Professor Stefan Lorenz Sorgner Featured on Fortune Italia
John Cabot University Philosophy Professor Stefan Lorenz Sorgner was recently featured on Fortune Italia’s December-January issue. Fortune Italia is the Italian edition of Fortune magazine, a globally renowned business magazine that covers various aspects of business, finance, technology, and economics. Professor Sorgner is one of the world’s leading experts in the fields of Transhumanism and Posthumanism.
“Transhumanism indicates the process of acquiring skills to overcome our limits. The goal is to improve the quality of life,” explained Professor Sorgner. He emphasized the potential of advancements like mechanical limbs and neural implants, like the Mia Hand, a customizable myoelectric prosthesis. “In 2018, I was invited by the Taiwanese Minister of Innovation to speak at a conference on smart cities. I talked about the necessity to have ‘upgraded humans,’ equipped with bionic limbs, chips, and sensors,” he added.
“Tufts University has developed a microchip that can be placed on incisors and analyze everything one eats, and then provide information about the quality of food and even indicate whether or not it poses health risks,” said Professor Sorgner. He explained that, in order for mechanical limbs to function optimally, it is necessary to find a correlation between digital data and organic impulses. “This is the most important aspect. What is needed are data, how we retrieve data from people using these mechanical parts, and how we transfer data from the body to the computer.”
With predictive medicine, people can have indications that help them prevent diseases before they manifest. “We already do it when we take pills for blood pressure, and we can go further if we start looking at research on aging,” said Professor Sorgner. “There are dysfunctions in our body that lead to consequences such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s, and we can find solutions before the problems even manifest.”
Stefan Lorenz Sorgner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at John Cabot University in Rome and Director and Co-Founder of the Beyond Humanism Network, Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), Research Fellow at the Ewha Institute for the Humanities at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, academic Advisor of Humanity+, and Visiting Fellow at the Ethics Centre of the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena. He is editor of more than 10 essay collections, and author of the following monographs: Metaphysics Without Truth (Marquette University Press 2007), Menschenwürde nach Nietzsche (WBG 2010), Transhumanismus (Herder 2016), Schöner neuer Mensch (Nicolai, 2018), Übermensch (Schwabe 2019), On Transhumanism (Penn State University Press 2020), We Have Always Been Cyborgs (Bristol University Press 2022), Philosophy of Posthuman Art (Schwabe 2022), Transhumanismus (mit Philip von Becker, Westendverlag 2023), Homo ex machina (together with Bernd Kleine-Gunk, Goldmann 2023). In addition, he is Editor-in-Chief and Founding Editor of the Journal of Posthuman Studies (a double-blind peer review journal, published by Penn State University Press since 2017).
