At TU Delft I am working on the ethics of resilience, bringing what we know about how positive results can come out of unexpected events—like in cases of serendipity—together with how we ought to prepare a response to unexpected but potentially disastrous events and disruptions. In both of these contexts, issues of distributive and...
Despite its explosive growth over the past decades, the philosophy of technology is in great need of an empirical-philosophical theory of technology. The objective of this project is to develop such a theory: a theory of technological mediation. Building such a theory is a radical new step in the development of the postphenomenological approach...
Medical Trust Beyond Clinical Walls is an NWO-funded research project at Eindhoven University of Technology, in collaboration with and co-funded by Mobihealth B.V. and Sananet Care B.V. The purpose of this project is to investigate how patients with chronic diseases establish trust in forms of treatment and monitoring that involve telecare, the use of...
We normally think that peoples responsibility diminishes when mental capacities are lost and that responsibility is restored when those capacities are regained. But how is responsibility affected when mental capacities are extended beyond their normal range through cognitive enhancement? For instance, might some people ‘ e.g. surgeons working long shifts in hospital ‘ have...
I am a philosopher working at Eindhoven University of Technology and Tilburg University. In Eindhoven I work as a postdoc researcher on the project Medical Trust Beyond Clinical Walls within the Department for Philosophy & Ethics. In Tilburg I am a lecturer within the Department of Philosophy. My academic interests cover a wide range...
Research of the medical imaging group of Professor Reiber at LUMC (a Dutch hospital) specializes in the development of software which automatically segments, measures, and classifies medical images. With the help of these applications researchers and clinicians can conduct quantitative analyses of medical images. The technology has not yet been fully integrated in clinical...
Biomedical engineering practices articulate a specific normative perspective on the body. While in daily life people live their body as themselves, biomedical engineers study bodies as machine-like objects. This perspective puts a stamp on engineering decisions and on the specific technologies that are developed. This book deals with the questions how normative work of...
This project is an example of embedded ethical research. It is embedded in the context of the daily research practices of a group of biophysical engineers under supervision of dr. Rob Kooyman in the faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Twente. This group is developing a non-invasive acousto-optic technique for the...
New technologies often go accompanied by moral uneasiness. It is important to policy makers to spot such controversies at an early stage. That can help them prevent the development of technologies that are morally unacceptable to society. Ideally they might even be able to steer technology development in more desirable directions. Several instruments exist...
Nederlands Introduction on the subject It is nowadays possible to study the living brain at a level of detail which was unthinkable as recently as 25 years ago. On top of this, technologies aimed at modifying (influencing, treating or enhancing) the brain – ranging from neuropharmacology to neuroengineering – are becoming more and more...
Technological development has started to interfere explicitly with human nature. Technologies like biotechnology, brain implants, and enhancement technologies make it possible to reshape humanity in various ways. These ‘posthumanist’ developments are highly contested, though. The current discussion about posthumanism is dominated by two positions. The utopian transhumanist movement explicitly welcomes the enhancement of homo...
Molecular diagnostics promises to make diseases visible long before they manifest themselves with clear symptoms level. Furthermore, this new technology promises to deliver its results anywhere, whenever wanted, fast and cheap. If these promises come true, a rapid proliferation of self-tests is to be expected. This PhD project aims to investigate the ethical implications...
