Download or read book Phantomology 101 written by Sharon Ramirez and published by . This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Phantomology 101...Hunting The Haunted," from the history of ghosts & ghost hunting to the modern day science of ghost hunting, what every paranormal investigator needs to know!
Download or read book A Philosophy of Person and Identity written by Monica Meijsing and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-08-04 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the themes of personhood and personal identity. It argues that while there is a metaphysical answer to the question of personal identity, there is no metaphysical answer to the question of what constitutes a person. The author argues against both body-mind dualism and physicalism and also against the idea that there is some metaphysically real category of persons distinct from the category of human beings or human organisms. Instead, the author presents neutral-monist, autopoietic-enactivist kind of metaphysics of the human being, and a relational, and completely human-dependent notion of a person. The tools used in these arguments include conceptual argumentation and empirical case studies. Using both personal experiences and studies of cultures all over the world, the author examines dualism between mind and body. The author discusses real people who seem to live a Cartesian life, as somehow disembodied minds as well as the concept of the person. The author uses the concluding chapters to present their own views arguing that questions about our identity should be separated from questions of our personhood as well as the concept of personhood. This volume is of interest to scholars of philosophy of mind.
Download or read book Summa Technologiae written by Stanisław Lem and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of the 1961 science fiction novel Solaris, adapted into a meditative film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and remade in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh. Throughout his writings, comprising dozens of science fiction novels and short stories, Lem offered deeply philosophical and bitingly satirical reflections on the limitations of both science and humanity. In Summa Technologiae—his major work of nonfiction, first published in 1964 and now available in English for the first time—Lem produced an engaging and caustically logical philosophical treatise about human and nonhuman life in its past, present, and future forms. After five decades Summa Technologiae has lost none of its intellectual or critical significance. Indeed, many of Lem’s conjectures about future technologies have now come true: from artificial intelligence, bionics, and nanotechnology to the dangers of information overload, the concept underlying Internet search engines, and the idea of virtual reality. More important for its continued relevance, however, is Lem’s rigorous investigation into the parallel development of biological and technical evolution and his conclusion that technology will outlive humanity. Preceding Richard Dawkins’s understanding of evolution as a blind watchmaker by more than two decades, Lem posits evolution as opportunistic, shortsighted, extravagant, and illogical. Strikingly original and still timely, Summa Technologiae resonates with a wide range of contemporary debates about information and new media, the life sciences, and the emerging relationship between technology and humanity.
Download or read book Transhumanism Engineering the Human Condition written by Roberto Manzocco and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-11 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is designed to offer a comprehensive high-level introduction to transhumanism, an international political and cultural movement that aims to produce a “paradigm shift” in our ethical and political understanding of human evolution. Transhumanist thinkers want the human species to take the course of evolution into its own hands, using advanced technologies currently under development – such as robotics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cognitive neurosciences, and nanotechnology – to overcome our present physical and mental limitations, improve our intelligence beyond the current maximum achievable level, acquire skills that are currently the preserve of other species, abolish involuntary aging and death, and ultimately achieve a post-human level of existence. The book covers transhumanism from a historical, philosophical, and scientific viewpoint, tracing its cultural roots, discussing the main philosophical, epistemological, and ethical issues, and reviewing the state of the art in scientific research on the topics of most interest to transhumanists. The writing style is clear and accessible for the general reader, but the book will also appeal to graduate and undergraduate students.
Download or read book Jacques Derrida s Ghost written by David Appelbaum and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A spirited reading of Derrida’s view of ethics as transcendental and performative.
Download or read book Eye tracking in Interaction written by Geert Brône and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a state-of-the-art of current research on the role of eye gaze in different types of interaction, including human-human and human-computer interaction. Approaching the phenomenon from different disciplinary and methodological angles, the chapters in the volume are united through a shared technological approach, viz. the use of eye-tracking technology for measuring speakers’ and hearers’ eye gaze patterns while engaged in interaction. Envisioned as an ‘innovating reader’, the volume addresses key questions of interdisciplinary relevance (e.g. to what extent can the analysis of fine-grained eye gaze data, obtained with eye-tracking technology, inform conversation analysis, and vice versa?), positioning (e.g. what is the semiotic status of eye gaze in relation to linguistic signaling?), and methodology (e.g. can we strike a balance between experimental control and authenticity in setting up dialogue settings with eye-tracking technology?). The exploration of these and other questions contributes to the demarcation of a burgeoning research program.
Download or read book The Shortest Shadow written by Alenka Zupancic and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-09-26 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Restoring Nietzsche to a Nietzschean context—examining the definitive element that animates his work. What is it that makes Nietzsche Nietzsche? In The Shortest Shadow, Alenka Zupančič counters the currently fashionable appropriation of Nietzsche as a philosopher who was "ahead of his time" but whose time has finally come—the rather patronizing reduction of his often extraordinary statements to mere opinions that we can "share." Zupančič argues that the definitive Nietzschean quality is his very unfashionableness, his being out of the mainstream of his or any time. To restore Nietzsche to a context in which the thought "lives on its own credit," Zupančič examines two aspects of his philosophy. First, in "Nietzsche as Metapsychologist," she revisits the principal Nietzschean themes—his declaration of the death of God (which had a twofold meaning, "God is dead" and "Christianity survived the death of God"), the ascetic ideal, and nihilism—as ideas that are very much present in our hedonist postmodern condition. Then, in the second part of the book, she considers Nietzsche's figure of the Noon and its consequences for his notion of the truth. Nietzsche describes the Noon not as the moment when all shadows disappear but as the moment of "the shortest shadow"—not the unity of all things embraced by the sun, but the moment of splitting, when "one turns into two." Zupančič argues that this notion of the Two as the minimal and irreducible difference within the same animates all of Nietzsche's work, generating its permanent and inherent tension.
Download or read book Stanislaw Lem written by Peter Swirski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future brings a welter of unknown elements of Lem's life, career, and literary legacy to light in order to mete out cognitive justice to the writer who preferred to be known as the philosopher of the future.
Download or read book Is Oedipus Online written by Jerry Aline Flieger and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005-05-06 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychoanalysis as a navigation device for the cultural maze of the twenty-first century. "Can Freud be 'updated' in the twenty-first century, or is he a venerated but outmoded genius?" asks Jerry Aline Flieger. In Is Oedipus Online? Flieger stages an encounter between psychoanalysis and the new century, testing the viability of Freud's theories in light of the emergent realities of our time. Responding to prominent critics of psychoanalysis and approaching our current preoccupations from a Freudian angle, she presents a reading of Freudian theory that coincides with and even clarifies new concepts in science and culture. Fractals, emergence, topological modeling, and other nonlinearities, for example, can be understood in light of both Freud's idea of the symptom as a nodal point and Lacan's concept of networks (rather than sequential cause and effect) that link psychic realities. At the same time, Flieger suggests how emerging paradigms in science and culture may elucidate Freud's cultural theory. Like Slavoj Zizek, editor of the Short Circuits series, Flieger shifts effortlessly from field to field, discussing psychoanalysis, millennial culture, nonlinear science, and the landscape of cyberspace. In the first half of the book, "Re-siting Oedipus," she draws on the work of Lyotard, Zizek, Deleuze, Virilio, Baudrillard, Haraway and others, to refute the assumption of Freud's outdatedness in the new century. Then, in "Freud Sitings in Millennial Theory," she recasts oedipal theory, siting/sighting/citing Freud in a twenty-first-century context. Thinking of Oedipus—decipherer of enigmas, wanderer—as a navigator or search engine allows us to see psychoanalysis as a navigation device for the cultural maze of the "bimillennial" era, and Oedipus himself as a circuit of intersubjective processes by which we become human. For humanity—still needed in the "posthuman" century—is at the core of Freud's theory: "Reading Freud today," Flieger writes, "reminds us of the complications of the Sphinx's riddle, the enigma that Oedipus only thought he solved: the question of what it is to be human. Psychoanalysis continues to pose that question at the crossroads between instincts and their vicissitudes."
Download or read book Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature Films and Discourse written by A. Fuchs and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-01-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse offers an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of fundamental shifts in German cultural memory. Focusing on the resurgence of family stories in fiction, autobiography and in film, this study challenges the institutional boundaries of Germany's memory culture that have guided and arguably limited German identity debates. Essays on contemporary German literature are complemented by explorations of heritage films and museum discourse. Together these essays put forward a compelling theory of family narratives and a critical evaluation of generational discourse.
Download or read book Peeling the Onion written by Günter Grass and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2008 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published. During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous. Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onion--which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany--reveals Grass at his most intimate.
Download or read book Interrogation Machine written by Alexei Monroe and published by . This book was released on 2005-10-14 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the NSK organization are a number of divisions, the best-known of which is Laibach, an alternative music group known for its blending of popular culture with subversive politics, high art with underground provocation - reflecting the political and cultural chaos of its time."
Download or read book Nietzsche and Transhumanism written by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay collection deals with the question of whether Nietzsche can be seen as a precursor of transhumanism or not. Debates on the topic have existed for some years, particularly in the Journal of Evolution and Technology and The Agonist. This book combines existing papers, from these journals, with new material, to highlight some of the important issues surrounding this argument. The collection addresses a variety of issues to show whether or not there is a close connection between transhumanist concerns for progress and technology and Nietzsche’s ideas.
Download or read book Cognitive Fictions written by Joseph Tabbi and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together cognitive science and literary analysis to map a new "media ecology," Cognitive Fictions limns an evolutionary process in which literature must find its place in an artificial environment partly produced and thoroughly mediated by technological means. Joseph Tabbi provides a penetrating account of a developing consciousness emerging from the struggle between print and electronic systems of communication. Central to Tabbi's work is the relation between the arrangement of communicating "modules" that cognitive science uses to describe the human mind and the arrangement of visual, verbal, and aural media in our technological culture. He looks at particular literary works by Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, David Markson, Lynne Tillman, Paul Auster, and others as both inscriptions of thought consistent with distributed cognitive models, and as self-creations out of the media environment. The first close reading of contemporary American writing in the light of systems theory and cognitive science, Cognitive Fictions makes needed sense of how the moment-by-moment operations of human thought find narrative form in a world increasingly defined by competing and often incompatible representations. Book jacket.
Download or read book Andrew s Brain written by E.L. Doctorow and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This brilliant novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been the inadvertent agent of disaster. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, SLATE, AND THE TELEGRAPH Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times—funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound. Andrew’s Brain is a surprising turn and a singular achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the words of Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.” Praise for Andrew’s Brain “Too compelling to put down . . . fascinating, sometimes funny, often profound . . . Andrew is a provocatively interesting and even sympathetic character. . . . The novel seamlessly combines Doctorow’s remarkable prowess as a literary stylist with deep psychological storytelling pitting truth against delusion, memory and perception, consciousness and craziness. . . . [Doctorow] takes huge creative risks—the best kind.”—USA Today “Cunning [and] sly . . . This babbling Andrew is a casualty of his times, binding his wounds with thick wrappings of words, ideas, bits of story, whatever his spinning mind can unspool for him. One of the things that makes [Andrew] such a terrific comic creation is that he’s both maddeningly self-delusive and scarily self-aware: He’s a fool, but he’s no innocent.”—The New York Times Book Review “A tantalising tour de force . . . a journey worth taking . . . With exhilarating brio, the book plays off . . . two contrasting takes on mind and brain. . . . [Andrew’s Brain encompasses] an astonishing range of modes: vaudeville humour, tragic romance, philosophical speculation. . . . It fizzes with intellectual energy, verbal pyrotechnics and satiric flair.”—The Sunday Times (London) “Dramatic . . . cunning and beautiful . . . strange and oddly fascinating, this book: a musing, a conjecture, a frivolity, a deep interrogatory, a hymn.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Provocative . . . a story aswirl in a whirlpool of neuroscience, human relations, loss, guilt and recent American history . . . Doctorow reveals his mastery in the sheen of a text that is both window and mirror. Reading his work is akin to soaring in a glider. Buoyed by invisible breath, readers encounter stunning vistas stretching to horizons they’ve never imagined.”—The Plain Dealer “Andrew’s ruminations can be funny, and his descriptions gorgeous.”—Associated Press “[An] evocative, suspenseful novel about the deceptive nature of human consciousness.”—More “A quick and acutely intelligent read.”—Entertainment Weekly
Download or read book High Techn written by R. L. Rutsky and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On art and high tech.
Download or read book Connected written by Steven Shaviro and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2003-10-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twenty-first century, a network society is emerging. Fragmented, visually saturated, characterized by rapid technological change and constant social upheavals, it is dizzying, excessive, and sometimes surreal. In this breathtaking work, Steven Shaviro investigates popular culture, new technologies, political change, and community disruption and concludes that science fiction and social reality have become virtually indistinguishable. Connected is made up of a series of mini-essays-on cyberpunk, hip-hop, film noir, Web surfing, greed, electronic surveillance, pervasive multimedia, psychedelic drugs, artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, and the architecture of Frank Gehry, among other topics. Shaviro argues that our strange new world is increasingly being transformed in ways, and by devices, that seem to come out of the pages of science fiction, even while the world itself is becoming a futuristic landscape. The result is that science fiction provides the most useful social theory, the only form that manages to be as radical as reality itself. Connected looks at how our networked environment has manifested itself in the work of J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, K. W. Jeter, and others. Shaviro focuses on science fiction not only as a form of cultural commentary but also as a prescient forum in which to explore the forces that are morphing our world into a sort of virtual reality game. Original and compelling, Connected shows how the continual experimentation of science fiction, like science and technology themselves, conjures the invisible social and economic forces that surround us.
