A Pragmatic Approach to Ethical Inquiry on Transhuman Athletes and Gene Doping in Sport

Gene doping is the most recent addition to the list of banned practices formulated by the World Anti-doping Agency. It is a subset of doping that utilizes the technology involved in gene therapy. The latter is still in the experimental phase but has the potential to be used as a type of medical treatment involving alterations of a patient‘s genes. I apply a pragmatic form of ethical inquiry to evaluate the application of this medical innovation in the context of sport for performance-enhancement purposes and how it will affect sport, the individual, society and humanity at large. I analyze the probable ethical implications that will emerge from such procedures in terms of values that lie at the heart of the major arguments offered by scholars on both affirmative and opposing sides of the debate on gene doping, namely fairness, autonomy and the conception of what it means to be human.

Transhuman education: Sloterdijk's reading of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism

Peter Sloterdijk presented a reading of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism at a conference held at Elmau in 1999. Reinterpreting the meaning of humanism in the light of Heidegger's Letter, Sloterdijk focused his presentation on the need to redefine education as a form of genetic ‘taming’ and proposed what seemed to be support for positive eugenics. Although Sloterdijk claimed that he only wanted to open a debate on the issue, he could not have been surprised at the level of opposition this suggestion aroused. In the weeks following, he blamed Habermas for raising this opposition and for refusing to engage with him openly. Although Luis Arenas has chronicled the aftermath of Sloterdijk's paper, it may be of interest to educators to examine how Heidegger's text is presented. What is this new humanism? If Heidegger's new humanism was based on a mystical attitude towards Being, so Sloterdijk's new humanism was to be based on the materialist principles of a biotechnological age. Unlike Heidegger who rejected technology as yet one further example of the forgetfulness of Being, Sloterdijk seems to embrace technology and the enhancement of the human body and mind as the next great step forward in educational theory. Could he possibly be right? Is education in these times a partner or an opponent of the technological enhancement of the human being? This article tries to identify Sloterdijk's disagreements with Heidegger on the question of the human.

The coming

Through an exploration of representations of metamorphosis and the creation of a body of written work, this thesis uses a critical examination of theoretical approaches to metamorphosis in combination with textual analysis of representations of metamorphosis and creative practice as research to arrive at the beginnings of an ethic of writing. The creative work, The Coming, consists of a collection of short fiction, The Coming, and two collections of poetry, Orison and Milagros. The exegesis, Transhuman Change: towards an ethic of writing, explores theories about metamorphosis as a figure for writing, as a trope, and as a motif for exploring identity to contextualise the analysis of representations of metamorphosis from which the ethic is developed. With reference to the psychosexual development theory of Jacques Lacan and Elaine Scarry’s philosophy of the body, pain, language and creativity, the exegesis examines existing approaches to metamorphosis and uses supplementary textual analysis of influential representations of metamorphosis from Ovid to Pygmalion, X-Men and Extreme Makeover to explore assumptions about the body, language, the self, gender in western culture. The limitations of the performance of representations of metamorphosis as a figure for the self’s survival of death are considered in the light of voice as metonym for self to propose an ethic which valorises life. The experience of sex and the construction of gender in representations of metamorphosis are considered in the light of Lacan’s theory of desire and Scarry’s theory of the body and language to propose an ethic of representing gender ironically. The motif of the faithless lover and the Pygmalion myth are considered in the light of the (m)other’s role in language to propose an ethic in which indeterminacy constitutes the condition for being aware of oneself among selves. Each of the three proposals is discussed in relation to the short fiction, memoir and poems produced in the course of this research to test their limits and possibilities as the foundation of an emerging ethic of writing.

Mesons: ontologia

Este trabalho se intitula Mesons e propõe descrever e fundamentar uma nova teoria: a mesologia. Trata-se de uma teoria geral dos meios [mesons] e das mediações, uma ontologia dos meios, poderíamos dizer, cujo intuito é fornecer parâmetros conceituais para a compreensão de fenômenos bastante heterogêneos, sejam eles de ordem cultural ou natural, física ou metafísica. Essa abrangência é possível porque a mesologia se apoia em princípios cosmológicos e ontológicos para se fundamentar. Nesse sentido, um dos princípios fundamentais em torno dos quais a teoria dos mesons se articula é o binômio finito-infinito, entendido a partir da ontologia e da cosmologia. Por isso, esta tese leva o subtítulo de Ontologia, pois pretende delinear as premissas metateóricas elementares dessa teoria. Portanto, este é um trabalho eminentemente metaempírico, cujos objetos material e formal coincidem em um mesmo objeto conceitual: a demarcação epistemológica do conceito de mesons, bem como a exploração de diversos fenômenos que possam ser descritos e agenciados pela mesologia. A partir deste núcleo primário que é a definição da ontologia dos mesons, uma série de outros conceitos se dissemina, centrais para a compreensão da mesologia como um todo: mesons, meios, ser, vida, sapiens, ontologia, cosmologia, infinito, finito, heterarquia, heterogênese, antropia, antropofanias, antropogemas, transumano, holografia, holograma, mereografia, mereograma, pluriontologias, transferência, animismo, imaginal, tempestade, entre outros. Obviamente não pude analisar e estabilizar todos esses conceitos neste trabalho. E se não o fiz é também porque imagino este trabalho dedicado a delinear o ser dos mesons, ou seja, a ontologia dos meios, como o primeiro volume de um projeto maior, em diversos volumes, intitulado Mesons, e que abordará outros conceitos e outras noções, tais como cosmo, vida, forma, morte, sexualidade, em suas determinações e especificidades propriamente mesológicas.