cfp: The Terminator and Philosophy

Hi everyone! It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, as I have been trying to get Philosophy Sucks! off the ground (thanks to everyone who has come over and checked it out) and I am abivalent towards the practice of one author posting the same post on several blogs, and like everyone else I am super busy. At any rate, I am very excited to announce this call for papers. If you are a fan of the Terminator (show or movies) and you want to help me raise the quality of philosophy in the pop culture books then submit an abstract. And if you don’t want to do that, please help me spread the word! Also not the quick turn-around time. Blackwell wants to time the book with the new movie next summer and so it is a bit of a rush job but on the positive side: Acepted authors will be paid, the paper is only to be 10-20 pages, and it is to be written for a general audience! C’mon that’s a piece of cake! Oh, and it says ‘The Terminator and Philosophy’ but don’t let that put you off if you don’t work in a philosophy department…it is really ‘The Terminator and Cog Sci’ in my opinion…




Call for Abstracts

The Terminator and Philosophy


 


Edited by Richard Brown and Kevin S. Decker


 


The Blackwell Philosophy and Popular Culture Series


 


Please circulate and post widely.


Apologies for Cross-posting.


 


To propose ideas for future volumes in the Blackwell series please contact the Series Editor, William Irwin, at wtirwin@kings.edu.


 


Abstracts and subsequent essays should be philosophically substantial but accessible, written to engage the intelligent lay reader. Contributors of accepted essays will receive an honorarium.


Possible themes and topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:


“Can We Really Change the Future?” or “Killing Sarah Connor”: Cyberdyne Systems, time travel and the grandfather paradox; Skynet and John Connor: philosophy of technology and creating our own enemies; “Sentience, Sapience, and Self-Awareness”: issues in philosophy of mind; Neural Net to Supercomputer to ‘Software in Cyberspace’: Skynet and multiple realization;“Is Skynet Justified in Defending Itself?” the ethics of war and artificial intelligence; “Irrefutable Delusions”: Sarah Connor, Delusional Beliefs, and Standards of Evidence in T2;“Stop Miles Bennett Dyson”: Sarah Connor’s transformation into a killer (is violence contagious?) or Sarah Connor’s transformation from ‘80’s ditz to Feminist Icon; “Judgment Day is Unavoidable” or “No Fate but what we Make”: eternalist vs. presentist perspectives on the original versus modified timelines; “John Connor is the Most Important Person in the World”: causality and the meaning of life; “To Preserve and Protect”: the contrastive values of human versus artificial life; “What is a Terminator?”: The Ontology of Fictional Objects; “I Have Data Which Could be Interpreted as Pain”: machines, consciousness, and simulated perception; The T-1000: adaptable machines and emergence; How Did They Build Skynet?: “truthmakers” and knowledge with no source; Andy and the Turk: killing the innocent to save the innocent or Are scientists responsible for their inventions?; “Terminatrix”: the T3 gynoid , feminism, and trangressive cyborgs; “Should we Stop the Future?”: Conservatism and the “Terminator Argument” in bioethics; “The Closest Thing to a Father I Have”: John Connor & the Terminator; “Desire is Irrelevant, I am a MACHINE”:  Who is Responsible for the Terminator’s Actions? Or freewill vs determinism; “Assume the Shape of Anything it Touches”: The Metaphysics of Transformation in T2 & T3; The Govinator: Fantasy and reality in politics; Does the Future Exist now?: The nature of spacetime and reality; Embodied Artificial Intelligence: Is AI actually possible, and if so, how close are we to creating it?; Monstrous Technology: From Frankenstein to the Terminator.


 


Submission Guidelines:


1. Submission deadline for abstracts (100-500 words) and CV(s): September 8, 2008.


2. Submission deadline for drafts of accepted papers: November 3, 2008.


Kindly submit by e-mail (with or without Word attachment) to: Richard Brown at onemorebrown@yahoo.com

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