Socratic and Cartesian Personae: Undismembering and Liquidation (original) (raw)

Reflections on the Socratic notion of the self

Care of the self in early Greek philosophy, 2012

The ancient Greek notion of “care of the self” and the self-knowledge it presupposes is premised on the concept of introspection. Introspection obviously involves “consciousness”; more precisely, it implies a “conscious” notion of the “self.” Consciousness itself can be notorious difficult to define and explain. In this paper, I examine some of the historical precedents for “caring for the self” as we find them in Plato’s earlier dialogues, notably the Apology, and the kind of consciousness it presupposes. This was an invited paper for a panel on “Care of the self in early Greek philosophy” organized by Annie Larivée for the 80th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of New Brunswick, May 2011. I’ve added a few references to my more recent work on the topic.

Dissolving Nature: How Descartes Made Us Posthuman

Techne: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 2012

This paper is a historical inquiry into the philosophical fault-line that leads from mechanicism to posthumanism. I focus on a central aspect of posthumanism: the erosion of the distinction between organism and machine, nature and art, and the biological and engineering sciences. I claim that shift can be placed in the seventeenth century, in Descartes’ biology. Although Descartes is known primarily as the philosopher of the cogito, the mythical cradle of rational humanism, I argue that the dawn of the modern human was also the place of its undoing. The Cartesian fusion of the natural and the technological opened the door to distinctly posthuman understandings of the living body, its relation to technological extensions, and the possibility of its drastic alteration. Descartes’ scientific writings are a kind of laboratory, rehearsing the theoretical and practical amalgamation of machines and organisms in at least two senses: (a) the prosthetic and instrumental enhancement of the body, its technological production, extension and mediation; and (b) the functional integration of machines and organisms in medical, industrial, military, and other contexts. Cartesian mechanicism demanded a reconceptualization of bodily boundaries, organismic unity, natural finality, causation, and bio/technological instrumentality-all of which Descartes boldly attempted to theorize in terms of the wondrous technologies of his day. As the living vanished into the immanent plane of the machine, nature could no longer be taken as a clear source of normative frameworks, and the category of ‘nature’ became nearly impossible to define. Also, Descartes’ radical proposal obscured the possibility of thinking the human as ontologically unique, or as having an ideal unity, despite its privileged relationship to the immaterial (the soul-body union). In what follows, we will examine the posthuman ramifications of these aspects.

Patočka’s Socrates: The Care for the Soul and Human Existence

Investigaciones Fenomenológicas, 2021

In order to get out of present day discussions between (for example) determinism and free will, creationism and evolution, bios and zoē, human existence and biological life – those dead end binaries of our present day thinking into which we have manoeuvred ourselves – we need to revisit the Ancient discussions relating to the care of the soul and human existence. I will draw together these two themes from Jan Patočka’s writings by anchor-ing them in his account of Socrates who was the first to emphasise the idea of human re-sponsibility not only for thinking but also for human acting in the world. I will argue that the significant common feature – the care for our own being, our existence – brings Patočka’s reflections on the care for the soul and care for our human existence together. While, according to Patočka, the notion of the care for the soul was displaced from the philosophical reflection by the modern scientific venture, the idea of human existence is, although problematic ...

Socrates and the Socratic Philosophies

Socratica IV. Selected papers, 2020

Selected papers on the Socratic Philosophies peer-reviews by the Editorial Committee of the International Society for Socratic Studies.

Socrates in the 21st century.pdf

Philosophical Practice and Counseling. Official Journal of the Korean Society of Philosophical Pratcice, 2018

In this essay, which is a summary of the main ideas in the author’s Ph.D. research (still work in progress), the author proposes a method to justify philosophical practice philosophically. Such a justification is necessary for the sake of the connection with academic philosophy and to avoid philosophical bungling. The author connects to Socrates’ skeptical and maieutic legacy, as well as to Husserl’s perceptive/experiential and Wittgenstein’s descriptive and ordinary language legacies. He explains his hypothesis that a philosopher might be aware of his epistemic premises and able to test these premises in the practice of philosophizing. He discusses his methodic and epistemic hypotheses, the latter being experiential and semantic questioning.