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Contributors
Karim Akerma has lectured on philosophy at the universities of Leipzig and Hamburg.
Recent articles are Hegel’s Silence on Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The End and the Perma-
nence of Mankind in Karl Jaspers’s Philosophy, Wann beginnt ein menschliches Leben?
(When does a Human Life Begin), and Das embryonale Potenzial. Ein ontologischer Fehls-
chluss (The Embryonic Potential: An Ontological Fallacy). His monographs include Der
Gewinn des Symbolischen. Zur Ableitung von Naturtheorie aus dem gesellschaftlichen Sein
in der Tradition kritischer Theorie seit Marx (1992, The Premium of Symbols. Deriving
Natural Theory from Social Existence, in the Tradition of Critical Theory Since Marx),
Soll eine Menschheit sein? Eine fundamentalethische Frage (1995, Ought There Be a Hu-
manity? A Normative Query), Verebben der Menschheit? Neganthropie und Anthropodizee
(2000, Ebbtide for Humanity. Neganthropy and Anthropodicy), Außerirdische Einleitung
in die Philosophie. Extraterrestrier im Denken von Epikur bis Jonas (2002, Alien Introduc-
tion into Philosophy: Extraterrestrials in Philosophical Thought from Epikur to Jonas),
and Lebensende und Lebensbeginn. Philosophische Implikationen und mentalistische Begrün-
dung des Hirn-Todeskriteriums (2006, The End of a Life and the Beginning of a Life: Phi-
losophical Implications and Mentalistic Foundation of the Brain-Death Criterion).
Apart from philosophy, Karim Akerma works as a translator and offers translation ser-
vice (http://www.akerma.de).
Matthijs Cornelissen teaches Integral Psychology at the Sri Aurobindo International
Centre of Education in Pondicherry. A qualified physician, he came to India in 1976
to study the confluence of Yoga and psychotherapy. Together with Neeltje Huppes he
founded in 1981 Mirambika, a research center for integral education in New Delhi.
More recently, together with Huppes he organized three major conferences on Indian
psychology in Pondicherry. Publications include several papers on Indian psychology
and two edited volumes, Consciousness and Its Transformation (2001), and together with
Kireet Joshi, Consciousness, Indian Psychology, and Yoga (2004).
Antoine Courban is a physician and a transdisciplinary humanist. Born in Lebanon, he
received his doctorate in Medicine, Surgery, and Midwifery from Liège’s University
594 Contributors
Mario Crocco is a neurobiologist with degrees in several fields. Since 1982 he has been
Director of the Neurobiology Research Centre, Ministry of Health of the Argentine Re-
public. He served the Argentine Federal Government from 1984 to 1986 as chair of the
database of the Economic Felonies Investigative Commission in the Senate House.
Since 1988, he also directs the Laboratory of Electroneurobiological Research at the
Hospital J. T. Borda, funded by the City of Buenos Aires. He has been measuring intri-
Contributors 595
cate inner brain surfaces since the late 1950s, including the finest blood vessels and
brain interstitium or slender passageway amidst the surfaces of brain cells. Having
strobe-filmed the motion of cilia (microbes’ ‘‘hair’’) since childhood, on these results
and with a comparative study between 1964 and 1972 he revindicated the ciliary-
system ancestry of an object-structuring biophysical mechanism involving whole
regions of brain tissue, relating it with the natural selection of intellectual perfor-
mances and conceiving of sensations ( Jakob’s intonations) as the Newtonian force that
deflects the biospheric evolutionary process through animal appetition and violence.
He reconstituted a text by Plato, which had been corrupted by the interpolation of
a nineteenth-century philologist, discovering therein a cogito, which he communicated
in 1979 and which clarified Aristotle’s complex role. With his wife, Alicia Ávila, he has
deepened the studies of the cultural struggle against time’s irrevocable elapse and of
the role of existential violence in biological evolution, elaborating in natural sciences
a notion of persons as respectable.
State University Child Study Center, Kent, OH, and the Maimonides Medical Center
Dream Research Laboratory, Brooklyn, NY. He is author, coauthor, or editor of over
thirty books, including Extraordinary Dreams (2002), Varieties of Anomalous Experience:
Examining the Scientific Evidence (2000), and The Psychological Impact of War on Civilians:
An International Perspective (2003). Krippner has conducted workshops and seminars on
dreams and/or hypnosis in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Cyprus, Ecua-
dor, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, the
Netherlands, Panama, the Philippines, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Russia, South Africa,
Spain, Sweden, Venezuela, and at the four congresses of the Interamerican Psycho-
logical Association. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Indian Psy-
chology and Revista Argentina de Psicologia Paranormal, and the advisory board of the
International School for Psychotherapy, Counseling, and Group Leadership (St. Peters-
burg) and the Czech Unitaria (Prague). He holds faculty appointments at the Universi-
dade Holistica Internacional (Brasilia) and the Instituto de Medicina y Tecnologia
Avanzada de la Conducta (Ciudad Juarez). He has given invited addresses at the Chi-
nese Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, and the
School for Diplomatic Studies, Montevideo, Uruguay. He is a Fellow of the Society for
the Scientific Study of Religion, and has published cross-cultural studies on spiritual
content in dreams. More information is available at http://www.stanleykrippner.com/.
Armand J. Labbé (1945–2005) worked as a museum anthropologist for over twenty
years as Director of Research and Collections and Chief Curator at the Bowers Museum
of Cultural Art in Orange County, California, and was a Research Associate and An-
thropology Instructor at CSU Fullerton. He published ten books and numerous schol-
arly papers and articles focusing on cultural symbolic systems, neotropical shamanism,
indigenous concepts of the soul, and archaic religious thought. Among his latest books
are Shamans, Gods, and Mythic Beasts, which investigates shamanic themes reflected in
the pre-Hispanic art of Colombia, and Guardians of the Life Stream: Shamans, Art, and
Power in Prehispanic Central Panama, an in-depth, comprehensive examination of neo-
tropical shamanism and its underlying paradigms. Labbé was a Fellow of the American
Anthropological Association, a member of the Society for the Anthropology of Con-
sciousness, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, among other profes-
sional organizations.
Hubert Markl is a zoologist and humanist with an extensive research record in sensory
physiology, social biology, communication in animals, and environmental protection.
He studied biology, chemistry, and geography at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in
Munich, where he was awarded the degree of Dr. rer. nat. of Zoology in 1962. Research
locations include Harvard University and Rockefeller University, and he received the
Habilitation in Zoology at the University of Frankfurt. From 1968 to 1973 he was Pro-
fessor and Director of the Zoological Institute of the Darmstadt Institute of Technology
(Zoologisches Institut der Technischen Hochschule Darmstadt). Since 1974 he has been
Professor of Biology at the University of Constance (Universität Konstanz), and in the
same year he was elected to the Senate of the German Research Association (Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). Markl served as vice president of the DFG from 1977
to 1983. He held the office of president of the DFG between 1986 and 1991. In 1993
he was elected the first president of the newly established Berlin-Brandenburg Acad-
emy of Sciences (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften). In addition,
Markl chaired the board of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians (Gesell-
schaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte). From 1996 to 2002 he was president of
the Max Planck Society. The University of Saarland, the University of Potsdam, and the
University of Dublin conferred honorary doctorates on him in 1992 and 1997, respec-
tively. He also received honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological Seminary,
New York; from Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv; from Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and
from the Weizman Institute of Science, Rehovot (in 2000, 2001, and 2002). Besides nu-
merous research reports and articles in the sciences and humanities, he is editor of Bio-
physik (1977, 1982; Engl. Biophysics 1983, coed.); Evolution of Social Behavior (1980, ed.);
Natur und Geschichte (1983, coed.); Neuroethology and Behavioral Physiology (1983,
coed.); and author of Evolution, Genetik und menschliches Verhalten (1986); Natur als Kul-
turaufgabe (1986); Wissenschaft: Zur Rede gestellt (1989); Wissenschaft im Widerstreit
(1990); Die Fortschrittsdroge (1992); Wissenschaft gegen Zukunftsangst (1998); and Schöner
neuer Mensch? (2002).
Graham Parkes is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Among the books he has edited, translated, or authored are: Heidegger and Asian
Thought (1987), Nietzsche and Asian Thought (1991), Nishitani Keiji’s The Self-
Overcoming of Nihilism (1990), Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology
(1994), Reinhard May’s Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East-Asian Influences on his Work
(1996), and François Berthier’s Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Gar-
den (2000), as well as a new translation of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (2005). He
is also beginning to present the results of his philosophical research in the medium of
digital video on DVD: Nietzsche’s Thinking Places: From the Alps to the Mediterranean
(2003), and Walter Benjamin’s Paris: Projecting the Arcades (2005).
Michael Polemis is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, and
Guest Professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He is an executive
600 Contributors
scholar Chosang Phunrab, from the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Vara-
nasi, India.
Mircea Steriade (1924–2006) was Professor of Neuroscience at the Faculty of Medicine,
Laval University, Québec, Canada, since 1969. After earning an MD and DSc in Neuro-
science (in 1952 and 1955), he carried out postdoctoral studies with Frédéric Bremer in
Brussels. In 1968 he was a visiting professor at the University of Montreal. For 35 years,
his research was funded by the Medical Research Council (now the Canadian Institutes
for Health Research). He was supported by the National Science and Engineering Re-
search of Canada, the Human Frontier Science Program, and the U.S. National Institute
of Health. He was actively involved in the education of PhD students and postdoctoral
fellows; many of those collaborators now have positions as professors and researchers
in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Japan. Steriade published more than 340
articles, book chapters, edited books, and monographs. Since 1990, he was the coau-
thor or single author of five monographs, Thalamic Oscillations and Signaling (1990),
Brainstem Control of Wakefulness and Sleep (1990), The Visual Thalamocortical System
and Its Modulation by the Brain Stem Core (1990), Thalamus (1997), and The Intact and
Sliced Brain (2001). Steriade was a member of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy
of Sciences). He was editor-in-chief of the journal Thalamus & Related Systems, pub-
lished by Elsevier, and was a member of other editorial boards.
Thomas Szasz AB, MD, DSc (Hon.), LHD (Hon.), is Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at
the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York. He is
the author of 31 books, among them the classic, The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), and
The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience (1996). His most recent book
is Coercion as Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry (2007). Szasz is widely recognized as
the world’s foremost critic of psychiatric coercions and excuses. He maintains that
just as we reject using theological assertions about people’s (deviant) religious states of
mind (heresy) as a justification for depriving individuals of liberty, so we should also
reject using medical assertions about people’s (deviant) psychiatric states of mind
(mental illness) as a justification for depriving individuals of liberty and/or excusing
them of crimes (and incarcerating them in ‘‘mental hospitals’’). Szasz has received
many awards for his defense of individual liberty and responsibility threatened by this
modern form of tyranny masquerading as therapy (which he has termed the ‘‘Thera-
peutic State’’). A frequent and popular lecturer, he has addressed professional and
lay groups, and has appeared on radio and television, in North, Central, and South
America as well as in Australia, Europe, Japan, and South Africa. His books have been
translated into every major language.
Mariela Szirko is a neuropharmacologist with degrees in pharmacy and biochemistry
who has also had a teaching career in neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. She
is head of the Neurophysiology Department at the Centre of Neurobiological Research,
602 Contributors
Metaphor, or Actuality? A Probe into Iñupiat Healing (1992), The Reality of Spirits: A
Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study? (1992), Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of Af-
rican Healing (1992), The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit Presence among a Northern Alas-
kan People (1996), Among the Healers: Stories of Spiritual and Ritual Healing around the
World (2005), and Heart of Lightness: The Life Story of an Anthropologist (2005). She is
also the editor of the journal Anthropology and Humanism.
Julia Watkin (1944–2005) was an honorary research associate in philosophy (2003) at
the University of Tasmania and a Kierkegaard specialist. She obtained her BA at the
University of Bristol, from which she also received her doctorate on Kierkegaard. Her
work includes several Kierkegaard books: A Key to Kierkegaard’s Abbreviations and
Spelling/ Nøgle til Kierkegaards Forkortelser og Stavemåde (1981); Kierkegaard’s book on
Adler, Nutidens religieuse Forvirring (1984); translation of the first volume of Kierke-
gaard’s Writings: Early Polemical Writings (1990); Kierkegaard (1997); and Historical
Dictionary of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy (2001). Watkin also published over a hundred
articles and papers on Kierkegaard in a number of languages and in many countries.
She contributed to publications such as Kierkegaardiana, the Journal of the History of
European Ideas, and International Kierkegaard Commentary. In 1979 she established the
ongoing International Kierkegaard Newsletter (and in 1994 the website International Kier-
kegaard Information). In 1991 she became a member of the International Advisory
Board of the American series International Kierkegaard Commentary (editor Robert L. Per-
kins). She was on the team of the American translation project ‘‘Kierkegaard’s Writ-
ings’’ for fourteen years and was Assistant Director of the Department of Kierkegaard
Research at Copenhagen University. She was lecturer and then senior lecturer in phi-
losophy at the University of Tasmania, where she directed the Søren Kierkegaard Re-
search Unit. She was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (1969), and a member
of the Danish Kierkegaard Society. She taught and supervised students from many
countries. Her latest book, God and the Modern World, was published in 2005.
Helmut Wautischer is Senior Lecturer in philosophy at California State University,
Sonoma. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Graz, Austria.
Trained as an analytic philosopher, he has a fascination with ‘‘first-person’’ ways of
knowing. His primary research interests are in philosophical anthropology and con-
sciousness studies. He is the author of several papers, guest editor of a special issue on
dreaming in the Anthropology of Consciousness (1994), and editor of Tribal Epistemolo-
gies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology (1998). He has presented papers at different
venues such as the American Anthropological Association and the World Congress of
Philosophy, chaired and organized many sessions in conjunction with the Annual
Meetings of the American Philosophical Association, and is coeditor of the online jour-
nal Existenz, at http://www.bu.edu/paiedeia.