Canguilhem amid the cyborgs

George Canguilhem's 1947 lecture,‘Machine and organism’,is a rich source of ideas for thinking about the relationships between living organisms and machines. He takes all tools and machines to be extensions of the bodymand part of life itself (which does not make machines any more good or bad than every living organism is good or bad). These insights are updated with a discussion of cyborgs. An account is given of the original idea of the cyborg (Clynes and Kline 1960), and of its transformations in science fiction and at the hands of Donna Haraway and Andrew Pickering. Canguilhem is profoundly anti-Cartesian, but on account oshis vision of life which breaks down the old barriers between natural and artificial, mind and body, manufactured and created.     

Between Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman: between discourse in the abstract and face-to-face interaction

Michel Foucault's ‘archaeology’ and Erving Goffman's interpersonal sociology are complementary. Both are essential for understanding how classifications of people interact with the people classified, and hence for the author's studies of ‘making up people’. The paper begins by explaining how that project is rooted in an ‘existentialist’ conception of the person. It then uses Goffman's Asylums and Foucault's Folie et déraison - both published in 1961 - to illustrate how these methodologies reinforce each other.     

How "natural' are "kinds' of sexual orientation?

Law and Philosophy -     

How “Natural” are “Kinds” of Sexual Orientation?

Law and Philosophy -