Research
Transhumanism and the Philosophy of Human Enhancement
Since 2007 I have been looking into current transhumanist philosophies, their key ideas, and the history of these ideas. Key transhumanist ideas are human self-design, the elimination of all suffering, the achievement of perfection and immortality, and the complete defeat of (human) nature. In order to understand these ideas better and to be able to evaluate them properly I have looked into their history, followed their development and identified their mythological status. The object was to gain clarity about what we as human beings are, what we want to, or ought to, become, and what technological advances are worth striving for. This strand of my research resulted in more than 15 papers and five books, 'Better Humans? Understanding the Enhancement Project' (2013), 'Sex and the Posthuman Condition' (2014), 'The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television' (ed., 2015), Mythologies of Transhumanism’ (2016), and ‘Moral Enhancement. Critical Perspectives’ (ed. with Lewis Coyne, 2018).
Life, Death, and Meaning
Since 2017 I have become increasingly interested in philosophical conceptions of meaningful living. I see my work on this as a natural extension of my previous work on human enhancement, which I thought people disagreed on mainly because they had very different ideas of what makes life worth living. This is particularly evident in the debate on radical life extension. Those in favour seem to think that as long as we have to die life is meaningless, while those against are inclined to think that, on the contrary, life would be meaningless if we did not have to die.
This prompted me to study more closely the work of some classic philosophers and writers who all, in their own particular way, struggled with the problem of finding meaning in a mortal world. My work on this resulted in my first book on the subject, published in 2019 under the title ‘The Meaning of Life and Death. Ten Classic Thinkers on the Ultimate Question’, followed by the edited collection ‘Death and Meaning’ in 2021, which resulted from a Royal Institute of Philosophy conference that I organised here at Liverpool the year before and which contains my paper “When Death Comes Too Late: Radical Life Extension and the Makropulos Case”.
Another conference I organised was the 6th International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life, which took place from 17 to 19 June 2024 at the University of Liverpool. The keynote speakers were Tatjana Schnell, James Tartaglia, and Kieran Setiya. This resulted in a collection of papers that I edited for the Journal of Philosophy of Life, published in January 2025.
Another book (‘Meaning in Life. A Subjectivist Account’), in which I provide a more systematic account of meaning in life and defend a subjectivist position (according to which living a meaningful life means experiencing one’s life as meaningful), was published in March 2025. I have tried to capture the core idea of this book in a poem that I wrote for the University of Liverpool Research in Verse Poetry Competition: “Digging for Truffles”.
Currently I’m in the process of finishing yet another book on the subject called ‘Philosophical Dialogues on the Meaning of Life.’ This book features a series of fictional Socratic dialogues on meaning in life, which will be published, probably in spring 2026, in the Routledge series Philosophical Dialogues on Contemporary Problems.
Also related to this project is my work on anti-natalism, which has resulted in a special issue of the Journal of Value Inquiry entitled “Would It Be Better if We Had Never Existed? David Benatar’s Anti-Natalism” that I edited with Oliver Hallich in 2022, which also contains my paper “Anti-Natalism, Pollyannaism, and Asymmetry: A Defence of Cheery Optimism”. My short story “Mother Knows Best” provides a rather gloomy commentary on moral enhancement and anti-natalism.