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).
Meaning in Life
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. Another book (‘Sisyphus Fulfilled’), in which I am going to 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), is in progress and is likely to be finished by January 2024 and published later that year.