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The Forum is open to everyone, including students, visitors, and faculty members from all departments and institutes!

The 60 minute lecture is followed by a 10 minute break and a 30-60 minute discussion. The language of presentation is English or Hungarian.
 

The scope of the Forum includes all aspects of theoretical philosophy, including:

  • logic and philosophy of formal sciences
  • philosophy of science
  • modern metaphysics
  • epistemology
  • philosophy of language
  • problems in history of philosophy and history of science, relevant to the above topics
  • particular issues in natural and social sciences, important for the discourses in the main scope of the Forum.

Location









 
 
 


25 October (Friday) 4:15 PM  Room 226
Joint TPF and LaPoM session!
Attila Csordás
 
 
 Aging vs agings: limits and consequences of biomedical definitions
Currently, most people spend the last decades of their lives fighting multiple, chronic, age-associated diseases, compromising their life plans.
Scientific breakthroughs have arrived in the last decades in terms of understanding the major molecular and cellular processes behind biological aging and in the last 5-6 years a strong scientific consensus emerging around the comprehensivity of this list on one hand and the malleability of human longevity on the other. Treatments and interventions are currently under development to counteract these processes in order to extend healthspan and slow down biological aging.
In politics, there’s now a new single-issue movement, longevity politics, prioritising healthy longevity research and interventions.
These three changes concerning aging/longevity, a societal, a scientific and a political invoke further philosophical reflection.
The talk will focus on presenting new biomedical knowledge related to biological aging targeted to an unexposed audience and then phrase emerging conceptual problems as clearly as possible. The aim is stating the problematics, in which philosophy is traditionally good at, not providing the solutions.
The introduction provides the basic vocabulary of the talk and a map of different aging concepts are drawn.
The first 3, connected parts of the talk, the bulk of the material, tap into what can be called as the philosophy of the biomedical sciences. First the highlights of state of the art molecular biogerontology are presented. Next, some of the offered biomedical aging definitions are analysed from a conceptual point of view. Attempts to properly define biological aging has a versatile and challenging history. We are trying to look into why is that so with a focus on the hardship due to trying to conceptually handle biological aging as a singular, when it is so hopelessly plural and broad spectrum.  Third, the conceptual connection  between biological aging, health and disease are investigated.
The second, smaller, part of the talk goes into the practical relevance of the more theoretical considerations in the first part and it can be dubbed as philosophy of technology. Here some arguments are discussed on why interventions trying to slow, stop or reset the biological aging process cannot be considered enhancements but rather, treatments.
Finally, the author’s Open Lifespan book project is sketched, introducing its main methodological vehicle, the Open Lifespan thought experiment and upper limit possible world. The main point is to carve out a separate conceptual space and angle for the possibility of an indefinitely long, open-ended healthy lifespan, while constantly limiting this scenario with the reality of biomedical technology. This position comes sharply in-between the all too familiar current closed lifespan scenarios, underestimating possible and probable biomedical trajectories and the biomedically impossible immortality scenarios favoured by philosophers, intellectual influencers, transhumanists and mainstream journalists, grossly overestimating what’s possible.