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Michael Hauskeller

Michael is head of philosophy at the University of Liverpool. His current work spans transhumanism, death and meaning. He has written on whether non-human animals can have meaningful lives and What It Is Like to Be a Bot. He says of his work: “As a philosopher, I am a generalist, which is a nice way of saying that I have done many different things and I am not really an expert on anything in particular. Most people would probably tag me as an ethicist, but this is only true in a very broad sense. Figuring out what is right and what is wrong, permissible or impermissible, does not hold much interest for me. It seems to me that when people are debating these questions they are actually arguing about something else, namely who we want to be and in what kind of world we want to live. For me, doing philosophy is ultimately a sustained attempt to get to grips with this “deeply puzzling world” (to borrow an expression of Mary Midgley’s), to understand it and to understand our place in it. Philosophy is not business; it’s personal, more akin to therapy than to science. It’s about finding out what is actually going on and what we are doing here. Can philosophy provide an answer to these questions? I don’t know. All we can do is keep on trying. Perhaps what matters is not that we find an answer, but that we keep the question alive.”

Michael is an atheist and has a broadly naturalistic worldview. He has a sentiocentric moral scope but is working towards putting that into practice.

Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism podcast and here on the Sentientism YouTube.

Michael at the University of Liverpool
Michael on Academia.edu

Latest work

In the classroom!

I recently gave this presentation (YouTube and podcast links below) to a network of Religious Education (RE) teachers from Northumberland in the UK. It’s aimed at helping teachers bring the […]
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In the classroom!

I recently gave this presentation (YouTube and podcast links below) to a network of Religious Education (RE) teachers from Northumberland in the UK. It’s aimed at helping teachers bring the […]
More

Just How Big Should “The Moral Circle” Be? – Jeff Sebo on Sentientism Ep: 229

Jeff Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at New York University. A Sentientism conversation about his new book "The Moral Circle".
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Our First IRL Sentientism Meetup! Plus Education and Other Updates

If you’re in range of London on the 27th July come and join our first in person meetup, a picnic in Regent’s Park. As with all of our communities and […]
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