Bodies
8. Hyperreal (Phantom) Body
9. Sacrosanctity, the Glorious Body, and the Body’s Revaluations (“das Leibapriori” in Traditional and Posttraditional Cultures)
III. Body Representationism Between Permanent Loss and Recovery of the Identity
1. Body Representation Then and Now
2. Body Representation Meets Technopoiesis (Hans Jonas Revisited)
3. Cognitive Sciences: Putting Together a Jigsaw
4. Disabled vs. Enhanced Body Representations
4.1 A Dysmorphic Body Image, Facial Allograft Transplantation and Personal Identity
4.2 A Disabled Body Image and Personal Identity
4.3 Enhanced Bodies, Neuroplasticity and Evolving Representation
4.4 Body Schema Plasticity and The Minded Body (Arnold Gehlen Revisited)
4.5 A Look from the Outside
IV. Psychosurgery. The Self As a Chronic Patient
1. What Is Neuroenhancement
2. Examples of Psycho- and Neurotropic Therapies’ Effect on the Memory and Identity
3. An Episodic Self-identity Turn?
4. Becoming Chronic Patients (and Needing Chronic Therapists vs. Comprehensive Human Enhancement)
V. Empowering the Agent, Not the Patient. Gadamer, Kępiński, Dąbrowski and Waldenfels vs. Technopoiesis
1. (Auto)therapeuin
2. Kazimierz Dąbrowski on “Positive Disintegration”
3. Hans-Georg Gadamer and Antoni Kępiński: A Hermeneutic Duet on the Theme of Autotherapy
4. Antoni Kępiński
5. Bernhard Waldenfels’ Phenomenological Tools of Autotherapy: Treating Our “Normal” vs. “Anomalous” Afflictions
VI. Artificial Intelligent Devices To Be Our Alter Egos? Facing Humans’ Most Distant Relatives
1. Our Artificial Alter Egos
2. Designing an Autonomous AI
3. What Kind of Ethics for AI? Follow-up Exploratory Reflections
4. A Categorical Imperative Test for Artificial Moral Agents?
5. “No One Really Knows How the Most Advanced Algorithms Do What They Do”
Summary
Bibliography
Dia-Logos
Schriften zu Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften
Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences
Herausgegeben von / Edited by
Tadeusz Buksiński / Piotr W. Juchacz
Advisory Board
Karl-Otto Apel (Frankfurt am Main)
Manuel Jiménez-Redondo (Valencia)
Peter Kampits (Wien)
Theodore Kisiel (Illinois)
Hennadii Korzhov (Donetsk)
Marek Kwiek (Poznań)
George McLean (Washington)
Evangelos Moutsopoulos (Athènes)
Sergey Nizhnikov (Moscow)
Ewa Nowak (Poznań)
Bd. /vol. 27
Introduction. Against the Stream: Searching for a Concept of the Self in Posthumanist Contexts
“Whoever finds himself is superior to the world”
Syrian Thomas’ Gospel
The aim in the title may sound a mission impossible-like in the light of the post-selfhood turn1 that has been observed over the last two decades not only in analytical philosophy and the philosophy of mind but also in the so-called posthumanism. If we no longer live in a human world, why care about this “central abstraction”2 projected by our minds, i.e., our self-identity?
The problem is not only ontological and cognitive in nature – it is more anthropological, existential, social, and therapeutic. Philosophical anthropology used to formulate it with the Kantian question “What is man?” According to Robert Loaden, Kant’s approach to the human being put an end to “scholastic anthropology,”3 as it was useless for modern humans who had to revise their concept of human nature after the discovery indigenous nations with their different multicultural identities. However, Kant’s concept of man as an autonomous subjectivity delivered a powerful counterbalance to reductionist concepts such as that of La Mettrie (L’homme machine, 1747).
In contrast to these approaches, phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy rather asked ‘Who am I?’ – as a unique human being with interiority (mental life) and exteriority (corporeality, embodiment). Finally, analytical philosophy proclaimed non-egological and conceptions of the self.4 Contemporary transhumanist scholars seem to follow Peter Strawson’s concept, as they have begun talking about “postpersons” (Julian Savulescu) and post-selves in a radical human enhancement context. “We are not essentially selves (…) Being a self is ←9 | 10→just a ‘phase’ we pass through, like being adults. Nothing psychological is necessary for our existence,”5 Ingmar Persson argues.
But next to such reductionist or even nihilist claims as those of Persson,6 one can still find grounds for a non-reductionist, or at least a moderate conception, of the self. Without a doubt, Paul Ricoeur, Owen Flanagan, and Dan Zahavi contribute to this conception: “it is undeniable that the self plays a crucial role in our psychological and social life by giving it organization, meaning, and structure.”7 Those authors are not the
