About Me

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Australian philosopher, literary critic, legal scholar, and professional writer. Based in Newcastle, NSW. My latest books are THE TYRANNY OF OPINION: CONFORMITY AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM (2019) and AT THE DAWN OF A GREAT TRANSITION: THE QUESTION OF RADICAL ENHANCEMENT (2021).

Monday, May 09, 2016

My Academia.edu page revisited

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've recently built myself a page at Academia.edu. This will bring together a fair bit of information about the academic side of my working life, including a detailed CV and a good selection of my work - with a bias toward older and and/or more obscure pieces.

Do feel free to check it out. Some highlights are:

1. "Science and the Sea of Faith" - previously published only in an obscure small-press publication in Australia.

2. "Should we fear death? Epicurean and modern arguments" - again, previously published only in a fairly obscure collection. I argue that there is a rational basis to fear death, though not as much as we actually do. Check it out for more detail.

3. "Mutants, Cyborgs, AI & Androids" - published in Meanjin in 2004. Meanjin is a well-known literary journal in Australia, but is not so well known elsewhere. Includes some wrestling with ideas about what it is to be human, whether human beings have a particular moral worth - compared to, say, artificial intelligences - and so on.

4. "Anthropomorphic Superbeings and Future Human Societies" - although I've delivered this paper orally, it hasn't previously been published.

5. "How free is the will? Sam Harris misses his mark" - this piece, which responds to Sam Harris's small book on free will (though it's much more than a book review), was originally published on the ABC Religion and Ethics Portal. The version I've uploaded is slightly longer than the previously published version, with some text from my original manuscript restored. There are also some other small tweaks. This is my definitive version.

In all, I've uploaded 18 papers so far, but the above pieces especially make it worthwhile in that they are not readily available to most readers (unlike, for example, articles in the Journal of Medical Ethics). I obviously consider them all to be solid work (or I wouldn't be making them more readily available), even if my interests and emphases have changed a bit since some of them were written.

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