Ewa Nowak
Advancing the Human Self
Do Technologies Make Us “Posthuman”?
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Publishing Reviewer:
Prof. Dr. Roma Kriaučiūnienė (Vilnius Uviversity, Lithuania)
This work was supported by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) under a
research grant OPUS 9, no 2015/17/B/HS1/02381.
ISSN 1619-005X
ISBN 978-3-631-80678-4 (Print)
ISBN 978-3-631-82213-5 (E-PDF)
ISBN 978-3-631-82214-2 (EPUB)
ISBN 978-3-631-82215-9 (MOBI)
DOI 10.3726/b16974
© Peter Lang GmbH
Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Berlin 2020
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About the author
Ewa Nowak is a full professor and chair of ethics at AMU Poznań (Poland); a former visiting scholar of Cornell Univ. and Universities of Konstanz, Bern, Berlin and Siegen; the co-author of Ethos in Public Life (2008) and Experimental Ethics (2013); and the co-editor of Kohlberg Revisited (2015) and Educating Competencies for Democracy (2013).
About the book
Do technologies advance our self-identities, as they do our bodies, cognitive skills, and the next developmental stage called postpersonal? Did we already manage to be fully human, before becoming posthuman? Are we doomed to disintegration and episodic selfhood? This book examines the impact of radical technopoiesis on our selves from a multidisciplinary perspective, including the health humanities, phenomenology, the life sciences and humanoid AI (artificial intelligence) ethics. Surprisingly, our body representations show more plasticity than scholarly concepts and sociocultural narratives. Our embodied selves can withstand transplants, bionic prostheses and radical somatechnics, but to remain autonomous and authentic, our agential potentials must be strengthened – and this is not through ‘psychosurgery’ and the brain–computer interface.
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Table of Contents
Introduction. Against the Stream: Searching for a Concept of the Self in Posthumanist Contexts
1. Developmental Psychology Meets Phenomenological Psychology
3.1 An Outline of Narrative Theory
3.2 The Narrative Self in Humanist Clinical Contexts and Beyond Them
3.3 Between Narrative, Silence and Dysnarrativa
3.4 Literary Narratives on Becoming Posthuman
3.4.1 Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis
3.4.2 T. R. Brown’s The Face in the Mirror
II. The Evolution of Body Concept
1. Objective Material Reality, Brute Body, Fleshness, Corporeity
2. Living Matter and Soma Organikon
3. Organic Identity and Individuality
6. “… Like Organs of One Single Intercorporeality”
7. Assembly, Hybrid, and Crosscorporeal 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