scholarly journals Bendroji organologija: tarp organizmo ir mašinos

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 52-68
Author(s):  
Audronė Žukauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Georges Canguilhem ◽  
Bernard Stiegler ◽  
Biological Organisms ◽  
The Continuum

In this article, I discuss the theory of organology, which examines the interaction between the organism and the machine. The term “organology” was proposed by Georges Canguilhem in his text “Machine and Organism”. Referring to his predecessors, such as Ernst Kapp, Alfred Espinas, and André Leroi-Gourhan, Canguilhem argues that tools and technologies can be understood as an extension of biological organisms. Thus, organology examines the relationships between organisms and machines as well as redefines machines as organs of the human species. In a similar manner, Simondon examines technical objects as belonging to general ontogenesis, which encompasses both living and non-living beings. Later, this idea is significantly elaborated by Bernard Stiegler who creates his own theory of “general organology” and asserts that human life can be maintained only through the invention of tools and the organization of the inorganic. The notion of “general organology” is taken further by Yuk Hui who argues that technical objects are becoming organic in the sense that they incorporate organic properties, such as recursivity and contingency. Thus, not only does “general organology” question the opposition between mechanism and vitalism but also inscribes technical objects into the continuum of living beings.

What Could It Mean to Say, “Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?”

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-246
Author(s):  
Vanessa Wills ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Class Relation ◽  
Economic Class ◽  
Definite Form ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Correct Understanding

Marxism is a materialist theory that centers economic life in its analysis of the human social world. This materialist orientation manifests in explanations that take economic class to play a fundamental causal role in determining the emergence, character, and development of race-and sex-based oppression—indeed, of all forms of identity-based oppression within class societies. To say that labor is mediated by class in a class-based society is to say that, in such societies, the class-based division of that activity which produces and reproduces the human species is the definite form in which labor appears, and that the human life which is the product of that self-making activity bears its stamp. Marxism’s emphasis on economic factors as central in the constitution and development of human life has been seized upon as evidence of its alleged “class reductionism”—its supposed tendency to think of all aspects of human life as direct and simple expressions of a class relation. No such thing follows; quite the opposite, a correct understanding of the relationships among capitalism, racism, and sexism only further highlights how central the struggle against each is to the struggles against any of the others.

scholarly journals TRANSINDIVIDUALITY AND POST-LABOR BASED ON SIMONDON AND STIEGLER

2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (143) ◽  
pp. 319-338
Author(s):  
Jae-Hee Kim
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Information Networks ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Philosophical Foundation ◽  
Technical Culture ◽  
Bernard Stiegler ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Gilbert Simondon

ABSTRACT This article aims to elucidate a philosophical foundation of a post-labor paradigm through the transindividual technical-psychic-collective culture based on Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler. Simondon predicts that the problem of the alienation of labor due to mechanical industrialization can be overcome through the spread of post-industrial technical culture based on both technical mentality and information technology (IT). In contrast, Stiegler claims that, along with information networks, hyper-industrialization rather than post-industrialization has arrived and that, in order to recover human values in a machine empire devoid of caring, the strengthening of the ability for non-automation based on automaticity is necessary. However, Simondon’s technical culture beyond labor implies a posthumanistic vision in that it assumes the capacity of technology to mediate between the preindividual and the transindividual beyond technical instrumentalism, which is anthropocentric, and opens up transductive relationships among humans and non-humans. I will argue that Stiegler’s urgent proposal that seeks to save human life from the control of a techno-capital system, such as the reinvention of work transcending employment, must be concretized within the Simondonian posthumanistic project.

Self-Deception, Dissimulation, and the Universality of Evil in Human Nature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Papish
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Human Species ◽  
The Social

This chapter considers whether self-deception informs Kant’s notoriously controversial claim that there is an evil rooted universally throughout the human species. It is ultimately argued that while self-deception as described in Chapters 3 and 4 cannot be implicated in his argument, a nearby kind of practical-epistemic failing, namely dissemblance or dissimulation (Verstellen), can be. To help secure this conclusion, the chapter also addresses several important interpretive challenges including: whether Kant intends his claims about a universal evil to be a priori or empirically grounded; whether the social (or unsocial) aspects of human life are relevant to Kant’s proof; if Kant can justifiably describe the evil that runs throughout human nature as both a propensity or willingness and a chosen disposition; how the universality of evil can exist alongside the possibility of individual moral reform; and what to make of the claim that evil attaches to the human race’s “species” character.

Biocentrism, Religion and Synthetic Biology

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-35
Author(s):  
Robin Attfield
Keyword(s):  
Synthetic Biology ◽  
Genetic Engineering ◽  
Precautionary Principle ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Human Interventions

Biocentrism maintains that all living creatures have moral standing, but need not claim that all have equal moral significance. This moral standing extends to organisms generated through human interventions, whether by conventional breeding, genetic engineering, or synthetic biology. Our responsibilities with regard to future generations are relevant to non-human species as well as future human generations. Likewise, the Precautionary Principle raises objections to the generation of serious or irreversible harm or changes to the quality of human or non-human life, and needs to be applied when the introduction of synthetic biotechnology is envisaged. Consideration of this Principle supplements the problems raised for synthetic biology from a biocentric perspective. The bearing of biocentrism on religions is also considered, together with contrasting views about science, religion and the creation of life.

scholarly journals Personal and logical characteristics involving choosing a conjugal partner

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 527-542
Author(s):  
Mariana Floricica Calin ◽  
Mihaela Luminita Sandu ◽  
Madalina Eftimie
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Personality Factors ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Legal Recognition ◽  
True Value ◽  
First Child ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
Life On Earth

We often talk about the couple, what it means and what is involved, but we seldom recognize it`s true value. The couple is the one who leads to the perpetuation of the human species, it is the first step towards the spread of the human life on Earth. In order for two people to form a family, they need to go through the stage of couple, either married or not. Most people prefer that a couple status is achieved through legal recognition, marriage, then when the first child is born, they become a family. Each of us reaches a moment in life when the preoccupation, interest, curiosity and desire to choose a partner, to start a family appear. We all have our own and different experiences, but we certainly have many things in common. There is a unique intertwining of psychological and social factors that influence and determine an individual in making the right choices.Thus, the need to be part of a couple for some, or to start a family for others, is a need manifested similarly, but named differently. People are social, affective beings and the need to share feelings is common to all. Each individual has unique criteria that they meet when choosing a partner, and I believe that these criteria come from the intertwining of unique personality factors and the importance given by each to social factors that can be involved in forming, developing and maintaining a better relationship.

Meschonnic’s Theory of Rhythm, his Key Concepts and their Relation

2019 ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
Marko Pajević
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Full Understanding ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Continuum

This chapter introduces into the key concepts of Meschonnic’s theory. Basing the conception of language on the sign represents an obstacle to the awareness of certain elements of human life, especially to a full understanding of what language or art do. Meschonnic’s poetics of the continuum and of rhythm criticizes the sign based on Benveniste’s terms of rhythm and discourse, developing an anthropology of language. Rhythm, for Meschonnic, is no formal metrical but a semantic principle, each time unique and unforeseeable. As for Humboldt, his starting point is not the word but the ensemble of speech. The poem, then, is a process of transformation, a way of thinking, and rhythm is form in movement. Thus, Meschonnic’s poetics attempts to thematize the intelligibility of presence. Art and literature raise our awareness of this continuous. This poetic thinking is a necessary counterforce against all institutionalization.

scholarly journals Virology research and virulent human pandemics

1995 ◽  
Vol 115 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. A. Mims
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Vertebrate Host ◽  
Respiratory Pathogen ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Loss Of Life ◽  
Serious Illness ◽  
Major Threat ◽  
Viral Determinants

SummaryThe possibility that a devastating human pandemic could arise, causing massive loss of human life, is discussed. Such a major threat to the human species is likely to be a virus, and would spread by the respiratory route. It need not necessarily cause massive loss of life, but if it caused serious illness or incapacity it would still have a major impact. A possible source is from an existing respiratory pathogen, but it would more probably arise from an infection that is maintained in an arthropod or vertebrate host, but which at present either does not infect humans, or if it does it fails to be effectively transmitted between them. More research should therefore focus on the pathogenetic factors and the viral determinants that promote respiratory transmission.

Certain uncertainties: Modes of patient safety in healthcare

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 732-752 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonja Jerak-Zuiderent
Keyword(s):  
Primary Care ◽  
Patient Safety ◽  
General Practitioners ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Clinical Work ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Out Of Hours ◽  
Georges Canguilhem ◽  
Care Facilities ◽  
Continuous Stream

The safety movement in healthcare approaches patient safety mainly by reducing uncertainty to prevent possible errors. This article is concerned with how this approach relates to other modes of conceptualising patient safety. Following the work of Georges Canguilhem, I argue that, depending on how we conceptualise knowing, acting and error, a different mode of patient safety is possible: one that involves ‘living with uncertainty’. Through ethnographic research on daily clinical work in Dutch primary care facilities, I show that the assumption that clinical work can be made safe by reducing errors not only is problematic, it also creates new forms of ‘unsafety’. My observations at general practitioners’ out-of-hours service units and other primary care facilities display a ‘continuous stream of knowing and acting’ in which care professionals adopt specific practices that avoid contradictions between uncertainty and safety. Although these practices differed in the various locations I studied, there were some common dimensions of ‘living with uncertainty’. By problematising the conceptions of safety and errors as antonyms I suggest that a reappraisal is in order, particularly of the notion of errors in healthcare. Keeping and protecting room for errors in a situated way is crucial for knowing and acting in a field riddled with uncertainty and dealing with human life.

Passions, virtue, and rational life

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-140
Author(s):  
John Hacker-Wright
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Aristotelian Tradition

Neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalists argue that moral norms are natural norms that apply to human beings. A central issue for neo-Aristotelians is to determine what belongs to the good human life; the question is complicated, since we take up a diversity of different lives, many of which seem good, and it seems unclear what the human species-characteristic life really is. The Aristotelian tradition gives some guidance on this question, however, because it describes us as rational animals with intellectual and appetitive powers; the perfection of those powers is what makes us good qua human. This is especially well spelled out in Thomas Aquinas; he takes moral virtues of courage and temperance to be perfections of our sense appetites, a power of going for things presented as good through our senses. These virtues thereby shape our passions, specifically the passions of fear, daring and concupiscent love, which are a result of the sense appetites pursuing what appears as good. This view provides a framework for virtue, which can then be taken as the perfections of distinct powers shared by all human beings, though actualized in a variety of ways. In this article, I will focus on the passion of fear, which I here describe, following Aquinas, as a movement of sense appetite away from evils that are difficult or impossible to avoid. My focus will be on showing that this passion is necessary, irreplaceable by our cognitive powers, and that the underlying sensitive appetites that produce fear must be perfected for any human being to count as good.

scholarly journals Nonlinear diversification rates of linguistic phylogenies over the Holocene

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus J Hamilton ◽  
Robert S. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Bayesian Methods ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Doubling Time ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Diversification Rates ◽  
The Holocene ◽  
Out Of Africa ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Biological Organisms

AbstractThe expansion of the human species out of Africa in the Pleistocene, and the subsequent development of agriculture in the Holocene resulted in waves of linguistic diversification and replacement across the planet. Analogous to the growth of populations or the speciation of biological organisms, languages diversify over time to form phylogenies of language families. However, the dynamics of this diversification process are unclear. Bayesian methods applied to lexical and phonetic data have created dated linguistic phylogenies for 18 language families encompassing ∼3,000 of the world’s ∼7,000 extant languages. In this paper we use these phylogenies to quantify how fast languages expand and diversify through time both within and across language families. The overall diversification rate of languages in our sample is ∼0.001 yr-1(or a doubling time of ∼700 yr) over the last 6,000 years with evidence for nonlinear dynamics in language diversification rates over time, where both within and across language families, diversity initially increases rapidly and then slows. The large-scale replacement of the world’s hunter-gatherer languages by agricultural languages over the Holocene was a non-constant process.

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