WINNER of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Best First Book Award 2023 Limit Cinema explores how contemporary global cinema represents the relationship between humans and nature. During the 21st century this relationship has become increasingly fraught due to proliferating social and environmental crises; recent films from Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) address these problems by reflecting or renegotiating the terms of our engagement with the natural world. In this spirit, this book proposes a new film philosophy for the Anthropocene. It argues that certain contemporary films attempt to transgress the limits of human experience, and that such ‘limit cinema’ has the potential to help us rethink our relationship with nature. Posing a new and timely alternative to the process philosophies that have become orthodox in the fields of film philosophy and ecocriticism, Limit Cinema revitalizes the philosophy of Georges Bataille and puts forward a new reading of his notion of transgression in the context of our current environmental crisis. To that end, Limit Cinema brings Bataille into conversation with more recent discussions in the humanities that seek less anthropocentric modes of thought, including posthumanism, speculative realism, and other theories associated with the nonhuman turn. The problems at stake are global in scale, and the book therefore engages with cinema from a range of national and cultural contexts. From Ben Wheatley’s psychological thrillers to Nettie Wild’s eco-documentaries, limit cinema pushes against the boundaries of thought and encourages an ethical engagement with perspectives beyond the human.

This open access collection brings together a team of leading scholars and rising stars to consider what experimental philosophy of medicine is and can be. While experimental philosophy of science is an established field, attempts to tackle issues in philosophy of medicine from an experimental angle are still surprisingly scarce. A team of interdisciplinary scholars demonstrate how we can make progress by integrating a variety of methods from experimental philosophy, including experiments, sociological surveys, simulations, as well as history and philosophy of science, in order to yield meaningful results about the core questions in medicine. They focus on concepts central to philosophy of medicine and medical practice, such as death, pain, disease and disorder, advance directives, medical explanation, disability and informed consent. Presenting empirical findings and providing a crucial foundation for future work in this dynamic field, this collection explores new ways for philosophers to cooperate with scientists and reveals the value of these collaborations for both philosophy and medicine. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council Starting Grant.

'Oh friends, not these sounds, let us instead strike up ones more pleasing and more joyful'. Written during the corona of 2020 and stretching into 2021, the sounds and words of music are here given a deeper and wider meaning. The words quoted above were Beethoven's own in the lockdown of his own deafness and just before letting the chorus loose to proclaim that 'all people become brothers'. The sounds he refers to are those of despair, exuberance, and utopian peace that his symphony has just portrayed. For him, and for us, the Ode is less the vision of an alternative world than an expression of a constant need to seek a joy which, beyond happiness and once-in-a-while cheerfulness, is a sense of doing something worthwhile with and, where possible, for others.

The technology of Artificial Intelligence is here, and moving fast, without ethical standards in place. A Blueprint for the Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Technologies leans on classical western philosophy for its ethical grounding. Values such as conscience, rights, equity, and discrimination, establish a basis for regulatory standards. Multiple international agencies with governing interests are compared. The development of ethical standards is suggested through two new non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The first is to develop standards that evolve from practice, while the second acts as an ombudsman to settle abuse. Both NGOs are envisioned to cooperate with regulators. More than seeking a perfect solution, the book aims to balance the tension between conflicting interests, with the goal to keep this dangerously wonderful technology under global human control. For that to materialize, the technology needs to have a seat on the table of global ethics. The final chapter lists fourteen thinking points to achieve an ethics balance for new technologies.