Sascha Settegast is a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Center for Tumor Diseases, Heidelberg University, where he coordinates a research group on genomic newborn screening. His research focuses on virtue ethics, medical ethics, the philosophy of sex, and the thought of John McDowell. His doctoral dissertation was devoted to Aristotelian naturalism.
What excites you about philosophy?
Among all the wonderful things that philosophy is and does, one thing that fascinates me is its somewhat neglected aesthetic dimension. Part of the existential import of philosophy surely is that it can function, so to speak, as a technology of experience, in that your sincere beliefs about the fundamental nature of the world, how it works, and what matters in it, shape how you experience your place in it emotionally, and your sense of what life ultimately is. I like the idea that philosophical thinking can connect us to this somewhat intangible core of our self-experience and enables us to work with it creatively. I often wonder what existence would feel like if, for example, Catholicism, or Kantianism, or Humeanism were actually true.
What are you working on right now?
At the moment, most of my time is devoted to the ethics of genomic newborn screening. Screening newborns for rare diseases that are often debilitating or even fatal has been a reality in many countries since the 1960s. It is an incredibly successful public health program that has literally saved the lives of thousands of children through early diagnosis and treatment, in part also because it has been continually expanded to include further target diseases and new methods of analysis. Our research group NEW_LIVES is among several projects that currently investigate the feasibility of expanding the newborn screening program by means of whole genome sequencing, which could enable early detection and treatment of hundreds of additional diseases.
There are implementation challenges though, starting with the question of selection criteria for target diseases, but also questions of how to substantiate the best interests of the child in this context, which govern parental decision-making via their duty of care towards the child, and whether a child’s right to informational self-determination (its right not to know, to an open future, and to genetic privacy) places limits on what we may test for. There are also the risks of medicalization: overdiagnosis, overtreatment, stigmatization, and negative effects on self-perception and identity formation, which I am particularly interested in right now.
In addition to my “day job” with NEW_LIVES, I am trying to make time for other research interests as well. I recently completed a paper in which I develop a McDowell-inspired account of practical knowledge, and I hope to write a paper on the nature and definition of pornography once my dissertation is on its way to the publisher.
What do you consider your greatest professional accomplishment?
My doctoral dissertation on Aristotelian naturalism, which is the view that we can distinguish virtuous from vicious character traits and validate the normative authority of the virtues by drawing on human nature. My thesis starts from the observation that critics and proponents of Aristotelian naturalism tend to talk past each other because they operate with very different conceptions of (human) nature. The standard objections advanced by the critics tend to presuppose a scientistic conception of nature, while proponents such as Thompson, Foot, Hursthouse, and McDowell in the end operate with an objective idealist conception of nature. In my dissertation, I explicate both positions and attempt to bring them into dialogue by investigating their respective ontological and epistemological presuppositions.
In particular, I draw on McDowell’s critique of scientism to show that the critics’ position at the root presupposes a problematic subject-object-dualism, which I then try to overcome by means of a hylomorphic account of the unity of subject and object. To that end, I spend a good deal of effort on McDowell’s conceptualist and disjunctivist account of experience, which I (re)interpret in objective idealist terms. On that basis, I then develop a systematic reconstruction of his account of nature and argue that it can avoid or resolve the critics’ objections to Aristotelian naturalism, in part by reframing the role of natural science.
I take it that a major goal of the Neo-Aristotelians is to vindicate the objective validity of manifest image categories, such as ‘life-form,’ without having to deny the scientific image in the process, and I attempt to do that by means of a hylomorphic account of their unity, on which the manifest image articulates the formal and final causes, and the scientific image the efficient and material causes of our life-world. I am currently still revising my thesis for publication as a book, but my recent paper in Synthese (“Fineness of Grain and the Hylomorphism of Experience”) is good for a first impression of my overall approach.
What is your favorite book of all time?
I love anything written by Iris Murdoch, and the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann. Both resonate with me on an existential level. It is perhaps a bit cliché and no surprise for a virtue ethicist, but I always feel uplifted when reading Aristotle, like I am grappling with something immensely important.
What are you reading right now?
I recently developed an amateur interest in Japanese literature. I was fascinated by Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book and its almost eidetic portrayal of Heian court life and its aesthetic sensibility, and now have moved on to Yoshida Kenko’s Essays in Idleness, so far a really delightful collection of anecdotes and reflections. I am also slowly reading through the Kokinshu, a classic anthology of Japanese poetry that dates roughly to around the year 900. The poems are very brief and beautifully impressionistic. They are woven together in a sort of logical progression, for example following the development of the seasons or the natural course of a love affair, which makes for a gradual transition in mood from one poem to the next. The cumulative effect is very powerful and atmospheric. It emotionally draws you into an entire way of seeing and experiencing the world, in a way that feels very existential to me.
If you were an ice cream, what flavor would you be?
Greek yogurt and Amarena cherry.
What’s your poison?
A good Negroni is hard to beat!
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.
Alexis LaBar has a Master’s degree in Philosophy from West Chester University of Pennsylvania. Before attending West Chester, she graduated from Moravian University with a Bachelor’s in Philosophy, a minor in Global Religions, and an Ethics certificate. She is the recipient of the 2022 Claghorn Award in Philosophy, awarded by West Chester University, and the 2021 Douglas Anderson Prize in Philosophy, awarded by Moravian University. She is the Editor of the Teaching Beat and Work/Life Balance Beat.
