The 2023 Annual Conference of the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) will take place from the 9th to the 11th of August 2023 (+ pre-conference on the 7th and the 8th of August 2023). It will be hosted by the Gokongwei Brothers School of Education and Learning Design (GBSEALD) of the Ateneo de Manila University. All details of the event – including themes, call for papers, plenary speakers, submission timeline and transportation & accommodation information – can be found on the conference website here.
Category Archives: Events
IACR Conference 2022 – The Hague + Zoom, August 8-12
The 2022 Annual Conference of the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) will take place from the 10th to the 12th of August 2022 (+ pre-conference on the 8th and the 9th of August 2022). It will be hosted by the International Institute of Social Sciences (ISS) in the Hague (Netherlands) part of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Details of the event, including themes this year centred around ‘Realist Complexity, between Causal and Complex Systems’ can be found on the conference website here.
Roundtable discussion: The Limits of the Human in Post-human Society – Grenoble Ecole de Management, Jan 14 2022
The ninth annual Centre for Social Ontology workshop will take place at Grenoble Ecole de Management from January 11th to January 14th, 2022. It will culminate in a roundtable with Prof. Margaret Archer and colleagues on the morning of Friday January 14th.
This roundtable is intended both as an intellectual exchange and as a celebration of the recent quadrilogy The Future of the Human.
Until the most recent decades, natural and social science could regard the ‘human being’ as their unproblematic point of reference, with monsters, clones and drones being acknowledged as fantasies dreamed up for the purposes of fiction or academic argument. In future, this common, taken for granted benchmark will be replaced by various amalgams of human biology supplemented by technology – a fact that has direct implications for democracy, social governance and human rights, owing to questions surrounding standards for social inclusion, participation and legal protection.
Considering the question of who or what counts as a human being and the challenges posed by anti-humanism, the implications for the global social order of the technological ability of some regions of the world to ‘enhance’ human biology, and the defence of humankind in the face of artificial intelligence, the books in this series examine the challenges posed to the universalism of humankind by various forms of anti-humanism, and seek to defend ‘human essentialism’ by accentuating the liabilities and capacities particular to human beings alone.
Those interested in attending are requested to RSVP before December 15th with Ismael Al-Amoudi: ismael[dot]al-amoudi[at]gmail.com.
Friday 14th January 2022, Grenoble Ecole de Management, room E341
09.30: Roundtable with Prof. Margaret Archer and colleagues from the Centre for Social Ontology
12:00: Light buffet
IACR Conference 2021 – online, September 20-24
The 2021 Annual Conference of the International Association for Critical Realism (#IACR2021) will be held online this year. Hosted by Rhodes University and the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa), it will take place via Zoom from the 20th to the 24th of September. Details of the event, including subthemes this year centred around the unifying theme of emancipation, can be found here.
What is Essential to Being Human? Can AI Robots Not Share It?
The latest volume of the Post-human Society and the Future of Humanity book series has been published and is available for purchase from Routledge. Edited by Margaret Archer and Andrea Maccarini, this compilation of essays “asks whether there exists an essence exclusive to human beings despite their continuous enhancement – a nature that can serve to distinguish humans from artificially intelligent robots, now and in the foreseeable future.”
Considering what might qualify as such an essence, this volume demonstrates that the abstract question of ‘essentialism’ underpins a range of social issues that are too often considered in isolation and usually justify ‘robophobia’, rather than ‘robophilia’, in terms of morality, social relations and legal rights. Any defence of human exceptionalism requires clarity about what property(ies) ground it and an explanation of why these cannot be envisaged as being acquired (eventually) by AI robots. As such, an examination of the conceptual clarity of human essentialism and the role it plays in our thinking about dignity, citizenship, civil rights and moral worth is undertaken in this volume. What is Essential to Being Human? will appeal to scholars of social theory and philosophy with interests in human nature, ethics and artificial intelligence.
Chapters
1. Introduction – Margaret S. Archer and Andrea M. Maccarini
2. On Robophilia and Robophobia – Douglas V. Porpora
3. Sapience and Sentience: A Reply to Porpora – Margaret S. Archer
4. Relational Essentialism – Pierpaolo Donati
5. Artificial Intelligence: Sounds like a friend, looks like a friend, is it a friend? – Jamie Morgan
6. Growing Up in a World of Platforms: What Changes and What Doesn’t? – Mark Carrigan
7. On Macropolitics of Knowledge for Collective Learning in the Age of AI-Boosted Big Relational Tech – Emmanuel Lazega and Jaime Montes-Lihn
8. Can AIs do Politics? – Gazi Islam
9. Inhuman Enhancements? When Human Enhancements Alienate from Self, Others, Society and Nature – Ismael Al-Amoudi
10. The Social Meanings of Perfection: Human Self-Understanding in a Post-Human Society – Andrea M. Maccarini
Post-Human Futures: Human Enhancement, Artificial Intelligence and Social Theory
The latest volume of the Post-human Society and the Future of Humanity book series has been published and is available for purchase from Routledge. Edited by Mark Carrigan and Doug Porpora, this volume “engages with post-humanist and transhumanist approaches to present an original exploration of the question of how humankind will fare in the face of artificial intelligence.”
With emerging technologies now widely assumed to be calling into question assumptions about human beings and their place within the world, and computational innovations of machine learning leading some to claim we are coming ever closer to the long-sought artificial general intelligence, it defends humanity with the argument that technological ‘advances’ introduced artificially into some humans do not annul their fundamental human qualities. Against the challenge presented by the possibility that advanced artificial intelligence will be fully capable of original thinking, creative self-development and moral judgement and therefore have claims to legal rights, the authors advance a form of ‘essentialism’ that justifies providing a ‘decent minimum life’ for all persons. As such, while the future of the human is in question, the authors show how dispensing with either the category itself or the underlying reality is a less plausible solution than is often assumed.
Chapters
1. Being Human (or What?) in the Digital Matrix Land: The Construction of the Humanted – Pierpaolo Donati
2. Being Human as an Option: How to Rescue Personal Ontology from Transhumanism, and (Above All) Why Bother – Andrea M. Maccarini
3. Perplexity Logs: On Routinized Certainty Work and Social Consequences of Seeking Advice from an Artificial Intelligence – Emmanuel Lazega
4. Artificial Intelligence and the Challenge of Social Care in Aging Societies: Who or What Will Care for Us in the Future? – Jamie Morgan
5. Why Should Enhanced and Unenhanced Humans Care for Each Other? – Ismael Al-Amoudi and Gazi Islam
6. Can Humans and AI Robots be Friends? – Margaret S. Archer
7. Humanity’s End: Where Will We Be in a Million Years? – Douglas V. Porpora
From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Irresponsibility – Ismael Al-Amoudi, University of Bristol
On January 14, 2021, Professor Ismael Al-Amoudi presented a guest lecture at the University of Bristol, entitled “From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Irresponsibility: Deep machine learning in organisations”.
Image via Paul Chapman, CC BY 2.0
Ritual, Communitas and Critique – Gazi Islam, HEC Montreal
Professor Gazi Islam gave an invited presentation entitled “Ritual, Communitas and Critique: Theorizing Events as Moments of Organizing” to the HEC Montréal Department of Management, on the 26th of November, 2020. Details can be found here.
Margaret Archer joint-recipient of the International Oreste Benzi Award 2020
Professor Margaret Archer has been jointly awarded the 2020 International Oreste Benzi Award for her work against human trafficking. Archer’s ‘Housing, Help and Hospitality’ charity for trafficked women and their children was particularly lauded in the award announcement. A detailed account of the work of this charity can be found here.
The Father Oreste Benzi Foundation “promotes research, studies and opportunities for analysis and discussion on the needs of suffering, marginalised and disadvantaged people,” inspired by the work of Father Oreste Benzi, priest of the Diocese of Rimini.
Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility as Buzzwords? – Ismael Al-Amoudi, Grenoble Ecole de Management
In autumn of 2020, professor Ismael Al-Amoudi gave an inaugural lecture to Masters students of Energy Management and Purchasing Management at the Grenoble Ecole de Management, entitled “Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility as Buzzwords?” The presentation slides are available upon request.
Centre for Social Ontology 