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497The Body at the FrontStudia Phaenomenologica 7 (n/a): 353-376. 2007.This paper investigates the relation in Patočka’s thought between the concepts of the “front” and the “solidarity of the shaken”, which we find in the Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, particularly the sixth essay, “Wars of the Twentieth Century and The Twentieth Century as War”, and the phenomenological analysis of corporeity that we find in Patočka’s work from the late sixties, namely, “The Natural World and Phenomenology” (1967). We argue for a reading of the “front” and the “sol…Read more
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263Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship Between Human Experience and Nature (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2013.What is the relationship between phenomenology and naturalism? Are they mutually exclusive or is a rapprochement possible between their approaches to consciousness and the natural world? Can phenomenology be naturalised and ought it to be? Or is naturalism fundamentally unable to accommodate phenomenological insights? How can phenomenological method be used within a naturalistic research programme? This cutting-edge collection of original essays contains brilliant contributions from leading phen…Read more
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244Phenomenology and Naturalism: Editors' IntroductionRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 72 1-21. 2013.This is the editors' introduction to an edited volume devoted to the relation between phenomenology and naturalism across several philosophical domains, including: epistemology, metaphysics, history of philosophy, and philosophy of science and ethics.
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75What Goes Without Saying: Husserl’s Concept of StyleResearch in Phenomenology 43 (1): 3-26. 2013.The idea of “style” emerges at several important points throughout Husserl’s oeuvre: in the second part of the Crisis of the European Sciences, the lectures on intersubjectivity published in Husserliana XV, and in the analyses of transcendental character and intersubjectivity in the second book of the Ideas. This paper argues that the idea of style, often overlooked, is in fact central to understanding Husserl’s conception of the person and intersubjective relations, its role in the latter captu…Read more
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56Transgenerational Epigenetics, or the Spectral History of the FleshChiasmi International 9 65-93. 2007.
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49Thinking After Europe: Jan Patocka and Politics (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield International. 2016.Jan Patočka, perhaps more so than any other philosopher in the twentieth century, managed to combine intense philosophical insight with a farsighted analysis of the idea and challenges facing Europe as a historical, cultural and political signifier. As a political dissident in communist Czechoslovakia he also became a moral and political inspiration to a generation of Czechs, including Václav Havel. He accomplished this in a time of intense political repression when not even the hint of a unifie…Read more
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45Medicine and Society, New Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2015.This volume addresses some of the most prominent questions in contemporary bioethics and philosophy of medicine: ‘liberal’ eugenics, enhancement, the normal and the pathological, the classification of mental illness, the relation between genetics, disease and the political sphere, the experience of illness and disability, and the sense of the subject of bioethical inquiry itself. All of these issues are addressed from a “continental” perspective, drawing on a rich tradition of inquiry into these…Read more
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43Empathy and Alteration: The Ethical Relevance of a Phenomenological Species ConceptJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 39 (5): 543-564. 2014.The debate over the ethics of radically, technologically altering the capacities and traditional form of the human body is rife with appeals to and dismissals of the importance of the integrity of the human species. Species-integrist arguments can be found in authors as varied as Annas, Fukuyama, Habermas, and Agar. However, the ethical salience of species integrity is widely contested by authors such as Buchanan, Daniels, Fenton, and Juengst. This article proposes a Phenomenological approach to…Read more
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41The Subject of Enhancement: Augmented Capacities, Extended Cognition, and Delicate Ecologies of the MindThe New Bioethics 21 (1): 5-19. 2015.This paper argues for an inflationary and capacity-relative understanding of human enhancement technology. In doing so it echoes the approach followed by Buchanan. Particular emphasis is placed on the point that capacities themselves are relative to demands placed on the organism by its environment. In the case of human beings, this environment is to a very large extent institutionally structured. On the basis of the inflationary and capacity-relative concept of enhancement, I argue that the sub…Read more
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35Resume: L’épigenèse transgénérationnelle, ou l’histoire spectraIe de la chairChiasmi International 9 94-94. 2007.
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34'Faith is in things not seen': Merleau-Ponty on Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of StyleIn Kascha Semonovitch Neal DeRoo (ed.), Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception, Continuum. pp. 185. 2010.
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31The Algorithmic Disruption of Workplace SolidarityPhilosophy Today 65 (3): 571-598. 2021.This paper examines the development and technological mediation of the concept of solidarity. We focus on the workplace as a focal point of solidarity relations, and utilise a phenomenological approach to describe and analyse those relations. Workplace solidarity, which has been historically concretised through social objects such as labor unions, is of particular political relevance since it has played an outsize role in the broader struggle for social, economic, and political rights, recogniti…Read more
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30Introduction: Critiquing technologies of the mind: enhancement, alteration, and anthropotechnologyPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (1): 1-16. 2017.
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30The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Europe (edited book)Routledge. 2021.Understood historically, culturally, politically, geographically, or philosophically, the idea of Europe and notion of European identity conjure up as much controversy as consensus. The mapping of the relation between ideas of Europe and their philosophical articulation and contestation has never benefited from clear boundaries, and if it is to retain its relevance to the challenges now facing the world, it must become an evolving conceptual landscape of critical reflection. The Routledge Handbo…Read more
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29Philosophy and Synthetic Biology: the BrisSynBio ExperimentNanoEthics 14 (1): 21-25. 2020.This article provides an overview of the relation between synthetic biology and philosophy as understood from within the Ethics, Philosophy and Responsible Innovation programme of BrisSynBio (a BBSRC/EPSCR Synthetic Biology Research Centre). It also introduces the special issue of NanoEthics devoted to synthetic biology and philosophy.
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29Biology, the Empathic Science: Husserl's Addendum XXIII of the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental PhenomenologyJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 44 (1): 10-24. 2013.
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27Il y a du soin dans l’airMultitudes 58 (1): 173-183. 2015.In this article we discuss the question of whether a robotic carer could every really care. We argue that care is largely a matter of expressive and performative states rather than internal cognitive or emotional ones. We address the question of "authenticity" in caring and care work.
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26The Over-Extended Mind? Pink Noise and the Ethics of Interaction-Dominant SystemsNanoEthics 12 (3): 269-281. 2018.There is a growing recognition within cognitive enhancement and neuroethics debates of the need for greater emphasis on cognitive artefacts. This paper aims to contribute to this broadening and expansion of the cognitive-enhancement and neuroethics debates by focusing on a particular form of relation or coupling between humans and cognitive artefacts: interaction-dominance. We argue that interaction-dominance as an emergent property of some human-cognitive artefact relations has important implic…Read more
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26The Institutional LifeIn Roland Breeur & Ullrich Melle (eds.), Life, Subjectivity, and Art: Essays in honor of Rudolf Bernet, Springer Science+business Media. 2012.Some ten years ago I read for the first time the passage from which this contribution draws its title. It marks, for me, something like the beginning of an obsession–but one that only takes me in circles, back to those lines, where I find comfort alongside a certain sense of futility in a passage that I know I will never fully unravel. In this futile return there is a feeling of coming home, but also of a continuous departure which most often leads down familiar paths–all of them leading back to…Read more
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25How Low Can You Go? BioEnactivism, Cognitive Biology and Umwelt OntologyHumana Mente 9 (31). 2016.The viability of enactivist philosophy in providing descriptions of biological phenomena across the phylogenetic spectrum relies in large part on the scalability of its central concepts, i.e. whether they remain operative at varying levels of biological complexity. In this paper, I will examine the possibility of scaling two deeply intertwined concepts: cognition and surrounding world. Contra some indications from Varela and others, I will argue that the concept of embodied cognition can be scal…Read more
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24European institutions?Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 47 (3): 226-241. 2016.ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to sketch a phenomenological theory of political institutions and to apply it to some objections and questions raised by Pierre Manent about the project of the European Union and more specifically the question of “European Construction”, i.e. what is the aim of the European Project. Such a theory of political institutions is nested within a broader phenomenological account of institutions, dimensions of which I have tried to elaborate elsewhere. As a working co…Read more
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24Phenomenological Approaches to the Political in Patocka and Merleau-PontyDissertation, KU Leuven. 2008.Contents INTRODUCTION: PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE POLITICAL IN PATOČKA AND MERLEAU-PONTY 11 1. Memory and community 11 2. Patočka 18 3. Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and institution 22 4. The political context 28 5. Status of the current research 32 6. Overview of the chapters 34 CHAPTER 1: THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL EPOCHĒ AND THE POLITICAL 39 1. Introduction 39 2. Criticism of Husserl’s notion of the lifeworld 46 3. The a priori of the World 49 4. The subject and the epochē 56 5. Epochē to polis 61…Read more
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23Starting from NatureJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 44 (1): 2-5. 2013.status: published.
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23Should Students Take Smart Drugs?The Philosophers' Magazine 79 83-89. 2017.Should Students Take Smart Drugs? If this were a straightforward question, you would not be reading about it in a philosophy magazine. But you are, so it makes sense that we try to clarify the terms of the discussion before wading in too far. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), when philosophers set out to de-obfuscate what look to be relatively forthright questions, things usually get more complicated rather than less: each of the operative terms at stake in the ques…Read more
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22Riassunto: Epigenetica transgenerazionale, o la storia spettrale della carneChiasmi International 9 94-94. 2007.
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University of the West of EnglandDepartment of Health and Social SciencesSenior Research Fellow In Philosophy (Part-time)
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |
European Philosophy |