This issue displays our journal’s cosmopolitanism by featuring two new and two regular contributors, each from a different country not including the USA. Andrew Bartlett, the organizer of last summer’s GATE conference in Vancouver, concludes his three-part series on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, once more demonstrating his ability to ferret out fundamental anthropological themes in works of science fiction. Raoul Eshelman‘s article, his sixth for Anthropoetics, adds the visual arts to literature, film, and architecture as sources for performatism, the post-postmodern esthetic he has discovered and analyzed. Raphaël Baeriswyl persuasively brings a Girardian perspective to bear on the subject of asymmetric warfare, which may well be this century’s thorniest political problem. And I am especially happy to welcome an old friend, the distinguished philosopher of science Jean-Pierre Dupuy, to our list of contributors with an article containing some alarming conclusions concerning the ever greater threat of global catastrophe.
About Our Contributors
Raphaël Baeriswyl was born in 1975 in Lausanne, Switzerland. In civilian life, he is a lawyer at the Geneva Bar and specialises in banking law, asset (in particular aircraft) finance and commercial litigation. As an officer in the Swiss armed forces, he served in the mountain infantry and the cycling troops and is now an investigating judge in a military court. His main interests and research areas are logic and strategy, epistemology of social sciences, and axiology (descriptive and factual study of values).
Andrew Bartlett lives in Vancouver and teaches composition and literary analysis at Kwantlen University College in Surrey, British Columbia. He has attended several meetings of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. He organized the Generative Anthropology Thinking Event in Vancouver (July 2007). He is working on a book-length study in applied GA, Playing God the Creator: Science Fictions of the Artificial Human.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy is Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the École Polytechnique, Paris, Professor (1/3rd time) of French and Political Science at Stanford University, and a member of Académie Française des Technologies. His latest books in English are On the Origins of Cognitive Science. The Mechanization of the Mind – (Princeton University Press, 2000; The MIT Press, 2008) and Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality, (C.S.L.I. Publications, Stanford University, 1998); in French, La Panique, (Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2003), Pour un catastrophisme éclairé, (Seuil, 2002), Avions-nous oublié le mal? Penser la politique après le 11 septembre, (Bayard, 2002), Petite métaphysique des tsunamis, (Seuil, 2005), and Retour de Tchernobyl, (Seuil, 2006). He is currently engaged in research on the antinomies of Reason at the age of rational choice theory, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science; the ethics of nuclear deterrence and preemptive war; the philosophy of risk and uncertainty; and the philosophical underpinnings and the future societal and ethical impacts of the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science.
Raoul Eshelman (Ph.D. University of Constance 1988, Habilitation Hamburg 1995) is a Slavist and Comparatist specializing in modern and postmodern literature. He is presently teaching at the Dept. of Slavic Literatures at the University of Munich. His book Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism will appear in 2008 as a publication of the Davies Group.