philosophy of technology, particularly his complex notion of ‘Promethean shame,’ or technological ressentiment, may illuminate questions of surveillance and AI ethics. As a critical philosopher of technology, radically so, his emphasis on the negative or downside of technology distinguishes Anders’s thinking on technology from future-focused and mainstream technological messianism. Key to Anders’s notion of ‘Promethean shame’ was his observation that we adapt ourselves to our technology, not the other way around. Provocatively, Anders argued that while the populace in the past—referring to Nazi Germany—required the techniques of mass psychology and mass gatherings for the purposes of manipulation and control, today we do this work on ourselves, in our own time, in our own space, on devices and subscriptions we pay for. As we actively ‘program’ ourselves in an ongoing digital practice, constantly and in real-time, we provide the means for our own surveillance.

This essay seeks to make the case for reading hermeneutic philosophy of science with Feyerabend. In addition, there is the question of science, as Nietzsche raises this question along with Feyerabend’s programmatic recommendations for traditional philosophy of science. Including a discussion of method in history as in theology and philology, including Nietzsche’s hermeneutics, this essay reviews Feyerabend’s exchanges with Lakatos along with the resistance of mainstream philosophy of science to hermeneutics as such. A discussion of Feyerabend’s ‘gods’ engages what he invokes as ontological abundance as well as his criticism of the limitations of Popper’s critique of Parmenides requiring both historical/historiographical context, an understanding of science in practice, via a contextualization of Schrodinger, and via Plato’s epistemology along with Duhem on experiment and Riegl on style, crucial for Feyerabend on the notion of ‘progress,’ key for Lakatos and others, in art and science.