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Dr Lewis Coyne

Honorary Research Fellow

I am an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Exeter, where I also served as an Associate Lecturer from 2019-20, with responsibility for convening The Human Condition: Classic Readings in Anthropology (ANT2012/3012, PHL2051/3051) and contributing lectures to Politics of Biology (POL3247). Prior to this I was a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant in the Department from 2015-18, and I am also Research Fellow at The Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems in Bristol.


My work takes place principally at the intersection of practical ethics and science and technology studies, drawing complimentary insights from the philosophy of biology, sociology of morality, and philosophical anthropology. My overarching interests are in the novel responsibilities we have towards human and non-human life in light of contemporary techno-scientific developments - both biotechnological and ecological - and how these responsibilities can be acted upon to create a more sustainable and ethical trajectory for humanity in the twenty-first century. To date I have explored these topics through my ESRC-funded Ph.D. work on Hans Jonas, which was supervised by Michael Hauskeller, Edward Skidelsky, and Susan Kelly, and my post-doctoral project carried out as an Honorary Research Fellow, 'Toward a Richer Bioethics'.


My publications include journal articles on the ethics of synthetic biology, genome editing, and human enhancement, a co-edited collection on moral biomedical enhancement with Cambridge University Press, and, most notably, a monograph on the thought of Hans Jonas - Hans Jonas: Life, Technology and the Horizons of Responsibility - which was published in 2021 by Bloomsbury Academic. Each, in their own way, attempts to use phenomenological resources to non-reductively account for human and non-human life, and think through our responsibilities to the latter in the light of novel technologies and developmental trends.

 

Details and draft versions of the majority of my publications are available on my Academia.edu page.

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