Julien Murphy

In "Pierre Loves Horranges ", a little noticed essay on Sartre's existential psychoanalysis, emerging French philosopher Catherine Malabou offers a new reading of "Doing and Having", in Sartre's Being and Nothingness for her philosophy of the fantastic. We compare Sartre and Malabou on the fantastic, focusing on their analyses of quality, viscosity and ontological difference. We argue that Malabou's reinterpretation of Sartre's symbolic schema, which serves to make visible the change and exchange in the ontological difference, is valuable for a psychoanalysis of the future, one that comes after metaphysics and deconstruction.

A leading critic of the disruptive force of technology in education, Bernard Stiegler saw the counter-effects of artificial intelligence in undermining human agency, autonomy and individuality, rendering the role of education ever more critical. Stiegler believes that our goal is not to abandon technology but to focus our attention on its power and direction in a hypercapitalist economy. While he did not foresee the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GAI), its rapid acceleration raises important issues for his notion of digital writing as a pharmakon. In this essay, we examine Stiegler’s view on intelligence, digital writing, technological memory, and neuropower, focusing specifically on his Shanghai lecture and Nanjing Lectures. We compare Stiegler with Catherine Malabou, who examines the nature of intelligence primarily through the lens of neuroscience. We argue that Malabou’s view of neuroplasticity in human and artificial brains, and her critique of techno-narcissism in the control over technology, add an important dimension to Stiegler’s political critique of education. Finally, we examine how best to construe AI as part of a hyper-materialist epistemology that Stiegler espouses in the conclusion of his Nanjing Lectures, to bring about neganthropic knowledge through a therapeutics of care.

To what extent are women obliged to be child-bearers? If reproductive technology could offer some form of ectogenesis, would feminists regard it as a liberating reproductive option? Three lines of reproductive rights arguments currently used by feminists are applied to ectogenesis. Each fails to provide strong grounds for prohibiting it. Yet, there are several ways in which ectogenesis could contribute to women's oppression, in particular, if it were used to undermine abortion rights, reinforce traditional views of fertility, increase fetal rights in pregnancy, and perpetuate the unequal distribution of scarce medical resources. A re-thinking of women's relationship to pregnancy is needed in order to challenge ectogenetic research.

In two recent works, Intellectuals and Power and General Theory of Victims, François Laruelle offers a critique of the public intellectual, including Jean-Paul Sartre, claiming such intellectuals have a disregard for victims of crimes against humanity. Laruelle insists that the victim has been left out of philosophy and displaced by an abstract pursuit of justice. He offers a non- philosophical approach that reverses the victim/intellectual dyad and calls for compassionate insurrection. In this paper, we probe Laruelle's critique of the committed intellectual's obligations to victims, specifically, through an examination of Sartre's "A Plea for Intellectuals." We hope to show the value of Laruelle's theory on victims, crime and power for imagining future-oriented intellectuals.

Events surrounding the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States raise compelling moral questions about the effects of war and globalization on children in many parts of the world. This paper adopts Sartre's notion of freedom, particularly its connection with materiality and intersubjectivity, to assess the moral responsibility that we have as a global community toward our most vulnerable members. We conclude by examining important first steps that should be taken to address the plight of children.

The major dilemma for bioethics is choosing an appropriate method of ethical analysis, one that when applied to individual cases can illuminate if not resolve vexing ethical issues for providers and their patients. Two of these books offer direction in this regard. The framework Carson Strong adopts and makes a compelling case for in EthicsinReproductiveandPerinatalMedicine:ANewFramework is one of modified casuistry. Casuistry, imported to bioethics by Jonsen and Toulmin, is a practical, case-based method of ethical decisionmaking. It relies on comparison between moral factors in a case under consideration and in paradigm cases with justifications for different outcomes. The preferred course of action is the one warranted by the paradigm case that most resembles the case under consideration. Strong's framework is a modified form of casuistry because it takes into account social and political views and allows for, upon occasion, a prioritization of values across cases

The sixteen essays in Gender Struggles address a wide range of issues in gender struggles, from the more familiar ones that, for the last thirty years, have been the mainstay of feminist scholarship, such as motherhood, beauty, and sexual violence, to new topics inspired by post-industrialization and multiculturalism, such as the welfare state, cyberspace, hate speech, and queer politics, and finally to topics that traditionally have not been seen as appropriate subjects for philosophizing, such as adoption, care work, and the home.