Download or read book Pragmatism Technology and the Persistence of the Postmodern written by Andrew Wells Garnar and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is postmodernity over? Does postmodernism still have anything important to say? Pragmatism, Technology, and the Persistence of the Postmodern argues “yes” to both. Despite the claims of a number of scholars that “postmodern” is over and done with, Andrew Wells Garnar demonstrates its continued relevance by carefully examining the use of information and communication technologies. These technologies illustrate many important postmodern concepts, thus showing the continued significance of postmodern philosophy. Garnar reconstructs these concepts with the tools of classical pragmatism. By engaging with pragmatists as well as with the thought of Jean-François Lyotard, Albert Borgmann, and others, this book produces a revitalized vision of both pragmatism and the postmodern. This version of pragmatism reflects the tenor of the times in a more nuanced way, while also showing how the postmodern continues to play out in contemporary life. Pragmatism, Technology, and the Persistence of the Postmodern shows how a pragmatic conception of technology opens up possibilities for working within postmodernity to materially address social and technical problems.
Download or read book Virtual Futures written by Joan Broadhurst Dixon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-07-20 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtual Futures explores the ideas that the future lies in its ability to articulate the consequences of an increasingly synthetic and virtual world. New technologies like cyberspace, the internet, and Chaos theory are often discussed in the context of technology and its potential to liberate or in terms of technophobia. This collection examines both these ideas while also charting a new and controversial route through contemporary discourses on technology; a path that discusses the material evolution and the erotic relation between humans and machines. Virtual Futures brings together diverse fields such as cyberfeminism, materialist philosophy, postmodern fiction, computing culture and performance art, with essays by Sadie Plant, Stelarc and Manuel de Landa (to name a few). The collection heralds the death of humanism and the ride of posthuman pragmatism. The contested zone of debate throughout these essays is the notion of the posthuman, or the possibility of the cyborg as the free human. Viewed by some writers as a threat to human life and humanism itself, others in the collection describe the posthuman as a critical perspective that anticipates the next step in evolution: the integration or synthesis of humans and machines, organic life and technology. This view of technology and information is heavily influenced by Anglo American literature, especially cyberpunk, Pynchon and Ballard, as well as the materialist philosophies of Freud, Deleuze, and Haraway, Virtual Futures provides analyses by both established theorists and the most innovative new voices working in conjunction between the arts and contemporary technology.
Download or read book Essential Concepts in Sociology written by Anthony Giddens and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social life is in a constant process of change, and sociology can never stand still. As a result, contemporary sociology is a theoretically diverse enterprise, covering a huge range of subjects and drawing on a broad array of research methods. Central to this endeavour is the use of core concepts and ideas which allow sociologists to make sense of societies, though our understanding of these concepts necessarily evolves and changes. This clear and jargon-free book introduces a careful selection of essential concepts that have helped to shape sociology and continue to do so. Going beyond brief, dictionary-style definitions, Anthony Giddens and Philip W. Sutton provide an extended discussion of each concept which sets it in historical and theoretical context, explores its main meanings in use, introduces relevant criticisms, and points readers to its ongoing development in contemporary research and theorizing. Organized in ten thematic sections, the book offers a portrait of sociology through its essential concepts, ranging from capitalism, identity and deviance to the digital revolution, environment, postcolonialism and intersectionality. It will be essential reading for all those new to sociology as well as anyone seeking a reliable route map for a rapidly changing world.
Download or read book Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture written by Larry A. Hickman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hickman['s]... style of pragmatism provides us with flexible, philosophical 'tools' which can be used to analyze and penetrate various technology and technological cultural problems of the present. He, himself, uses this toolkit to make his analyses and succeeds very well indeed." --Don Ihde A practical and comprehensive appraisal of the value of philosophy in today's technological culture. Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture contends that technology--a defining mark of contemporary culture--should be a legitimate concern of philosophers. Larry A. Hickman contests the perception that philosophy is little more than a narrow academic discipline and that philosophical discourse is merely redescription of the ancient past. Drawing inspiration from John Dewey, one of America's greatest public philosophers, Hickman validates the role of philosophers as cultural critics and reformers in the broadest sense. Hickman situates Dewey's critique of technological culture within the debates of 20th-century Western philosophy by engaging the work of Richard Rorty, Albert Borgmann, Jacques Ellul, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and Martin Heidegger, among others. Pushing beyond their philosophical concerns, Hickman designs and assembles a set of philosophical tools to cope with technological culture in a new century. His pragmatic treatment of current themes--such as technology and its relationship to the arts, technosciences and technocrats, the role of the media in education, and the meaning of democracy and community life in an age dominated by technology--reveals that philosophy possesses powerful tools for cultural renewal. This original, timely, and accessible work will be of interest to readers seeking a deeper understanding of the meanings and consequences of technology in today's world.
Download or read book Technology Pessimism and Postmodernism written by Yaron Ezrahi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HOWARD P. SEGAL, FOR THE EDITORS In November 1979 the Humanities Department of the University of Michi gan's College of Engineering sponsored a symposium on ''Technology and Pessimism. " The symposium included scholars from a variety of fields and carefully balanced critics and defenders of modern technology, broadly defined. Although by this point it was hardly revolutionary to suggest that technology was no longer automatically equated with optimism and in turn with unceasing social advance, the idea of linking technology so explicitly with pessimism was bound to attract attention. Among others, John Noble Wilford, a New York Times science and technology correspondent, not only covered the symposium but also wrote about it at length in the Times the following week. As Wilford observed, "Whatever their disagreements, the participants agreed that a mood of pessimism is overtaking and may have already displaced the old optimistic view of history as a steady and cumulative expansion of human power, the idea of inevitable progress born in the Scientific and Industrial Rev olutions and dominant in the 19th century and for at least the first half of this century. " Such pessimism, he continued, "is fed by growing doubts about soci ety's ability to rein in the seemingly runaway forces of technology, though the participants conceded that in many instances technology was more the symbol than the substance of the problem.
Download or read book Pragmatism Postmodernism and the Future of Philosophy written by John J. Stuhr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-03 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Pragmatism written by Robert Hollinger and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1999-01-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American pragmatism can be best understood against the background of 20th-century American culture and politics. The essays in this volume, by philosophers, cultural critics, and historians, explore the development of pragmatism in this context. The emphasis in this volume is on the interrelations between the philosophical or foundational issues raised by pragmatism as a philosophical movement, and the cultural, political, and educational programs that have been associated with pragmatism from James, Dewey, and Mead to Rorty and Cornel West. The book is divided into three parts, reflecting the periods of Progressivism, Positivism, and Postmodernism. The contributors explore the ways in which pragmatist writings have been appropriated or misappropriated in the literature and practice of Progressive reformers, positivist academics, end-of-ideology liberals, and postmodernists.
Download or read book Feedback Loops written by Andrew Wells Garnar and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world of information technologies, genetic engineering, controversies about established science, and the mysteries of quantum physics, it is at once seemingly impossible and absolutely vital to find ways to make sense of how science, technology, and society connect. In Feedback Loops: Pragmatism about Science & Technology, editors Andrew Wells Garnar and Ashley Shew bring together original writing from philosophers and science and technology studies scholars to provide novel ways of rethinking the relationships among science, technology, education, and society. Through critiquing and exploring the work of philosopher of science and technology Joseph C. Pitt, the authors featured in this volume investigate the complexities of contemporary technoscience, writing on topics ranging from super-computing to pedagogy, engineering to biotechnology patents, and scientific instruments to disability studies. Taken together, these chapters develop an argument about the necessity of using pragmatism to foster a more productive relationship among science, technology and society.
Download or read book Pragmatism written by Robert Hollinger and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1995-05-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays explore the development of American pragmatism against the background of 20th-century American culture and politics. The book emphasises the inter-relations between the philosophical or foundational issues raised by pragmatism as a philosophical movement.
Download or read book Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture" contends that technology - a defining mark of contemporary culture - should be a legitimate concern of philosophers. Larry A. Hickman contests the popular notions that philosophy is little more than a narrow academic discipline and that philosophical discourse is little more than re-description of the ancient past. Drawing inspiration from John Dewey, one of America's greatest public philosophers, Hickman validates the role of philosophers as cultural critics and reformers in the broadest sense. Hickman situates Dewey's critique of technological culture within the debates of twentieth-century Western philosophy by engaging the work of Richard Rorty, Albert Borgmann, Jacques Ellul, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas, and Martin Heidegger, among others. Pushing beyond the philosophical concerns of these philosophers, Hickman designs and assembles a set of philosophical tools to cope with technological culture in a new century. The pragmatic treatment Hickman gives to current themes such as technology and its relationship to the arts, technosciences and technocrats, the role of the media in education, the meaning of democracy and community life in an age dominated by technology, reveals that philosophy possesses powerful tools for cultural renewal. This original, timely, and accessible work will be of interest to readers seeking a deeper understanding of the meanings and consequences of technology in today's world.
Download or read book Reimagining Philosophy and Technology Reinventing Ihde written by Glen Miller and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-27 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume includes eleven original essays that explore and expand on the work of Don Ihde, bookended by two chapters by Ihde himself. Ihde, the recipient of the first Society for Philosophy and Technology's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, is best known for his development of postphenomenology, a blend of pragmatism and phenomenology that incorporates insights into the ways technology mediates human perception and action. The book contains contributions from academics from Europe, North America, and Asia, which demonstrates the global impact of Ihde’s work. Essays in the book explore the relationship between Ihde's work and its origins in phenomenology (especially Husserl and Heidegger) and American pragmatism; integrate his philosophical work within the embodied experience of radical architecture and imagine the possibility of a future philosophy of technology after postphenomenology; develop central ideas of postphenomenology and expand the resources present in postphenomenology to ethics and politics; and extend the influence of Ihde's ideas to mobile media and engineering, and comprehensively assess the influence of his work in China. The book includes a reprint of the Introduction of Sense and Significance, one of Ihde's first books; "Hawk: Predatory Vision," a new chapter that blends his biographical experience with feminism, technoscience, and environmental observation; and an appendix that lists all of Ihde's books as well as secondary sources annotated by Ihde himself. Starting with an Editors' Introduction that offers an overview of the central ideas in Ihde's corpus and concluding with an index that facilitates research across the various chapters, this book is of interest to a diverse academic community that includes philosophers, STS scholars, anthropologists, historians, and sociologists.
Download or read book Crossing the Postmodern Divide written by Albert Borgmann and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crossing the Postmodern Divide is a guide for all those perplexed by what it means to live at the edge of an era. Albert Borgmann writes for everyone seeking to understand the sprawling critique of modernity that informs virtually every aspect of life at the end of the twentieth century, from philosophy, social theory, and the arts to everyday worlds of work and family and community. In this eloquent guide to the meanings of the postmodern era, Borgmann charts the options before us as we seek alternatives to the joyless and artificial culture of consumption. With exceptional clarity, Borgmann connects the fundamental ideas driving his understanding of society's ills to every sphere of contemporary social life. We have lost faith in the modern project. Our society is disenchanted with a world in which science and technology have become tools for destruction; where rampant individualism is a mask for privilege and greed; and where the institutions of public life are emptied of meaning and purpose. In offering alternatives to modernity's exhausted traditions, alternatives already emerging in everyday life, Borgmann moves this critique to its next stage. Whether in the increasingly flexible organization of work, the enabling technologies of the personal computer, or the return to small-scale communities more in harmony with the demands of nature, he finds us beginning to reorder our social worlds. Crossing the Postmodern Divide also offers a powerfully articulated vision of what a postmodern culture has in store. This new era, at its best, would enable participation, acknowledge limits, and restore to human life the importance of the local, the sacred, and the communal. The critique of modernism Borgmann portrays goes beyond the empty language of postmodern discourse. It speaks to real dissatisfactions with the quality of our world and strives to provide us with a helpful view of the postmodern divide and what lies beyond it.
Download or read book Doing Philosophy of Technology written by Joseph C. Pitt and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As science becomes more deeply embedded in a complex technological infrastructure, has this changed the relationship between the sciences and the various technologies that support them? As our technologies help shrink our world, can we restrict our ethical concerns or must we find a way to face the fact that we are now one world? What do new forms of architecture say about whom we are? Is the design process the new epistemological paradigm? The answers to all of these is "yes" according to Joseph C. Pitt (VirginaTech). Doing Philosophy of Technology presents an updated and integrated overview of the most important thinking from this prominent philosopher of technology. Throughout his career Joseph C. Pitt has defended the view that to say anything meaningful about the value of a technology one must know something about that technology and how it functions in the world. This starting point leads naturally to a pragmatist philosophical stance, since it is the real world consequences of introducing a technology that must be the basis for any further normative judgements. In the book we find an extended set of arguments that challenge the idea that there are eternal philosophical issues that transcend the impacts that technologies make on human beings and their world. Rather, it is claimed that as our technologies transform our world they transform us and the kinds of questions we find important to answer.
Download or read book Postphenomenological Investigations written by Robert Joseph Rosenberger and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2015 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an introduction to postphenomenology, an emerging school of thought in the philosophy of technology and science and technology studies, which addresses the relationships users develop with the devices they use.
Download or read book The Promise of Pragmatism written by John Patrick Diggins and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-05-15 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For much of our century, pragmatism has enjoyed a charmed life, holding the dominant point of view in American politics, law, education, and social thought in general. After suffering a brief eclipse in the post-World War II period, pragmatism has enjoyed a revival, especially in literary theory and such areas as poststructuralism and deconstruction. In this sweeping critique of pragmatism and neopragmatism, one of our leading intellectual historians traces the attempts of thinkers from William James to Richard Rorty to find a response to the crisis of modernism. John Patrick Diggins analyzes the limitations of pragmatism from a historical perspective and dares to ask whether America's one original contribution to the world of philosophy has actually fulfilled its promise. In the late nineteenth century, intellectuals felt themselves in the grips of a spiritual crisis. This confrontation with the "acids of modernity" eroded older faiths and led to a sense that life would continue in the awareness, of absences: knowledge without truth, power without authority, society without spirit, self without identity, politics without virtue, existence without purpose, history without meaning. In Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber faced a world in which God was "dead" and society was succumbing to structures of power and domination. In America, Henry Adams resigned from Harvard when he realized there were no truths to be taught and when he could only conclude: "Experience ceases to educate." To the American philosophers of pragmatism, it was experience that provided the basis on which new methods of knowing could replace older ideas of truth. Diggins examines how, in different ways, William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, George H. Mead, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., demonstrated that modernism posed no obstacle in fields such as science, education, religion, law, politics, and diplomacy. Diggins also examines the work of the neopragmatists Jurgen Habermas and Richard Rorty and their attempt to resolve the crisis of postmodernism. Using one author to interrogate another, Diggins brilliantly allows the ideas to speak to our conditions as well as theirs. Did the older philosophers succeed in fulfilling the promises of pragmatism? Can the neopragmatists write their way out of what they have thought themselves into? And does America need philosophers to tell us that we do not need foundational truths when the Founders already told us that the Constitution would be a "machine" that would depend more upon the "counterpoise" of power than on the claims of knowledge? Diggins addresses these and other essential questions in this magisterial account of twentieth-century intellectual life. It should be read by everyone concerned about the roots of postmodernism (and its links to pragmatism) and about the forms of thought and action available for confronting a world after postmodernism.
Download or read book Contemporary Pragmatism Issue 2 written by John R. Shook and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cultural Collisions written by Raphael Sassower and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cultural Collisions Raphael Sassower brings postmodernism face to face with technoscience and considers the viability of public works, such as the Superconducting Supercollider, in a postmodern age. Contending that technoscientific projects are contingent upon economic and political support, and not simply upon their scientific feasibility, Sassower illuminates the cultural context of postmodern technoscience vis-a-vis an examination of postmodernism and the philosophy of late 20th century science.
