Artificial by Nature

Philosophy of Life and the Life Sciences and Helmuth Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology

IVth International Plessner Conference, Erasmus University, Rotterdam.

Wed. 16-Fr. 18 September, 2009

Programme

Wednesday September 16, 2009

In front of Room M1-19	Registration
08:15-09:00	Registration / coffee and tea

 

Room M1-19 Athene	Welcome
09:00-09:15	Wiep van Bunge (Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy EUR)

 

Room M1-19 Athene	Plenary session: Evolution and human life (Theme 1) Chair: Gesa Lindemann
09:15-10:05	Hans-Peter Krüger What makes evolution possible? Helmuth Plessner’s 'categorical subjunctive’'
10:05-10:55	Joachim Fischer Philosophical Anthropology - a paradigm between Darwinism and Foucaultism
10:55-11:25	Coffee break
11:25-12:15	Karl-Siegbert Rehberg New Biology and Unchanged Old Questions: Recent Research and the ‘Sonderstellungs’-hypotheses of the Philosophical Anthropology
12:15-13:05	Raymond Corbey The Stellenwert of Plessner on (human) Stellenwert

 

13:05-14:10

Lunch (L-building Restaurant 'De Carrousel')

 

Room M1-19 Athene	Plenary session: Embodied cognition (Theme 2) Chair: Huib Ernste
14:10-15:00	Gesa Lindemann From Experimental Interaction to the Brain as the Epistemic Object of Neurobiology
15:00-15:50	Taylor Carman Are we our bodies?
15:50-16:20	Tea break
16:20-17:10	Maarten Coolen Bodily experience and experiencing one's body
17:10-18:00

 

19.00-22.00

Conference Dinner for all registered participants

Restaurant Bazar Witte de Withstraat 16 (down town Rotterdam) see also: www.bazarrotterdam.com/read/rot_en/wereldeethuis_rotterdam
Hotel & Wereldeethuis Bazar was established in December 1997 and is located in a listed building on the corner of Witte de Withstraat and William Boothlaan. Bazar does real justice to its name. The restaurant’s colourful tables, striking lamps and lively music make one think of an exotic market in some faraway land. The dishes on the menu are mainly from North Africa and the Middle East. On the ground floor you can have a beer or a refreshing mint tea at our friendly bar.

 

Thursday September 17, 2009

Room M1-19 Athene	Plenary session: Beyond man: protheses, cyborgs and artificial life (Theme 5) Chair: Maarten Coolen
09:00-09:50	Dierk Spreen Not terminated. In a Plessnerian perspective ‘cyborgized’ men still remain ‘human’ beings
	Plenary session: Bio-ethics (Theme 3)  Chair: Maarten Coolen
09:50-10:40	Lenny Moss Beyond the Dreyfus-McDowel impasse: Plessner, human detachment, the need for orientation/compensation and the significance of higher-level skill acquisition
10:40-11:10	Coffee break
	Plenary session: Beyond man: protheses, cyborgs and artificial life (Theme 5)  Chair: Maarten Coolen
11:10-12:00	Peter-Paul Verbeek De-limitating humanity: On cyborgs, posthumans, and Plessner’s concept of ‘boundary realization’

 

12:00-13:10

Lunch (L-building Restaurant 'De Carrousel')

 

Room M2-06	Parallel session A Theme 1 Chair: Joachim Fischer
13:10-13:50	Daniil Dorofeev Mutual relations of Scheler and Plessner and the biological bases of their projects of philosophical anthropology
13:50-14:30	Martino Boccignone The Duty of Personal Identity: Authenticity and Irony
14:30-15:10	Tatjana Meira-Kochetkova Enhancement and the human excentricity

 

Room M2-07	Parallel session B Theme 1 and 2 Chair: Jan Gulmans
13:10-13:50	Jasper van Buuren Plessner and the Mathematical-Physical Perspective
13:50-14:30	Heleen Pott Emotion, evolution and ‘laughing’ rats: Plessner’s Importance for Affective Neuroscience
14:30-15:10	Laurens van den Berg Out-of-Body Experiences and Telepresence from a Plessnerian Point of View

 

Room M2-09	Parallel session C Theme 4 Chair: to be announced
13:10-13:50	Bas Hengstmengel Helmuth Plessner as a Legal Thinker – Role Playing in Legal Discourse
13:50-14:30	Nico Lüdtke Plessner’s ‘Mitwelt’ as a de-anthropologised concept for understanding sociality
14:30-15:10	Kirsten Pols Strangely Familiar. The debate on multiculturalism and Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology

 

Room M3-03	Parallel session D Theme 4 Chair: Petran Kockelkoren
13:10-13:50	Bob Mugerauer The Centripetal-Centrifugal Dynamic of Eccentric Life and Its Environments
13:50-14:30	Stefan Nicolae Living Corpses – Dying Boundaries. Towards a Re-Signification of Helmuth Plessner’s Analysis of the Concept of Boundary for the Sociology of Death
14:30-15:10	Henrike Lerch Anthropology as grounding of cultural philosophy, The connection of man and culture by Helmuth Plessner und Ernst Cassirer

 

Room M3-04	Parallel session E Theme 5 Chair: Dirk Spreen
13:10-13:50	Johannes Hätscher Stimulating the brain: a case of cyborgism?
13:50-14:30	Mireille Hildebrandt Artificial life forms and the eccentric positionality of human life forms
14:30-15:10	Hironori Matsuzaki Does only ‘human body’ matter? Artificial humanoids in the quest for personhood

 

15:10-15:40

Tea Break

 

Room M2-06	Parallel session F Theme 1 Chair: Hans-Ptere Krüger
15:40-16:20	Line Ryberg Ingerslev Social experience and objectification
16:20-17:00	Scott Davis Plessner and the structural study of ancient China
17:00-17:40	Björn Sydow Eccentrical Positionality and Practical Subjectivity

 

Room M2-07	Parallel session G Theme 1 Chair: Karl-Siegbert Rehberg
15:40-16:20	Jan Gulmans Helmuth Plessner and the philosophical naturalism of the life sciences
16:20-17:00	Thomas Fröhlich Work in Progress: Plessner & Life Sciences
17:00-17:40	Nathalie Gontier Questions of boundaries in nature and culture

 

Room M2-09	Parallel session H Theme 4 Chair: Raymond Corbey
15:40-16:20	Matthias Varul The Eccentricity of the Romantic Consumer: Campbell, Simmel, and Plessner
16:20-17:00	Veronika Magyar-Haas De-masking as social pedagogical practice
17:00-17:40	Matthias Schlossberger Habermas and the Philosophical Anthropology of Plessner

 

Room M3-03	Parallel session I Theme 4 Chair: Tilman Allert
15:40-16:20	Gema Ortiz del Castillo Spain as a Philosophical Problem? Historical judgement and Plessnerian criticism to some foreign views about the problem of modernity in Spain
16:20-17:00	Jetske van Oosten The unbearable freedom of dwelling
17:00-17:40	Thomas Ebke Life, Concept and Subject: Plessner’s vital turn in the light of Kant and Bergson

 

Room M3-04	Parallel session I Theme 2 and 3 Chair: Lenny Moss
15:40-16:20	Janna van Grunsven The Body Exploited: Torture and the Destruction of Self
16:20-17:00	Oreste Tolone Eccentricity and mental Illness
17:00-17:40	Marco Russo Merleau-Ponty and Plessner. A parallel action

 

Room M3-03	Meeting HPG
17:45-18.45	Meeting of members of the Helmuth Plessner Association

 

Room LB-097 (L-building, ground floor)	Public Lecture
19.30-21.30	Anton C. Zijderveld Philosophical sociology – an oxymoron?

 

Friday September 18, 2009

Room M1-17 Tokyo	Plenary session: Bio-ethics (Theme 3) Chair: Maarten Coolen
09:00-09:50	Christian Illies Learning from Plessner – the threefold task of Bioethics and the contribution of Philosophical Anthropology
	Plenary session: Living Culture (Theme 4) Chair: Maarten Coolen
09:50-10:40	Weidong Cao The New Vitalism of Hans Driesch and the Rise of New Cultural Conservatism in China
10:40-11:10	Coffee break
11:10-12:00	Hans-Georg Soeffner Functional Purposelessness. The ‘Practical Meaning’ of Aesthetics
12:00-12:50	Huib Ernste Eccentric Positionality and Urban Space

 

12:50-14:00

Lunch (L-building Restaurant 'De Carrousel')

 

Room M1-17 Tokyo	Plenary session: Living Culture (Theme 4) Chair: Huib Ernste
14:00-14:50	Petran Kockelkoren Varieties in the cultural production of the self: Plessner's material apriori effectuated
	Evolution and human life (Theme 1) Chair: Huib Ernste
14:50-15:40	Heike Delitz ‘Right’ and ‘false’ Evolutionism: Bergson vs. Spencer, Darwin and Co. and its relevance for Plessner's philosophical anthropology
15:40-16:10	Tea break
	Plenary session: Beyond man: protheses, cyborgs and artificial life (Theme 5)  Chair: Huib Ernste
16:10-17:00	Tilman Allert The analytical potential of philosophical anthropology towards technological innovations in clinical surgery
17:00-17:50	Jos de Mul Philosophical anthropology 2.0. Reading Plessner in the age of converging technologies

 

Room M1-17 Tokyo	Closing
17:50-18:00	Hans-Peter Krüger, president of the HPG

 

 (Click here to download abstracts of the lectures)

 

Five conference themes

Against this framework of Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, the conference will focus on the following five related, and partly overlapping themes, each of which is connected with different philosophical sub-disciplines and different life sciences.

1. Evolution and human life (philosophical anthropology, philosophy of biology)

Although the biophilosophy that Plessner offers in Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch should be understood as a typology of the different fundamental modes in which living beings maintain themselves as relatively self-sustaining organisms in their environments (i.e. as plant, animal and man), rather than as a theory on the evolution of life, nevertheless many parallels can be drawn between his philosophy of the organic and Darwinism. From this perspective one could address the question in which way the relation between Homo sapiens’ nature and that of (other) animals should be understood, and especially the question what the philosophical scope is of the thesis that man has emerged from animals in an evolutionary sense. There are also several interesting connections between his biophilosophy, the cultural sciences and technology studies. Also, his basic anthropological law of ‘natural artificiality’ provides us with an interesting perspective on the controversial topic whether natural selection in the evolution of hominids is indeed gradually being replaced by artificial selection, i.e. one in which technological and cultural developments dominate.

The key questions within this thematic domain are: What are the implications of the notion of eccentric positionality for the study of the special position of Homo sapiens amongst other living beings? How does the notion of ‘natural artificiality’ affect the standard Darwinian view of evolution, with respect to both animals and humans? And finally, perhaps the most intriguing question of all: what, actually, is life?

2. Embodied cognition (philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive sciences and neuroscience)

For some time, now, it has become impossible to imagine present day debates on skills and cognition, viz. as they are taking place within the philosophy of mind, without recurrent references taking place to Merleau-Ponty’s account of human corporeal intentionality in his Phénoménologie de la perception (1945). But In Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (1928) Plessner had already developed a sophisticated critique of Cartesian dualism, which has not yet been incorporated in these debates. However, his philosophical anthropology may very well turn out to be highly relevant in this context. Of course, in his critique Plessner rejects the opposition between body and mind as a fruitful starting point for explaining human behaviour altogether: for him a human being has to be understood as a psychophysical unity. A human being’s life is constituted by its continuously having to find a settlement with respect to the relation between being one’s living body [Leib] and having one’s body as a body thing [Körper]. The key questions to be addressed in this domain are: To which extent does Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, which systematically takes into account the findings of the empirical scientific research of human action and animal behaviour, find confirmation in the empirical findings of current cognitive and neurological sciences? What are the similarities and differences between Merleau-Ponty’s later existential-phenomenological approach of human beings and Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, which itself had already incorporated many insights from phenomenology? What can be said about the role of embodied cognition in current theories on human knowledge, skills, action and expression, which are developed by the cognitive and neurological sciences, based on the perspectives of these two philosophers?

3. Bio-ethics (medical anthropology, ethics, medical science)

Although Plessner, as a philosopher who tried to uncover the fundamental principles of (human) life, he did not develop an elaborate ethical theory, his philosophy of life and his philosophical anthropology do have far-reaching implications for questions concerning the normative and ethical aspects of human life. The three anthropological laws disclose man’s finitude. Because human life is characterized by mediated immediacy, even in those cases that one would know what is good or healthy for one’s life, there always remains a gap between the goal that one is pursuing and the end point one is actually realizing. One has to learn from the history of one’s pursuits. As humans are artificial by nature, any naturalistic account of what is good or healthy for someone will necessarily fail. Plessner’s view that man’s standpoint with respect to transcendence is necessarily utopian, entails, that humans, in any situation that demands an answer of a normative kind, can never have resort to a given, last or absolute, set of values. The key questions within this thematic domain are: If one takes man’s eccentric positionality into account, which import does this have for an understanding of human freedom? And what are the implications for the notion of health, in both physical and mental respect, although, of course, they are intertwined? How can humans, given the law of utopian standpoint, find and defend legitimate justifications for the morality of their actions? How is human morality tied up with man’s finitude and historicity, as understood in Plessner’s anthropology of eccentric positionality?

4. Living culture (philosophy of culture, aesthetics, cultural sciences)

Since humans are artificial by nature, culture and art are not supplements, but integral elements of human life. At present, the disciplines which study art and culture seem to oscillate between two poles: the existential-phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches in which the human ‘subject’ is understood in terms of self-clarification and self-interpretation, and the post-structural and constructivist approaches in which the ‘subject’ seems to disappear behind a variety of material and discursive structures. Plessner seems to propose a more balanced view by stressing the eccentric positionality of human existence, which on the one hand entails that human beings are confined and restricted to their current environmental structures and material realisation, while on the other hand human experience remains inherently contingent and undeter-mined, as a consequence of which humans live in a world of choice and sociality. Culture can thus be seen as the result of materialisation and embodiment, but also of choices in a field of mediated realisations. Thus, human activity, as well as human identity, is characterised by its situation-, institution- and medium-bound narrative and performative structure. This perspective also blends the distinction between culture and nature and conceives human actions as (eccentrical) ‘networks’. These ideas are confirmed by modern actor-network and non-representational theory. The key questions in this thematic domain are: How is Plessner’s concept of eccentric positionality to be the basis of human sociality? How do human actions and practices deal with the different kinds of positionality, which according to Helmuth Plessner are so crucial for human being(s)? What would Helmuth Plessner’s contribution to the social scientific debate on the relationship between structure and agency look like? What is the relationship of non-representational social theory and Helmuth Plessners multi-facetted concept of positionality? How does the restrictiveness of the embodied nature of human being create a fundamental drive towards overcoming these restrictions and a longing for a more anonymous, undetermined, cosmopoli-tan, world of flows and generality (a world of non-places) and a longing for unrestricted recognition and trust? How would Helmuth Plessner conceptualize the mediality of (post-)modern human being as an expression of life?

5. Beyond man: protheses, cyborgs and artificial life (philosophy of technology, AI and AL, robotics)

The notion that human beings are ‘artificial by nature’ is also relevant for those sciences that study the restoration, normalisation, reconfiguration, enhancement or even replacement of (aspects of) human life by technical means, such as protheses, artifical organs, cyborgs and artifical life forms. How should we evaluate these sciences from the perspective of Plessner’s philosophical anthropology? Although the law of natural artificiality does not provide any reasons to repudiate these technological developments as unnatural, the laws of mediated immediacy and of utopian standpoint warns us for being too optimistic about both the controllability of these developments and about their contribution to human happiness. Key questions in this thematic domain are: To what extent can the figure of the cyborg be seen as a further exploration of man’s eccentric positionality? Can the basic law of natural artificiality provide us with a framework to understand contemporary movements like transhumanism? And do they, in turn, place Plessner’s philosophical anthropology in a new light? I.e., is a kind of positionality that lies beyond eccentric positionality conceivable, and if so, how will it affect the cognitive, volitional and emotional capacities of mankind?

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