scholarly journals Posthumanism in Archaeology: An Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Manuel Fernández-Götz ◽  
Andrew Gardner ◽  
Guillermo Díaz de Liaño ◽  
Oliver J.T. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Quantum Physics ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Material World ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Material Things ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study

Posthumanism is a growing field of interdisciplinary study that has emerged, principally in the last 20 years, as a broad church which seeks to reconceptualize human beings’ relationships with the world. At its heart, Posthumanism seeks to destabilize and question the category of ‘human’, which it sees as having previously been treated as transcendent and ahistorical. In its place, the figure of the posthuman aims to capture the complex and situated nature of our species’ existence, outside traditional dichotomies like culture and nature, mind and body, person and environment, and so on. From animal studies (e.g. Despret 2016; Wolfe 2009), via a rekindled attention to the material world (Coole & Frost 2010) to the cutting edge of quantum physics (Barad 2007), Posthumanism draws on a diverse range of inspiration (Ferrando 2019). This diversity also covers a significant internal dissonance and difference, with some posthumanists taking relational approaches, others arguing for the essential qualities of things, some focusing primarily on material things without humans and others calling for explicitly feminist investigations.

Nature

2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bellamy Foster
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
Material World ◽  
Complex Word ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
The World ◽  
Raymond Williams

This article is adapted from John Bellamy Foster, "Nature," in Kelly Fritsch, Clare O'Connor, and AK Thompson, ed., Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 279-86, http://akpress.org/keywords-for-radicals.html."Nature," wrote Raymond Williams in Keywords, "is perhaps the most complex word in the language." It is derived from the Latin natura, as exemplified by Lucretius's great didactic poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) from the first century BCE. The word "nature" has three primary, interrelated meanings: (1) the intrinsic properties or essence of things or processes; (2) an inherent force that directs or determines the world; and (3) the material world or universe, the object of our sense perceptions—both in its entirety and variously understood as including or excluding God, spirit, mind, human beings, society, history, culture, etc.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

scholarly journals Designing for deep learning in the context of digital and social media

Comunicar ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (58) ◽  
pp. 9-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
James-Paul Gee ◽  
Moisés Esteban-Guitart
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
World Health ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Redes Sociales ◽  
Living Things ◽  
The World ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Health Organization

There is today a great deal of controversy over digital and social media. Even leaders in the tech industry are beginning to decry the time young people spend on smartphones and social networks. Recently, the World Health Organization proposed adding “gaming disorder” to its official list of diseases, defining it as a pattern of gaming behavior so severe that it takes “precedence over other life interests”. At the same time, many others have celebrated the positive properties of video games, social media, and social networks. This paper argues that a deeper understanding of human beings is needed to design for deep learning. For the purposes of this study “design for deep learning” means helping people matter and find meaning in ways that make them and others healthy in mind and body, while improving the state of the world for all living things, with due respect for truth, sensation, happiness, imagination, individuality, diversity, and the future. In particular, fifteen features related to human nature are suggested based on recent scientific developments to answer the question: What is a human being? Consequently, proposals that are linked to learning and transformation, as well as social improvement, should fit with the ways in which humans, as specific sorts of biological and social creatures, learn best (or can learn at all) and can change for the better. En la actualidad existe una nutrida controversia en relación a los medios de comunicación sociales y digitales que ha llevado, incluso, a censurar la utilización de las redes sociales y los móviles por parte de líderes en la industria tecnológica. En este sentido, la Organización Mundial para la Salud ha propuesto añadir el «desorden del juego» a su listado de enfermedades, definiéndolo como un modelo de comportamiento de juego tan severo que se impone como «preferencia sobre otros intereses». Al mismo tiempo, distintos académicos han enfatizado los aspectos positivos derivados de las redes sociales y los videojuegos. En este artículo se argumenta que es necesaria una mejor comprensión del ser humano para poder implementar lo que aquí se define como diseño para el aprendizaje profundo. El «diseño para el aprendizaje profundo» está encaminado al reconocimiento de las personas y el desarrollo de sentidos saludables, individual y colectivamente, así como la mejora, en general, del estado del mundo para todos los seres vivos, según principios de verdad, felicidad, imaginación, individualidad, diversidad y futuro. En particular, se sugieren quince características basadas en desarrollos científicos que responden a la pregunta: ¿Qué es un ser humano? Consecuentemente, propuestas vinculadas al aprendizaje y la transformación y mejora social deben ser coherentes con dichas características que permiten definir cómo las personas, en tanto que organismos biológicos y sociales, aprenden o pueden aprender óptimamente, así como cambiar para mejorar.

A Foucauldian Reading of Huxley’s Brave New World

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Bilal Tawfiq Hamamra
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
World State ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The World ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Human World ◽  
Brave New World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Systematic Control

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is a nightmarish depiction of a post-human world where human beings are mass-produced to serve production and consumption. In this paper, I discuss the manipulations of minds and bodies with reference to Foucault’s biopower and disciplinary systems that make the citizens of the world state more profitable and productive. I argue that Brave New World depicts a dystopian systematic control of mind and body through eugenic engineering, biological conditioning, hypnopaedia, sexual satisfaction, and drugs so as to keep the worldians completely controlled, collectivized and contented in a totalitarian society. The world state eradicates love, religion, art and history and deploys language devoid of any emotions and thoughts to control the mind that judges and decides. I argue that Brave New World anticipates the Foucauldian paradigm of resistance, subversion and containment, ending in eliminating the forces that pose a challenge to the ideology of the world state.

Cosmic Liturgy: The Theological Dignity of Creation as a Basis of an Orthodox Ecotheology

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 332-344
Author(s):  
Daniel Munteanu
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Material World ◽  
New Creation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Orthodox Theology

AbstractOne of the most important contributions of Orthodox theology to ecotheology consists in its understanding of matter as an expression of the divine rationality. The logoi of the world are connected with the divine Logos and have an inner aspiration towards communion with God. Maximus Confessor’s view of the material world as potential church leads to a cosmic ecclesiology with direct significance for the overcoming of our contemporary ecological crisis. His theology of creatio originalis and of the new creation as transfigurated universe allows us to speak about the theological dignity of matter as the ‘home of God’, as well as a field of dialogue between creator and human beings. The Orthodox spirituality, as spirituality of theosis, of the transfiguration of matter through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is deeply ecological and, at the same time a source for a culture of healing communication, dialogue, love and respect of the ecosystems as expression of God’s rationality.

Transitions to and from Nature in Hegel and Plato

1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (02) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary K Browning
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Material World ◽  
Absolute Idealism ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Organic Community ◽  
Explanatory Priority ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

The philosophical understanding of nature is a key concern of both Plato and Hegel. Their elaborations of the identity and status of nature within their respective philosophies exhibit significant affinities to which Hegel himself draws attention in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Hegel and Plato, indeed, are fundamentally at one in theorizing nature as both displaying and obscuring the principles of reason which they take as providing the foundations of a coherent explanation of reality. In his lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel takes great pains to emphasize the profundity of Plato's idealism as residing in its identification of the objectively real with the rational. Plato, according to Hegel, is to be revered, above all, for having “… grasped in all its truth Socrates' great principle that ultimate reality lies in consciousness, since according to him the absolute is in thought and all reality is thought.” The Timaeus, for Hegel, articulates how the world of nature is necessarily structured by reason, just as the Republic is seen by Hegel as providing a philosophical explanation of the rationality of the traditional, organic community of the Greek polis. Hegel's recognition of the Platonic foundations of his own version of “absolute” idealism in which the universality of thought assumes an explanatory priority over the material phenomena of nature as well as informing the spiritual activities of human beings has been noted, rightly, by a number of subsequent commentators. Michael Rosen, for instance, in his book, Hegel's Dialectic and Its Criticism, while carefully distinguishing between aspects of Hegel's and Plato's conceptions of nature, intimates the continuity of Hegel's idealism with Plato's by observing how Hegel's language in effecting a transition from the categories of pure thought in the Logic to the material world of nature constitutes an “… echo of Plato's Timaeus.” Certainly, Hegel's cryptic account of the transition from the Absolute Idea, the categorial terminus of the Logic's interrogation of the determinations of pure thought, to the externality and materiality of nature evokes Plato's construal of the construction of the world in the Timaeus, both by the indeterminate character of the God which is invoked, as well as by the clear subordination of material phenomena to a separately articulable order of reason. In the account of the construction of the world developed in the Timaeus, Plato deploys the image of the divine demiurge imparting order to the world by referring to a pre-existing pattern of ideas. Hegel conceives of the Absolute Idea which at the outset of the Philosophy of Nature he likens to God, as, “… freely releasing itself…” into the externality of space and time, in which movement the Idea is seen as suffering neither a transition within nor a deepening of its character such as the mediated categories of the Logic incur in the process of their integration within the Absolute Idea.

From Brotherly Handshake to Militant Clenched Fist: On Political Metaphors for the Worker's Hand

1992 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 70-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gottfried Korff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Manual Dexterity ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Renaissance Art ◽  
Material World ◽  
Labor Power ◽  
The World ◽  
Sistine Chapel ◽  
The Creation

The hand has long been a symbol of what makes human beings human. It is still used to convey this meaning, despite the decline of manual labor and the replacement of manual dexterity by machines, robots, and computers. A number of twentieth-century images remind us of the hand's labor power: for example, Fernand Leger's 1951 homage to Vladimir Mayakowsky, his earlier 1918 painting, “The Mechanic,” which is a veritable icon of the worker whose hand forms the dynamic compositional element (Fig. 1), and Diego Rivera's “Detroit Industry Frescoes,” where gigantic hands symbolize humanity's struggle with the material world. In European visual traditions, the iconography of the hand as labor power is imprinted by three types of images: Renaissance imagery, industrial allegory, and artisan and worker iconography. In Renaissance art, Michelangelo, in “The Creation” in the Sistine Chapel, reinterpreted the Biblical reference to God's breathing life into the world by adding the barely touching hands of God and Adam, thereby suggesting the virtue of active work. Industrial allegory, developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, emphasized the “bourgeois” view of work as a sign of goaloriented, planned achievement and success in the world, with the hand depicted as a tool that creates new tools and hence the organ that makes humanity the crowning work of creation.

The matter with emotions

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Kus
Keyword(s):  
Human Beings ◽  
Material World ◽  
Material Things

I ‘full-heartedly’ agree with Harris and Sørensen that archaeologists are in need of fuller ‘appreciation of how the encounter with the material world is inherently affective’ in order to more effectively understand ‘how human beings and material things are co-constitutive’ (p. 146). Further, but assuredly not ‘foolhardily’, I would argue that in refining our appreciation and understanding of these matters of matter and emotion and being, we can make an important contribution to contemporary dialogues on emotion beyond ‘archaeological dialogues’; in particular, dialogues with psychological anthropologists.

scholarly journals Człowiek i przyroda w nauce chrześcijańskiego Wschodu

2004 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 327-348
Author(s):  
Janusz Aptacy
Keyword(s):  
Human Beings ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Material World ◽  
Know How ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Ex Nihilo ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Church

This article speaks of the relation between man and the rest of the created world. This is a subject that is being taken up more and more frequently by ecologists, by philosophers and theologians. Man is in relation to the universe above all because of their common beginning. For everything, human beings included came into being "from nothing" (ex nihilo). Secondly: all of creation, even if to a different degree, is subject to the laws of limitations. Thirdly: all of the universe, which means also a man living in it, is called development and liberation from the burdening of evil, in order to participate in the freedom and glory of the children of God (cfr. R om 8:21). The subject of the relation of man with the rest of the created world was dear to the Fathers of the Church, especially in the East. The heritage of the Eastern Church Fathers has been taken up mainly by Orthodox theologians. But there are also Catholic theologians that take up the subject of the relation between man and the universe. Here one should name above all K. Rahner, H.U. von Balthasar and, among Polish theologians: W. Hryniewicz. Among the contemporary Orthodox theologians that speak of the relation between man and the universe, we find O. Clément. For him, relations with God the Creator and Savior are of importance. Upon these relations depend on other ones: with other people and with the universe. If one does not take this into consideration, one's knowledge of the man himself would be incomplete. Relations between man and the universe can be twofold: man can remain on the outside of the reality which shows itself to his eyes or he can be inserted into this reality, which he shall observe as an organic all-embracing unity. Visible nature, as O. Clément writes, is a book rich in content, which speaks of life on Earth and after death. It is only necessary to know how to make use of this book. Man created in the "image and likeness" of God is marked by divinity and participates in the divine intellect and, by means of his body, is in relation to the material world. He concentrates in himself what is spiritual and what is material. All of the created universe can participate in divine "energies" only through man, who is "priest and caretaker" of the universe. It is the duty of man to read the first revelation (that is the world) and to "realize the ontological glorification of all things". But man, because of original sin, has led to a true cosmic catastrophe, to a darkening of the modality of paradise and to the appearance of a new way of universal existence, marked by sin. The man also ceased to understand the true world, the way God created it and sustains it in His glory. Creation,  just as Rs Creator, does not thrust itself upon man, who sees the universe through the prism of his fall which in such a manner obscures and covers it, that he becomes more and more obdurate to the action of God.

scholarly journals How Liking and Disliking Create Conflict: A Study Based on the Kalahavivada Sutta and the Abhidhammic Analysis of Mind Process

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kustiani
Keyword(s):  
Clear Picture ◽  
Psychological Process ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The World ◽  
Material Things ◽  
Do So

As mentioned in the Kalahavivada Sutta of the Suttanipāta, out of liking and disliking (sātaṃ asātanti ) people speak in the world; and finally they are entrapped in desire (chando). If they have desire, when they see the appearing and disappearing of material things (rūpesu disvā vibhavaṃ bhavañca), they will make various judgments in this world (vinicchayaṃ kubbati jantu loke). Further, these conditions will lead to unending quarrels and disputes. How is liking and disliking leading to conflict? How is the psychological process of it? The first question will be answered based on the Kalahavivada Sutta of the Suttanipāta, while the second question will be solved using the Abhidhammic analysis of mind process (citta vīthi). The examination based on these two methods will depict the clear picture of the psychological process of the arising of liking and disliking that lead to conflict. Through the understanding about the arising of liking and disliking, people are hoped to be more careful when they perceive everything through their senses. When they do so, they will perceive everything as they really are and as the result, liking and disliking can be reduced. In connection, it will lessen conflicts among human beings, and finally will be able to build peace and harmony in the society.

scholarly journals Topography in the Timaeus: Plato and Augustine on mankind's place in the natural world

1988 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 104-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Osborne
Keyword(s):  
Natural Resources ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Material World ◽  
Moral Position ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Bull's Eye ◽  
The Relationship

In this paper I shall be considering the relationship between the shape or structure of the world and the moral position occupied by human beings, particularly with regard to man's attitude towards and use of the natural resources of the material world he inhabits.1. The shape of the worldThere are two basic spatial metaphors that we frequently use in analysing notions of value and morality: one is the scale of up and down, with high and low or top and bottom as alternative ways of referring to the same type of hierarchy; the other is the notion of a centre, the bull's eye: if we are self-centred we value ourselves more highly than other things; if we have an anthropocentric view we value humanity above other animals. Thus we usually suppose that we put whatever we value most highly (on the one set of metaphors) at ‘the centre of things’ (on the other set).

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