Download or read book Living in the Labyrinth of Technology written by Willem H. Vanderburg and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 847 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the very beginnings of their existence, human beings have distinguished themselves from other animals by not taking immediate experience for granted. Everything was symbolized according to its meaning and value: a fallen branch from a tree became a lever; a tree trunk floating in the river became a canoe. Homo logos created communities based on cultures: humanity's first megaproject. Further symbolization of the human community and its relation to nature led to the possibility of creating societies and civilizations. Everything changed as these interposed themselves between the group and nature. Homo societas created ways of life able to give meaning, direction, and purpose to many groups by means of very different cultures: humanity's second megaproject. What Das Kapital did for the nineteenth century and La technique did for the twentieth, Willem H. Vanderburg's Living in the Labyrinth of Technology seeks to create for the twenty-first century: an attempt at understanding the world in a manner not shackled to overspecialized scientific knowing and technical doing. Western civilization may well be creating humanity's third megaproject, based not on symbolization for making sense of and living in the world, but on highly specialized desymbolized knowing stripped of all peripheral understanding. Vanderburg focuses on two interdependent forces in his narrative, namely, people changing technology and technology changing people. The latter aspect, although rarely considered, turns out to be the more critical one for understanding the spectacular successes and failures of contemporary ways of life. As technology continues to change the social and physical world, the experiences of this world 'grow' people's minds and society's cultures, thereby re-creating human life in the image of technology. Living in the Labyrinth of Technology argues that the twenty-first century will be dominated by this pattern unless society intervenes on human (as opposed to technical) terms.
Download or read book The Labyrinth of Technology written by Willem H. Vanderburg and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exposing the limitations of conventional approaches to the engineering and regulation of technology, Vanderburg suggests that the solution lies in a preventive strategy that situates technological growth in its human, societal, and biospheric contexts.
Download or read book Emerging from the Dark Age Ahead written by Charles Fensham and published by Clements Publishing Group. This book was released on 2011 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating presentation of faith, Charles Fensham argues cogently and passionately for a church that embraces hope in spite of the dark and destructive pressures all around it. Although a metaphoric dark time awaits Christianity, Fensham assures his readers that this darkness merely conceals the light for the future. "Emerging from the Dark Age Ahead " offers a prophetic and challenging call for contemporary Christians to ask where we have come from, where we are, and where we are going. "Professor Fensham borrows from Jane Jacobs the metaphor of 'the Dark Age ahead, ' bringing social and cultural analysis to bear upon a fresh theology of church and mission for our time and place. Drawing from deep roots in the trinitarian tradition, and borrowing insight from historic monasticism, he calls for a pilgrim, steward church that will speak and act constructively in the coming time of troubles. This is a creative, original work that will stimulate theological students and lay folk as well."-Harold Wells, Professor Emeritus, Emmanuel College, University of Toronto "Insightful, provocative, instructive-words that describe how this book helps the church navigate the deep cultural challenge it now faces of massive technique organized through digitalization. Grounding the church's life in a missional hermeneutic of reading Scripture and the church's identity in the social Trinity, Fensham boldly, yet carefully, charts a course for engaging the dark age ahead."- Craig Van Gelder, Ph.D., Professor of Congregational Mission, Luther Seminary Charles Fensham has a unique perspective on the emergent church. Born in apartheid South Africa and raised within the apartheid-tainted Reformed church, he is an immigrant to Canada with experiences of the church in France, Switzerland, the South Pacific and Africa. He teaches at Knox College at the University of Toronto.
Download or read book Secular Nations under New Gods written by Willem H. Vanderburg and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ongoing political muscle-flexing of diverse Christian communities in North America raises some deeply troubling questions regarding their roles among us. Earlier analyses including Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew showed that these three branches of the Judaeo-Christian tradition correspond to three forms of the American way of life; while Kruse’s One Nation Under God showed how Christian America was shaped by corporate America. Willem H. Vanderburg’s Secular Nations under New Gods proceeds based on a dialogue between Jacques Ellul’s interpretation of the task of Christians in the world and Ellul’s interpretation of the roles of technique and the nation-state in individual and collective human life. He then adds new insight into our being a symbolic species dealing with our finitude by living through the myths of our society and building new secular forms of moralities and religions. If everything is political and if everything is amenable to discipline-based scientific and technical approaches, we are perhaps treating these human creations the way earlier societies did their gods, as being omnipotent, without limits. Vanderburg argues that until organized Christianity becomes critically aware of sharing these commitments with their societies, it will remain entrapped in the service of false gods and thereby will continue to turn a message of freedom and love into one of morality and religion.
Download or read book Rescuing Humanity written by Willem H. Vanderburg and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2023-05-26 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rescuing Humanity, Willem H. Vanderburg reminds us that we have relied on discipline-based approaches for human knowing, doing, and organizing for less than a century. During this brief period, these approaches have become responsible for both our spectacular successes and most of our social and environmental crises. At their roots is a cultural mutation that includes secular religious attitudes that veil the limits of these approaches, leading to their overvaluation. Because their use, especially in science and technology, is primarily built up with mathematics, living entities and systems can be dealt with only as if their "architecture" or "design" is based on the principle of non-contradiction, which is true only for non-living entities. This distortion explains our many crises. Vanderburg begins to explore the limits of discipline-based approaches, which guides the way toward developing complementary ones capable of transcending these limits. It is no different from a carpenter going beyond the limits of his hammer by reaching for other tools. As we grapple with everything from the impacts of social media, the ongoing climate crisis, and divisive political ideologies, Rescuing Humanity reveals that our civilization must learn to do the equivalent if humans and other living things are to continue making earth a home.
Download or read book Our Battle for the Human Spirit written by Willem H. Vanderburg and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-08-04 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western society has become saturated with scientific and technological modes of thinking that impact our lives and our relationships. Expanding social inequality, the use of social media and the rise of mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression are manifestations of this shift in our civilization. Our Battle for the Human Spirit is a comprehensive probe into what is happening to human life in the beginning of the 21st century. It explores how culture, experience, and symbolization have been replaced by scientific, discipline-based, approaches. Willem H. Vanderburg argues that these approaches are inadequate in understanding the complexity of human lives and societies. In order to transcend these limits, Vanderburg calls for the reintegration of culture and symbolization into our daily lives.
Download or read book Our War on Ourselves written by Willem H. Vanderburg and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Willem H. Vanderburg's Our War on Ourselves explores the type of war we have unleashed on our lives by emphasizing discipline-based processes.
Download or read book Our War on Ourselves written by Willem H. Vanderburg and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-11-12 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our approach to knowing and doing is based on delegating physical phenomena to physicists, biological phenomena to biologists, social phenomena to sociologists, economic phenomena to economists, and so on. This approach to knowledge and practice works very well when one category of phenomena dominates (as in mechanical and technical systems), but does not work when many categories of phenomena make significant contributions (as in the biological and cultural spheres). As a result, our civilization succeeds in its scientific and technical endeavours yet fails in dealing with communities and ecosystems. Following his groundbreaking Labyrinth of Technology and Living in the Labyrinth of Technology, Willem H. Vanderburg's Our War on Ourselves explores the type of war we have unleashed on our lives by emphasizing discipline-based processes. The work also illuminates how we can achieve a more balanced, livable, and sustainable future by combining technical and cultural perspectives in our educational and institutional settings.
Download or read book Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering written by Carl Mitcham and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of classic Euro-American philosophy of technology in the 1950s originally emphasized the importance of technologies as material entities and their mediating influence within human experience. Recent decades, however, have witnessed a subtle shift toward reflection on the activity from which these distinctly modern artifacts emerge and through which they are engaged and managed, that is, on engineering. What is engineering? What is the meaning of engineering? How is engineering related to other aspects of human existence? Such basic questions readily engage all major branches of philosophy --- ontology, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics --- although not always to the same degree. The historico-philosophical and critical reflections collected here record a series of halting steps to think through engineering and the engineered way of life that we all increasingly live in what has been called the Anthropocene. The aim is not to promote an ideology for engineering but to stimulate deeper reflection among engineers and non-engineers alike about some basic challenges of our engineered and engineering lifeworld.
Download or read book The End of Ethics in a Technological Society written by Lawrence E. Schmidt and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2008-02-06 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lawrence Schmidt and Scott Marratto challenge modern liberal ethics, arguing that there is no consistent ethical framework to deal with the long-range negative consequences of certain technological developments They examine established ethical approaches to such urgent contemporary concerns as environmental degradation, nuclear energy, high tech militarism, and fetal genetic testing, showing that the prevailing viewpoint valorizes autonomy above all other goods and considers technological advances as mere extensions of the range of human freedoms. Modern ethics thus fails to take into account the moral intuition that some possibilities in the realm of techno science simply ought not to be pursued. A comprehensive assessment of modern western society's commitment to technological progress, The End of Ethics in a Technological Society presents a convincing argument in favour of a post-liberal approach - one that rejects the ideology of progress, supports caution, and accepts limitation."
Download or read book Technoethics and the Evolving Knowledge Society Ethical Issues in Technological Design Research Development and Innovation written by Luppicini, Rocci and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2010-01-31 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book introduces the reader to the key concepts and issues that comprise the emerging field of Technoethics, the interdisciplinary field concerned with all ethical aspects of technology within a society shaped by technology"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Technology Of Life written by V. K. Tarasov and published by . This book was released on 2019-05-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book has nothing to do with science, it is about life - the gift we manage in a different way. That is why you will not find reference to the people whose thoughts I retell sometimes word to word and sometimes modify on my own way, sifting it through the sieve of my own perception. This book is destined to all living in the world now and to those who will live a thousand years from now. But there is special category of people for whom it destined first of all, though there are not many of them. This book is for heroes. For the people which desire to remake their country or the whole world. And desire to do this, as it seems to them, is completely selfless. V.Tarasov
Download or read book Divine Institutions written by Dan-el Padilla Peralta and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revision of the author's thesis (doctoral)--Stanford University, 2014, titled Divine institutions: religious practice, economic development, and social transformation in mid-Republican Rome.
Download or read book Living in the Labyrinth written by Diana Friel McGowin and published by Delta. This book was released on 2011-08-24 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living In The Labyrinth is the story of how one woman found the strength and the courage to cope with a devastating disease that has afflicted five million Americans. Far from being an exercise in self-pity or a standard autobiography, this is an unflinching and ultimately uplifting look at a debilitating illness from the inside out. “Somewhere there is that ever-present reminder list of what I am supposed to do today. But I cannot find it. I attempt to do the laundry and find myself outside, in my backyard, holding soiled clothes. How did I get here? How do I get back?” Only forty-five when she first began to struggle with the memory lapses and disorientation that signal the onset of Alzheimer’s, Diana Friel McGowin has written a courageous, stirring insider’s story of the disease that is now the fourth leading killer of American adults. Diana’s personal journey through days of darkness and light, fear and hope gives us new insight into a devastating illness and the plight of its victims, complete with a list of early warning signs, medical background, and resources for further information. But Diana’s story goes far beyond a recounting of a terrifying disease. It portrays a marriage struggling to survive, a family hurt beyond words, and a woman whose humor and intelligence triumph over setbacks and loss to show us the best of what being human is. “A stunner of a book . . . it takes the reader on a terrifying but enlightening journey.”—San Antonio News Express “Touching and sometimes angry . . . a poignant insider’s view.”—The Cincinnati Enquirer
Download or read book Exploring the Labyrinth written by Melissa Gayle West and published by Harmony. This book was released on 2000-02-08 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Whoever you are, walking the labyrinth has something to offer. If a project is challenging you, walking can get your creative juices flowing. When struggling with grief or anger, or a physical challenge or illness, walking the labyrinth can point the way to healing and wholeness. If you're looking for a way to meditate or pray that engages your body as well as your soul, the labyrinth provides such a path. When you just want reflective time away from a busy life, the labyrinth can offer you time out. The labyrinth holds up a mirror, reflecting back to us not only the light of our finest selves, but also whatever restrains us from shining forth." --From the Introduction Join Melissa Gayle West and thousands of others who are turning to labyrinth walking for quiet meditation and spiritual healing. Exploring the Labyrinth blends the timeless wisdom and meaning derived from labyrinths along with practical advice, divided among three sections: What is a labyrinth and why does it have such astonishing contemporary appeal? You'll be introduced to walking and working with this ancient archetype. Learn to construct a temporary or permanent, indoor or outdoor labyrinth from rocks, rope, canvas, and a wide variety of other materials. Discover specific ways to use the labyrinth for rituals, meaningful celebrations, spiritual growth, healing work, creativity enhancement, and goal setting. With practical advice, spiritual wisdom, and helpful resources, Exploring the Labyrinth is the complete guide to this ancient, transformative tool.
Download or read book Keepers of the Labyrinth written by Erin E. Moulton and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Courage is tested, myths come to life, and long-held secrets are revealed Lilith Bennette runs at midnight. She scales walls in the dark and climbs without a harness. She hopes that if she follows exactly in the steps of her strong air force pilot mother, she’ll somehow figure out the mystery of her mother’s death—and the reason why her necklace of Greek symbols has been missing ever since. So when Lil is invited to Crete for a Future Leaders International conference, the same conference her mom attended years ago, she jumps at the chance to find some answers. But things in Melios Manor are not what they seem. Lil finds herself ensnared in an adventure of mythological proportions that leads her and her friends through the very labyrinth in which the real Minotaur was imprisoned. And they’re not in there alone. What secrets does the labyrinth hold, and will they help Lil find the truth about her mother? This book is perfect for older fans of Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the Heroes of Olympus--and anyone who wants to find out the true story behind the magic of the Greek gods. Praise for KEEPERS OF THE LABYRINTH: "Secret societies, mythology, and puzzles worthy of a Dan Brown novel all figure prominently in this thriller....There is much to recommend this book: all the protagonists are empowered female characters, it explores the idea that behind the stories of classical Greek mythology is a history of real people, and it is filled with exciting action."--VOYA "Secret societies, Greek mythology, and a group of strong female characters are all wrapped up in a mystery which will hit the mark with readers who have finished Rick Riordan’s “Percy Jackson” series."--School Library Journal "Greek mythology provides the frame for this exciting amalgam of action, friendship, and girl-detective fiction."--Booklist
Download or read book Lost in the Labyrinth written by Patrice Kindl and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2005-09-26 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Kindl inventively meshes classical myths, archeological findings and imaginative speculation in an intriguing tale full of mystery and emotion.” —Publishers Weekly Last night I saw my sister, who is dead. She stood at the end of a long corridor, weeping. “Can it really be you, Ariadne, come back after all this time?” I whispered. She did not answer, but began slowly to sink through the floor. Princess Xenodice is content to spend her days tending to the animals in the royal menagerie, haunting the workshop of a beautiful young man named Icarus, and visiting her brother who lives in the Labyrinth. Her safe and privileged world, however, has ominous cracks underfoot. Soon battles for power and revenge threaten everything Xenodice loves. Betrayals from both within and without her family lead to a series of tragedies that Xenodice struggles to avert. From the deepest layer of the Labyrinth under the Royal Palace to the topmost floor of the prison tower, this enthralling version of the myth of the maze and the Minotaur by master storyteller Patrice Kindl is filled with the marvelous and the strange. “It’s Xenodice’s strong, appealing character that will get readers through the maze; her first-person narration brings the ancient setting vividly to life with rich detail and timeless emotions—sibling rivalry, heart-pounding crushes, moral outrage, and the pain of family secrets. An intriguing . . . blend of history, myth, and fiction.” —Booklist “Readers who know the legend will enjoy the parallels and contrasts that occur throughout, but the strong storytelling lets Xenodice’s tale stand on its own, as well.” —School Library Journal
