Jessica Lombard

This article engages with the increasing use of science fiction narratives in the humanities and social sciences, where they serve as valuable methodological tools for addressing fundamental questions, exploring otherness, and envisioning possible futures. It lays the foundation for a comparative analysis of human and non-human identity and experience, focusing on both a seminal science fiction episode and a significant historical event. The episode “The Measure of a Man” from Star Trek: The Next Generation, where the android “Data” faces a trial to determine his status and rights as an artificial entity, raises critical questions about the assignment of status to technological beings, particularly robots. These issues are central to the evolution of contemporary societies and the differentiation of social actors and resonate unexpectedly and significantly with the historical Valladolid debate (1550-1551), which discussed the status of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. By examining both a fictional narrative and a historical case, this article highlights continuities and discontinuities in our representations of otherness, expressed through themes of anthropomorphism and resemblance. It seeks to reconsider the phenomenological status of objects and subjects, by taking into account a being’s lived experience, whether human or non-human.

Healthcare decision-making within the pediatric population is a complex area to navigate for clinicians, parents and/or legal guardians, and children, and is even more complicated when children require intensive life-sustaining medical treatment (LSMT). Literature has highlighted the key ethical and legal principles that clinicians involved in bioethics committees should follow when making complex clinical decisions for this population, however, it can be unclear exactly where and how these decisions are made in practice. This paper provides an insight into how healthcare decision-making for children requiring LSMT is navigated within the medical and legal environment in Ireland. It uses a unique methodology consisting of a combination of secondary qualitative analysis of interview data obtained from clinicians involved in bioethics committees, and an analysis of Irish case law. The results of this paper highlight how clinicians navigate bioethical pediatric healthcare decision-making in Ireland, in the context of decisions regarding LSMT. The findings illustrate the complex balancing act that clinicians face in recognising and respecting parental autonomy in shared decision-making whilst being responsible for medical care that prioritises the best interests of the child, particularly from a legal standpoint. In some instances, this creates a decisional discord, and further training and professional supports are needed within clinical practice to promote the needs of children and to reduce stakeholder conflict.

Following an examination of the Star Trek series, this chapter explores the technical and symbolic question of a topos that makes sense to the human being, continuing Sloterdijk's innovative transposition of the Heideggerian analysis of dwelling - into the realm of space. I discuss the way in which beings venturing to the farthest reaches of the cosmos must bring with them their environment in order to constitute an artificial sphere in which they can dwell, here considering science fiction as a means of opening up a space for prospective questioning and participating in fundamental ethical and empirical questions.

Our article debates the issues at stake in the Heideggerian examination of the Umwelt theory in his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. This discussion sheds light on the links and differences between the lifeworld that is constituted as a set of meanings and interactions, and the world that opens up to Being, by providing a definition of the world as what is experienced through “the accessibility of beings” (Heidegger, 1983/1995, p. 196, §47), i.e. the lived relationship to the subjective world itself. As Heidegger (1983/1995, p. 192, §46) theorizes the idea of the animal “poor in world” (based on the Uexküllian (1934/2010, p. 51) concept of “poverty”), he implies that both humans and animals perceive the fundamental nature of the world, albeit in different ways. Therefore, the article contends that the distinct treatment of human beings helps avoid confusion between the ontology of beings and their ontic biological structure. As Uexküll also makes the human being the exception in the harmonics of nature, we demonstrate that Uexküll’s statement of the human imperfection in fact prevents a biological reductionism. This article thus highlights the challenge, for biosemiotics, to provide a clear distinction between the ontology of living beings and their biological disposition.

Picture a simple scenario: a worm, in its modest way, traces a trail of paint as it moves across a sheet of paper. Now shift your imagination to a more complex scene, where a chimpanzee paints on another sheet of paper. A simple question arises: Do you perceive an identical creative process in these two animals? Can both of these animals be designated as authors of their creation? If only one, which one? This paper delves into the complexities of authorship, consciousness, and agency, unpacking the nuanced distinctions between such scenarios and exploring the underlying principles that define creative authorship across different forms of life. It becomes evident that attributing authorship to an animal hinges on its intention to create, an aspect intertwined with its agency and awareness of the creative act. These concepts are far from straightforward, as they traverse the complex landscapes of animal ethics and law. But our exploration does not stop there. Now imagine a robot, endowed with artificial intelligence, producing music. This prompts us to question how we should evaluate and perceive such creations. Is the creative process of a machine fundamentally different from that of an animal or a human? As we venture further into this realm of human-made intelligence, we confront an array of ethical, philosophical, and legal quandaries. This paper provides a platform for a reflective discussion: ethologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and bioinformaticians converge in a multidisciplinary dialogue. Their insights provide valuable perspectives for establishing a foundation upon which to discuss the intricate concepts of authorship and appropriation concerning artistic works generated by non-human entities.

The concept of transhumanism is based on a specific understanding of human limitations that should or could be transcended. Among them, the question of overcoming our own corporeality through the delaying of ageing or death is of major importance for a new understanding of human plasticity and fluidity when shaping ourselves and our environment. As transhumanism advocates for human enhancement through technological means, it considers ageing and death as diseases and criticizes their necessity in the human evolutionary process. In light of this transhumanist question, this article discusses ageing and death as diseases for which there must be technological solutions. It underlines that a philosophical approach is necessary to highlight how correlated and interrelated those subjects are and tries to go beyond humanist dichotomies to make clearer how major notions (health, enhancement, etc.) are intertwined with each other and consequently shape our socio-political subjectivities. Given this context, this article discusses the fact that medicine is traditionally structured on a limit that seems to be more and more plastic to pave the way for new debates, such as human enhancement, morphological freedom, and biocultural capital. It then discusses how transhumanism tries to transcend what is considered human structures by examining death as a fatal degeneration that could be overcome through biological amortality and informational immortality.

Through Heidegger’s re-reading of Descartes, this article explores a fundamental issue in the contemporary conception of worldliness. In a restricted sense, the human being is the maker of the world in that he appropriates what composes it, i.e., the worldly beings or things. Greatly influenced by the Cartesian notion of extensio, this tendency no longer entails the world as a thing in itself, but as a set of measurable things, thus available and open to activity. This article articulates the threat relative to the idea of the forming, by the human being, of the essence of the world. Every being, be it an object, an animal or even a human being, seems to be considered as a producer of energy and a structure that could be possessed. For example, such natural space is not campaign or land, but automatically field, that is to say, an agricultural deposit that is symbolically exploited and empirically exploitable. This ontological device prevents us from grasping the world in any other way than in terms of use and productivity. As a result, the ontology of the thing becomes an aesthetic issue in its own right. This issue does not involve here the capture of the object as a bearer of Beauty, but an aesthetic relation in the fundamentally etymological sense (αἰσθητικός) of what is felt, of what is sensible and perceptible. The need for an aesthetic rereading of the world and the things that stand in it presupposes, therefore, the evolution of the human gaze and a metaphysical approach to worldliness, detached from the instrumentalization of the beings and focused on their presence or their proximity. This article aims at demonstrating the necessity of a real human aesthetic responsibility, which can be concretized in the metaphysical thought of the thing that the human being unfolds, by considering it as the persistence in the world of an object whose ontological disposition could never be neutral.

This article shows technoscience as an extensively discussed concept in French and Belgian philosophy of technology, with major philosophers such as Bernadette Bensaude Vincent, Xavier Guchet and Gilbert Hottois.Instead of telling the new narrative of a specific technoscientific object, this article reflects on an ontology of their mode of existence. Technoscientific objects open emerging research fields to indefinite possibilities, while they reorganize epistemic activities and orchestrate the development of technical networks, platforms and structures.The main question here is to understand what is the ontological mode of existence of those objects and how they relate to the previously existing categories found in the work of Gilbert Simondon, that shaped the French philosophy of technology. To this end, we focus on a submicroscopic technoscientific object; namely the bio-object, and put forward an original analysis about the being of (bio)technoscientific objects in their own milieu.This paper demonstrates that, even if Simondonian notions are critical to study (bio)technoscientific objects, these cannot be considered as proper technical objects. We propose that the mode of existence of bio-objects is closer to that of artificial objects than to technical ones. This peculiarity may be the reason why French philosophers are consistent in studying technoscience as an emerging technical field, with and beyond Simondon’s lenses.

Durant la pandémie, le numérique s’est révélé un outil précieux pour assurer une continuité de la vie professionnelle, de l’éducation, de la vie familiale et amicale, et assurer une appétence pour la vie culturelle disponible en ligne. La bataille contre le coronavirus grâce au numérique se joue également sur d’autres plans : des gouvernements, avec l’appui d’entreprises privées, développent de nouvelles politiques de surveillance de l’épidémie et des personnes infectées. Ces usages technologiques sont des gages d’efficacité mais également des facteurs de risques pour les libertés des citoyens.

Cet article relate l’évolution de la répression du crime du Japon médiéval à ses mutations durant l’époque Edo puis l’ère Meiji, afin de retracer le glissement socio-historique entre une mentalité du châtiment et une législation de la punition – aujourd’hui matérialisée par l’emprisonnement en établissement carcéral. Le développement historique des concepts fondamentaux à une société, telle la criminalité, forment ici une manière distincte d’appartenir au monde contemporain et influencent comportements et schèmes de pensée : la réalité historique est une réalité sociale.

En matière de criminalité, le Japon fait figure d’exception. La population incarcérée y diminue en moyenne de 3,6 % par an et le taux de criminalité est en baisse depuis 2007. La densité d’incarcération dans les prisons japonaises n’est que de 74 % contre 120 % en France en avril 2017. Le Japon partage l’appareil démocratique et le développement économique des pays occidentaux mais se distingue par son éloignement géographique et culturel. Or les sciences criminologiques étudiant la philosophie d’un pays et ses traditions idéologiques sont fondamentales dans la réflexion sur la criminalité. Elles témoignent du fait que le crime est autant influencé par le droit, l’histoire et l’économie d’un pays, que par l’ancrage culturel d’une civilisation qui possède ses propres schèmes mentaux et comportementaux. Nous nous proposons d’attester de quelques-unes de ces pistes de réflexion.

Both current and past analyses and critiques of transhumanist and posthumanist theories have had a propensity to cite the Greek myth of Prometheus as a paradigmatic figure. Although stark differences exist amongst the token forms of posthumanist theories and transhumanism, both theoretical domains claim promethean theory as their own. There are numerous definitions of those two concepts: therefore, this article focuses on posthumanism thought. By first analyzing the appropriation of the myth in posthumanism, we show how the myth fails to be foundational and how we need to rethink the posthumanist mythological framework. We then introduce Haldane’s Daedalus figure as a fruitful analogy to understand the demiurgic posture that critics mean to unveil by first using Prometheus. Daedalus embodies the artisan role, whose status as an inventor for the mighty preserves from the gods' direct opprobrium. Thereafter, we introduce the Camusian Myth of Sisyphus as a competing analogy that ultimately serves as a myth better suited to address the posthumanist position on an existential standpoint. we ultimately show that Sisyphus, as the ‘absurd man’ that Camus claims him to be, is himself the posthuman, thus serving as a more ideal foundational myth for posthumanism and preserving the importance of narrative in posthuman discourses. To conclude, we specifically show that the concept of Sisyphus as a posthuman icon has significance that reaches beyond narrative value to current ecological debates in posthumanism