CFP: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences: Critiquing Technologies of the Mind: Enhancement, Alteration, and Anthropotechnology
Submission deadline: June 30, 2015
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Critiquing Technologies of the Mind: Enhancement, Alteration, and
Anthropotechnology
Special Issue of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
Over the past twenty or even thirty years, an international and interdisciplinary body of research has developed on the various ethical and philosophical issues raised by the possibility of using technological means to transform the human body beyond medical ends. The phrase that has emerged in the English-speaking bioethical debate to describe this new field is ‘human enhancement’. Some authors, particularly in France, have raised objections to the positive valuation that is implied in the preferred English terminology. As an alternative, the terms ‘anthropotechnics’ and ‘anthropotechnology’, combining the Greek words ‘anthropos’ and ‘techne’, have been suggested as preferable conceptual tools, which avoid the implicit positive valuation of ‘enhancement’, while directly addressing the question of technological intervention in and on the body for extra-medical ends.
This special issue will investigate a specific area of the anthropotechnics/enhancement debate: those modifications of the body aimed at affecting the processes of the mind. This field is generally referred to as ‘cognitive enhancement’, we prefer the more neutral and encompassing expression ‘technologies of the mind’. The issue will aim to address the fundamental ethical and philosophical questions surrounding this area of technology through the prism of the philosophically productive contrasts and conceptual differences between the (broadly speaking) Anglo-American and the (broadly speaking) French debates. The idea of anthropotechnics has emerged out of different philosophical traditions than the mainstream Anglo-American philosophical discourse around enhancement. We argue that a careful interrogation of the conceptual resources drawn upon by the French and, rather coarsely speaking, continental philosophical traditions (here we include phenomenology, hermeneutics, French epistemology, and post-structuralism) examined against a backdrop of the ‘enhancement’ debate more familiar perhaps to English speaking readers, will significantly enrich and broaden the philosophical literature in this area, as well as enlarging its international conceptual scope.
We welcome contributions on all topics and from all approaches within the scope outlined above. A more detailed CFP is available from the Journal's website:
http://www.springer.com/philosophy/philosophical+traditions/journal/11097?detailsPage=societies
*Submission information*
Word limit: 8000 words
Deadline for submissions: 30 June 2015
Publication is expected in 2016/17
Peer review: all submissions will be subject to a double blind peer-review process. Please prepare your submission for blind reviewing. Submissions should be made directly via the journal’s online submission system: 
(http://www.editorialmanager.com/phen) indicating: Special Issue:
Critiquing Technologies of the Mind.
For further details, please check the website of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences:
http://www.springer.com/philosophy/philosophical+traditions/journal/11097
Specific questions about the special issue can be addressed to Darian Meacham ([email protected]), Ruud ter Meulen ([email protected]), or Sylvie Allouche ([email protected]). Please include the text “Special Issue: Critiquing Technologies of the Mind” in the subject line of the email.