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We participate in moral debate, instead of taking established morality for granted, because of our discontent with the moral discourse already existing. We feel that something is distorted or concealed, that something remains to be said. One of the strategies to expose the deficiencies of established discourse is critical argument, but under certain specific historical circumstances, the apparent self-evidence of established moral discourse has gained such a dominance, has acquired such an ability to conceal its basic vulnerability, that its validity simply seems beyond contestation. Notwithstanding our discontent, we remain unable to challenge the established truth effectively. Then, all of a sudden, its vulnerability is revealed - and this is the experience of laughter. Moral criticism is preceded by laughter. In fact, all crucial transformations that emerged in the history of morality were accompanied by and made possible by laughter and moral criticism is basically and originally a comic genre. After drawing an outline of the present moral regime in chapter one, the moral significance of laughter is recovered with the help of four 'philosophers of laughter' in chapter two, namely Bakhtin, Nietzsche, Bataille and Foucault. Laughter allows reality to appear in a certain light, it contains a basic truth, it is a philosophical principle in its own right that cannot be reduced to or identified with the truth of science. In the subsequent chapters it is shown how three crucial moral transformations, occuring in the fourth century B.C., the sixteenth century A.D. and the nineteenth century A.D. evolved out of an experience of laughter, articulated by three outstanding protagonists of laughter presented in this book: Socrates, Luther and Ibsen. Finally, the significance of the experience of laughter in view of the present is discussed.

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The key objective of this volume is to allow philosophy students and early-stage researchers to become practicing philosophers in technoscientific settings. Zwart focuses on the methodological issue of how to practice continental philosophy of technoscience today. This text draws upon continental authors such as Hegel, Engels, Heidegger, Bachelard and Lacan (and their fields of dialectics, phenomenology and psychoanalysis) in developing a coherent message around the technicity of science or rather, “technoscience”. Within technoscience, the focus will be on recent developments in life sciences research, such as genomics, post-genomics, synthetic biology and global ecology. This book uniquely presents continental perspectives that tend to be underrepresented in mainstream philosophy of science, yet entail crucial insights for coming to terms with technoscience as it is evolving on a global scale today.This is an open access book.

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With names like Zemke, Schilling, Gabreski, Mahurin and Johnson, the 56th Fighter Group was, and still is, one of the legendary fighter units of World War II. BEWARE THE THUNDERBOLT ( the apt official motto of the 56th) is the story of the 56th Fighter Group in a chronological narrative of their combat missions. Composed of heroic pilots that aggressively took the air war into the enemy heartland in 1943, the "Wolfpack's" P-47 Thunderbolt contrails crossed high in the upper stratosphere as they escorted heavy bomber missions, or fell upon the enemy on the ground as their pilots destroyed over 1000 Luftwaffe aircraft. The story is also coupled with their post-war history of innovative Mustang missions to Alaska, and the first trans-Atlantic jet fighter missions in the P-80 Shooting Star. The foreword is by Hub Zemke, former commander of the 56th Fighter Group. David McLaren is also the author of Lockheed F-94 Starfire (with Marty Isham), available from Schiffer Publishing.

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