Professor Stefan Lorenz Sorgner Invited to Give Stanislaw Kaminski Memorial Lectures

JCU Philosophy Professor Stefan Lorenz Sorgner was recently invited to give the Stanislaw Kaminski Memorial Lectures at The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, in Poland. The lectures will be delivered from May 20 to 24, 2024, and will introduce participants to a variety of transhumanist approaches, debates, and philosophies.

The lectures will cover the history of transhumanism and its different approaches, distinguishing classical transhumanism, which aligns with utilitarianism, utopianism, objectivism, and a linear way of thinking, from Euro-Transhumanism, influenced by Nietzsche. Then it will tackle contemporary philosophical challenges across various disciplines, such as discussions on the ontology of emerging technologies, the ethics of transhumanism, posthuman art philosophies, and education in a posthuman paradigm.

Specific questions will be addressed, such as whether past techniques and artworks should be preserved, if AI can create valuable art, the relationship between music, magic, and technology, and the philosophical implications of gene technologies, brain-computer-interfaces, AI, and space technologies like the moon being used for data storage. The lectures will also explore societal questions like the impact of Starlink on political structures and whether universal public health insurance should be adopted against majority opinion.

Stefan Lorenz Sorgner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at John Cabot University in Rome and Director and Co-Founder of the Beyond Humanism Network, Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), Research Fellow at the Ewha Institute for the Humanities at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, academic Advisor of Humanity+, and Visiting Fellow at the Ethics Centre of the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena. He is editor of more than 10 essay collections, and author of the following monographs: Metaphysics Without Truth (Marquette University Press 2007), Menschenwürde nach Nietzsche (WBG 2010), Transhumanismus (Herder 2016), Schöner neuer Mensch (Nicolai, 2018), Übermensch (Schwabe 2019), On Transhumanism (Penn State University Press 2020), We Have Always Been Cyborgs (Bristol University Press 2022), Philosophy of Posthuman Art (Schwabe 2022), Transhumanismus (mit Philip von Becker, Westendverlag 2023), Homo ex machina (together with Bernd Kleine-Gunk, Goldmann 2023). In addition, he is Editor-in-Chief and Founding Editor of the Journal of Posthuman Studies (a double-blind peer review journal, published by Penn State University Press since 2017).