Vol. 1 (2018): All Persons Great and Small
The Notion of Personhood in SF

SF stories are in a unique position to help us examine the concept of personhood, by making the human world engage with a bewildering variety of beings with person-like qualities – aliens of bizarre shapes and customs, artificial constructs conflicted about their artificiality, planetary-wide intelligences, collective minds, and the list goes on. Every one of these instances provides the opportunity to reflect on specific aspects of the notion of personhood, such as, for example: What is a person? What are its defining qualities? What is the connection between personhood and morality, identity, rationality, basic (“human?”) rights? What patterns do SF authors identify when describing the oppression of one group of persons by another, and how do they reflect past and present human history?
Published: 2018-06-03 (June 3, 2018)
Editorial Notes
Alfredo Mac Laughlin
Yearly Theme (Peer-Reviewed)
Aesthetics in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Jerold J. Abrams
Moreau’s Law in “The Island of Doctor Moreau” in Light of Kant’s Reciprocity Thesis
Dan Paul Dal Monte
Carving a Life from Legacy: Free Will and Manipulation in Greg Egan’s “Reasons to Be Cheerful”
Taylor W. Cyr
Persons and a Metaphysics of the Navel
Dennis M. Weiss
The Creolizing Genre of SF and the Nightmare of Whiteness in John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”
Bernabe S. Mendoza
The Education Station: Teaching with SF
James Rocha
— Teaching Firefly: Companion Material. A Class Schedule for a Course on Joss Whedon and Philosophy
James Rocha
Book Reviews
Westworld and Philosophy: If You Go Looking for the Truth Get the Whole Thing
Stefano Bigliardi
Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy – ISSN: 2573-881X
You must be logged in to post a comment.