David Koepsell | |
---|---|
Born | David Richard Koepsell 1969 New York, U.S. |
Occupation(s) | Author, teacher, attorney |
David Richard Koepsell (born 1969) is an American author, philosopher, attorney, and educator whose recent research focuses on how ethics and public policy deal with emerging science and technology. He has been a practicing attorney, been employed as an ontologist, been a university professor, and has lectured worldwide. He is a visiting professor of research ethics at National Autonomous University of Mexico, director of research and strategic initiatives at Comisión Nacional de Bioética (CONBIOETICA) Mexico, an adjunct professor at University at Buffalo and a senior fellow and education director of the Center for Inquiry Transnational, based in Amherst, New York.[ citation needed ]
Koepsell earned his PhD in philosophy (1997) as well as his doctorate in law (1995) from the University at Buffalo, where he studied with Barry Smith.[ citation needed ] Koepsell currently serves as an adjunct professor in the Department of Learning and Instruction, the University at Buffalo. [1] He has lectured worldwide on issues ranging from civil rights, philosophy, science, ontology, intellectual property theory, society, and religion.[ citation needed ] Koepsell was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at TU Delft in September 2008 and was promoted to associate professor in September 2013.[ citation needed ] He is an associate editor of Free Inquiry magazine.[ citation needed ] He is the co-founder, with Edward Summer, of Carefully Considered Productions, an educational media not-for-profit corporation.[ citation needed ] He is also the co-founder of Encrypgen. Koepsell also serves on the advisory board of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom. [2] .He joined the software startup spin-off from ConsenSys, ConsenSys Health as General Counsel and Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer in March, 2020. [3]
In stark contrast to the work of Michael R. Heim, who has promoted a Platonic dualism in his discussions of cyberspace and virtual reality, Koepsell has argued for a Searlean realism about all expression.[ citation needed ] Cyberspatial entities are expressions of the same type as any other intentionally produced, man-made object. Koepsell's work uses legal ontology and common sense ontology to examine social objects. In the process, Koepsell criticized the distinction between patentable and copyrightable objects as artificial, and argued for an open-source approach to all intellectual property. [4] [5]
Koepsell's research interests have focused on the nexus of ethics, law, and science. [6] Specifically, while at Yale as a visiting fellow (2006–2007), he investigated ethical questions involved in the practice of bioprospecting and patenting elements of the human genome. Koepsell argues that there are two forms of commons, fiat and natural, otherwise called "commons by choice" and "commons by logical necessity." He has recently argued that DNA, like radio spectra, sunlight, and air, falls into the category "commons by logical necessity", and that attempts to own genes by patent are unjust. [7] His book on the subject, entitled Who Owns You, was published by Wiley-Blackwell in March 2009. [8] While it was endorsed by Nobel Prize winner John Sulston as a "lucid and compelling deconstruction of current practice in the patenting of human genes, exposing inherent contradictions in the process and offering practical ways to resolve them", [9] a starkly contrasting review of Who Owns You? has also been published. [10] In an interview for Singularity University, he applauded the court decision in the Myriad Genetics case that "a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated", while manipulation of a gene to create something not found in nature could still be eligible for patent protection. [11] [12] [13]
Regarding the intersection of religion with politics and public policy, Koepsell wrote an article for the Secular Humanist Bulletin titled "The United States Is Not a Christian Nation". [14] More recently the Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying "I think [Benjamin Franklin] would have been dismayed by religious fundamentalism in government. He was a free thinker about many things and at least a skeptic about the afterlife and the divinity of Jesus. He was a scientist, a man of letters and a man of Earth." [15]
Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior". The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value; these fields comprise the branch of philosophy called axiology.
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, including the first principles of: being or existence, identity and change, space and time, cause and effect, necessity, and possibility.
Mario Augusto Bunge was an Argentine-Canadian philosopher and physicist. His philosophical writings combined scientific realism, systemism, materialism, emergentism, and other principles.
Christian Wolff was a German philosopher. Wolff is characterized as one of the most eminent German philosophers between Leibniz and Kant. His life work spanned almost every scholarly subject of his time, displayed and unfolded according to his demonstrative-deductive, mathematical method, which perhaps represents the peak of Enlightenment rationality in Germany.
Computer ethics is a part of practical philosophy concerned with how computing professionals should make decisions regarding professional and social conduct.
The philosophy of biology is a subfield of philosophy of science, which deals with epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical issues in the biological and biomedical sciences. Although philosophers of science and philosophers generally have long been interested in biology, philosophy of biology only emerged as an independent field of philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s, associated with the research of David Hull. Philosophers of science then began paying increasing attention to biology, from the rise of Neodarwinism in the 1930s and 1940s to the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 to more recent advances in genetic engineering. Other key ideas include the reduction of all life processes to biochemical reactions, and the incorporation of psychology into a broader neuroscience.
Philosophy and economics studies topics such as public economics, behavioural economics, rationality, justice, history of economic thought, rational choice, the appraisal of economic outcomes, institutions and processes, the status of highly idealized economic models, the ontology of economic phenomena and the possibilities of acquiring knowledge of them.
Frank Cameron JacksonFBA is an Australian analytic philosopher and Emeritus Professor in the School of Philosophy at Australian National University (ANU) where he had spent most of the latter part of his career. His primary research interests include epistemology, metaphysics, meta-ethics and the philosophy of mind. In the latter field he is best known for the "Mary's room" knowledge argument, a thought experiment that is one of the most discussed challenges to physicalism.
Barry Smith is an academic working in the fields of ontology and biomedical informatics. Smith is the author of more than 700 scientific publications, including 15 authored or edited books, and he is one of the most widely cited living philosophers.
Jiyuan Yu was a Chinese moral philosopher noted for his work on virtue ethics. Yu was a long-time and highly admired Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, in Buffalo, New York, starting in 1997. Prior to his professorship, Yu completed a three-year post as a research fellow at the University of Oxford, England (1994-1997). He received his education in China at both Shandong University and Renmin University, in Italy at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and in Canada at the University of Guelph. His primary areas of research and teaching included Ancient Greek Philosophy, and Ancient Chinese Philosophy.
Luciano Floridi is an Italian and British philosopher. He holds a double appointment as professor of philosophy and ethics of information at the University of Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute where is also Governing Body Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and as Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bologna, Department of Legal Studies, where he is the director of the Centre for Digital Ethics. He is adjunct professor, Department of Economics, American University, Washington D.C. At the end of the academic year 2022-2023, Floridi will move to Yale, becoming the Founding Director of the institution’s Digital Ethics Center. He is married to the neuroscientist Anna Christina Nobre.
Mylan Engel Jr. is a full professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.
South Park and Philosophy: You Know, I Learned Something Today is the first non-fiction book in Blackwell Publishing Company's Philosophy & Pop Culture series and is edited by philosopher and ontologist, Robert Arp, at the time assistant professor of philosophy at Southwest Minnesota State University. The series itself is edited by William Irwin, who is a professor of philosophy at King's College, Pennsylvania in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The book utilizes the five classic branches of Western philosophy, namely, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and logic, in order to analyze episodes of South Park as well as place the show in a context of current popular culture.
Myles W. Jackson is currently the inaugural Albers-Schönberg Professor in the History of Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and lecturer with the rank of professor of history at Princeton University. He was the inaugural Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of the History of Science at New York University-Gallatin, Professor of History of the Faculty of Arts and Science of New York University, Professor of the Division of Medical Bioethics of NYU-Langone School of Medicine, Faculty Affiliate of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, NYU School of Law, and Director of Science and Society of the College of Arts and Science at NYU. He was also the inaugural Dibner Family Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Polytechnic Institute of New York University from 2007 to 2012. The chair is named after Bern Dibner, an electrical engineer, industrialist, historian of science and technology and alumnus of Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.
Professor David Simon Oderberg is an Australian philosopher of metaphysics and ethics based in Britain since 1987. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. He describes himself as a non-consequentialist or a traditionalist in his works. Broadly speaking, Oderberg places himself in opposition to Peter Singer and other utilitarian or consequentialist thinkers. He has published over thirty academic papers and has authored six books: The Metaphysics of Good and Evil, Opting Out: Conscience and Cooperation in a Pluralistic Society, Real Essentialism, Applied Ethics, Moral Theory, and The Metaphysics of Identity over Time. Professor Oderberg is an alumnus of the Universities of Melbourne, where he completed his first degrees, and Oxford where he gained his D.Phil.
Michael Alan Grodin is Professor of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health, where he has received the distinguished Faculty Career Award for Research and Scholarship, and 20 teaching awards, including the "Norman A. Scotch Award for Excellence in Teaching." He is also Professor of Family Medicine and Psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine. In addition, Dr. Grodin is the Director of the Project on Medicine and the Holocaust at the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, and a member of the faculty of the Division of Religious and Theological Studies. He has been on the faculty at Boston University for 35 years. He completed his B.S. degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his M.D. degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and his postdoctoral and fellowship training at UCLA and Harvard University.
Robert Arp is an American philosopher known for his work in ethics, modern philosophy, ontology, philosophy of biology, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, religious studies, and philosophy and popular culture. He currently works as an adjunct professor teaching philosophy courses in the classroom and online at numerous schools in the Kansas City, Missouri area and other areas of the United States.
Terrell Ward Bynum is an American philosopher, writer and editor. Bynum is currently director of the Research Center on Computing and Society at Southern Connecticut State University, where he is also a professor of philosophy, and visiting professor in the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility in De Montfort University, Leicester, England. He is best known as a pioneer and historian in the field of computer and information ethics; for his achievements in that field, he was awarded the Barwise Prize of the American Philosophical Association, the Weizenbaum Award of the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology, and the 2011 Covey Award of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy. In addition, Bynum was the founder and longtime editor-in-chief of the philosophy journal Metaphilosophy ; a key founding figure (1974–1980) and the first executive director (1980–1982) of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers; biographer of the philosopher/ mathematician Gottlob Frege, as well as a translator of Frege's early works in logic. Bynum's most recent research and publications concern the ultimate nature of the universe and the impact of the information revolution upon philosophy.
Alexander Robert Pruss is a Canadian philosopher and mathematician. He is currently a professor of philosophy and the co-director of graduate studies in philosophy at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Kenneth Einar Himma is an American philosopher, author, lawyer, academic and lecturer.
{{cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(help)