Prosthetic Immortalities
eBook - PDF

Prosthetic Immortalities

Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life

  1. 350 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Prosthetic Immortalities

Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life

About this book

Examining the links between today’s ideas of radical life extension and age-old notions of immortality
 

From Plato’s notion of generation to Derrida’s concept of survival to such modern phenomena as anti-aging treatments, cryogenics, cloning, and whole-brain uploads, Adam Rosenthal’s Prosthetic Immortalities shows how the dream of indefinite life has always been a technological one: a matter of prosthesis. He argues that every biological instance of perpetual life, from one-celled organisms to rejuvenating jellyfish to Henrietta Lacks’s “immortal” cancer cells, always results in the transformation of the original being. There can, therefore, be no certainty of immortality. Yet, because finite mortal life is already marked by difference, division, and change, as Rosenthal concludes: “the problem of immortality will not cease to haunt us.”

 

Prosthetic Immortalities examines the persistence of humans’ aspirations of deathlessness, showing that the link between immortalization and prostheticization is not unique to a single period but is, rather, a ubiquitous element of the discourse of immortality, encompassing both modern technoscientific efforts and religious discourses of an afterlife. Rosenthal asks to what extent the emergence of a virtual, posited, immortal presence follows from the tenets of empirical science—and not simply from the discourse of biology but also, and more radically still, from biological organization itself.

 

Rosenthal ultimately argues that the discovery of biological immortals—lifeforms that naturally have indefinitely long lifespans, such as cancer cells and bacteria—present novel conceptual difficulties for traditional philosophical approaches to mortality and selfhood, asking whether it is life itself that first births immortalizing prostheses.

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Yes, you can access Prosthetic Immortalities by Adam R Rosenthal in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Mind & Body in Philosophy. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. Foreword: Preferring Being Condemned Not To
  6. Preface and Acknowledgments: Deconstruction’s Last Word, or The Afterlife of Immortality
  7. Introduction: On Prosthetic Immortalization
  8. Part I: Immortality as Indivisibility
  9. Chapter 1. Life as Generation in Plato
  10. Chapter 2. Derrida and the Mortal Immortality of Sovereignty
  11. Part II: From Immortal to Indefinite Life
  12. Chapter 3. Substance Immortality
  13. Chapter 4. Ontological Immortality
  14. Chapter 5. Biological Immortality
  15. Chapter 6. Mortality Revisited: On Derrida’s “Condemnation to Die” and “Condemnation to Death”
  16. Chapter 7. Undecidable Desire for Survival: Harari, Bostrom, Hägglund
  17. Part III: Indefinite Life in the Biological Sciences
  18. Chapter 8. Genetic Immortality
  19. Chapter 9. Biological Immortality I: Unicellular (Metabolic)
  20. Chapter 10. Interlude on Death, Division, and the Life of Henrietta Lacks
  21. Chapter 11. Biological Immortality II: Multicellular (Metabolic)
  22. Chapter 12. Biological Immortality III: Multicellular (Organismal)
  23. Chapter 13. Metabolism and the Meaning of Life
  24. Part IV: Immortality as Translation: Two (and a Half) Paths
  25. Chapter 14. Age Reversal
  26. Chapter 15. Whole Brain Emulation
  27. Chapter 16. Cloning and the Fictions of Immortality
  28. Conclusion: Am I, Then, Immortal?
  29. Notes
  30. Index
  31. Author Biography