CAN JULIEN D’HUY’S COSMOGONIES SAVE US FROM YUVAL NOAH HARARI?

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-34
Author(s):  
Prof. Ph.D. Jacques COULARDEAU ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Circuit ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Intelligent Machines ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
Present World ◽  
As If

Over the last two decades, we seem to have been confronted with a tremendous number of books, films, TV shows, or series that deal with the past and the present, not to mention the future, as if it were all out of time, timeless, even when it is history. We have to consider our present world as the continuation and the result of the long evolution our species has gone through since we emerged from our ancestors 300,000 years ago. Julien d’Huy is a mythologist who tries to capture the phylogeny of myths, and popular or folkloric stories that have deep roots in our past and have been produced, changed and refined over many millennia. Can he answer the question about how we have become what we are by studying the products of our past and present imagination? But confronted to the prediction of Y.N. Harari that our species will simply disappear as soon as the intelligent machines we are inventing and producing take over our bodies, brains, and minds in just a few decades, Julien d’Huy sure sounds like the antidote because at every turn in our long history we have been able, collectively, to seize the day, and evolve into a new stage in our life, both biological and mental, not to mention spirituality. Let’s enter Julien d’Huy’s book and find out the power and the energy that will enable us to short-circuit and avoid Yuval’s nightmare.

The Garden in the Machine: Two American Avant-Garde Films and the Nineteenth-Century Visual Arts

Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 239-262
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
The Future ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Logical Extension ◽  
As If

One of the primary reasons I became interested in film studies was the seeming open-endedness of the field. Cinema was new, I reasoned, and would continue to be new, unlike other academic fields, and particularly those devoted to historical periods: as a scholar and a teacher, I would face the future, endlessly enthralled and energized by the transformation of the potential into the actual. That my development as a film scholar/teacher increasingly involved me in avant-garde film seemed quite natural — a logical extension of the attraction of film studies in general: Avant-garde film was the newest of the new, the sharpest edge of the present as it sliced into the promise of the future. Scholars in some fields may empathize with the attitude I describe, but scholars in all fields will smile at its self-defeating implications: of course, I can see now how typically American my assumptions were — as if one could maintain the excitement of youth merely by refusing to acknowledge the past! Obviously, film studies, like any other discipline, is only a field once its history takes, or is given, a recognizable shape.

scholarly journals Do We Need Surrealism Nowadays?

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 38
Author(s):  
Maklena Nika
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology ◽  
Andre Breton ◽  
The Past ◽  
Philosophical System ◽  
André Breton ◽  
The Future ◽  
Day By Day ◽  
As If

Even though 90 years have already passed form the First Surrealism Manifest (1924) of Andre Breton, it seems as if surrealism is still actual and tangible even nowadays. If we study it deeply theoretically, it is obvious that it is necessary in the century we are living. The surrealists’ human commitment becomes more attractive in an époque that is becoming materialistic day by day, in a society that hands in its fate to science and technology and in an environment which is getting more and more hostile every day. In this framework, surrealism is perceived neither as a “dogma” nor as a closed philosophical system, but as an open and adapted thought and life confrontation “method”. It has got a relieving effect which makes people co-communicate among each other; people of all the nationalities who gather around a common inspiration. It unifies the past with the present; it engraves the boulevard of the future, offering new and unknown opportunities to anyone.

Power after Nuclear Weapons

2020 ◽  
pp. 247-272
Author(s):  
Anne I. Harrington
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Disarmament ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Conceptual Foundation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
As If

This chapter draws out the implications of Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of power for thinking about the nuclear revolution. Drawing on Arendt’s distinction between violence and power, it posits that nuclear weapons are powerful not simply because they are destructive, but because the fact of their destructiveness induces statesmen to behave in practice as if power and violence were in fact opposites. This Arendtian approach providing a conceptual foundation for a particular strand of American thinking about nuclear disarmament. Rather than a push from the past, nuclear weapons reveal power to be more like a pull from the future. Their power is not reducible to the rituals of deterrence, but rather from the fact that thermonuclear annihilation has fundamentally altered the human relationship to the planet.

Past, Present, and Future of Artificial Intelligence in Library Services

2022 ◽  
pp. 91-114
Author(s):  
Ambar Yoganingrum ◽  
Rulina Rachmawati ◽  
Koharudin Koharudin
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Systematic Review ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Bibliometric Analysis ◽  
Library Services ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Intelligent Machines ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Over Time

In the past, human imagination about intelligent machines was only found in the science fiction of storybooks and films. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) can be found in people's daily lives. Various professions should prepare to face the automation era in the future. Libraries may be one of the slowest institutions to develop AI. Gradually, the institution adopts it for their services. Many papers focus on AI development in libraries, but the opportunities and challenges for librarians to face the era of automation are essential to discuss. This chapter provides insights into the professions that librarians can offer. First, this chapter provides information on the history and development of AI in library services. Then, based on bibliometric analysis, this chapter discusses AI trends in library services. Next, this chapter conducts a systematic review and presents the types of AI developed over time for library services. Finally, this chapter discusses the types of jobs, expertise, and skills that librarians can develop in the robotics era in the future.

scholarly journals Contemplative Listening in Moral Issues: Moral Counseling Redefined in Principles and Method

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack de Groot ◽  
Maria E.C. van Hoek
Keyword(s):  
Moral Issues ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Moral Talk ◽  
As If

We present a listening grid for moral counseling, in which we pay particular attention, alongside the what, to how clients talk about themselves: as if they were spectators; aware what this talking does to them; how they perceive what is good from the past; and what they will strive for in the future. By this moral talk, clients discover a picture of the conviction that will enable them to make a decision.

The Facticity of Time

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-206
Author(s):  
G. Anthony Bruno
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Argument ◽  
Logical System ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
As If

In the 1830s, Schelling attributes to Hegel the pretense of constructing a logical system with total justification, as if it were obvious why there is a system or, indeed, anything rational or meaningful at all. The questions of why there is reason or meaning are permutations of the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’. This question is emblematic of Schelling’s Hegel-critique and the source of his claim that reason is not self-justifying, but bounded by something other. What sort of claim is this? I argue that it is the conclusion to a transcendental argument in the Ages of the World, which holds that the past and future are conditions of the possibility of reason. This argument represents the past as the decision to construct a system and the future as the purpose guiding this construction. Schelling’s claim against Hegel that reason is bounded by something other thus results from discovering reason’s inescapable presuppositions.

Scotland’s Population

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Anderson ◽  
Corinne Roughley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Level ◽  
Population History ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Western European ◽  
As If

Scotland’s population history since the middle of the nineteenth century has too often been written either at a national level or as if what happened in a particular area was unique. There has been too much focus on losses, failings, or crises, and too little on successes and improvements in people’s experiences of life. There were multiple demographic Scotlands, linked to the diversity of the country’s economy, geography, and cultures, and many successes as well as failures. The book sets Scottish demography in a wider British and Western European framework and shows how patterns and trends from the past influence the present and the future demography of the country. Scotland’s outstandingly detailed published reports, many hitherto hardly used, are briefly described

A Future in Ruins

KronoScope ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-211
Author(s):  
Jilt Jorritsma
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Sustainable Futures ◽  
Present World

Abstract Around the world, the rise of temperatures due to global warming is revealing and exposing forgotten traces of the past that are still scored somewhere in the physical terrain. This paper suggests that the transformative landscapes of the Anthropocene not only confront our present world with a ruined and unprecedented future; they also draw our attention to suppressed and stowed-away memories and geographies from the past. By examining imaginaries of sustainable futures in Mexico City, New York and Amsterdam, it will be shown that site-specific ruins and traces of past realities have an evocative potential: they are used to imagine alternative historical trajectories and indicate possible alternative futures that challenge the absoluteness of our present world. The underlying temporality in these imaginaries is one in which the future is portended as a return of a past: there lies a future in these ruins.

What’s Wrong with Fakes? Heritage Reconstructions, Authenticity, and Democracy in Post-Disaster Recoveries

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-258
Author(s):  
Francesca Piazzoni
Keyword(s):  
Urban Spaces ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Post Disaster ◽  
As If

AbstractNatural and human disasters continue to destroy historic urban fabrics worldwide. While residents would often like to see their cities rebuilt “as they were,” most scholars of heritage fiercely reject identical reconstructions by arguing either that they are “fake” simulations, or that they epitomize undemocratic urbanization processes. Challenging these arguments, I first draw from literature on theming to argue that it is precisely “fakeness” that allows people to construct a sense of authenticity in rebuilt urban spaces. Next, I show how preoccupations with participation and justice can paradoxically lead professionals to advance the same universalistic, undemocratic heritage approach that they claim to contest. By enabling diverse people to negotiate a sense of the past, confront each other, and share new aspirations for the future, identical reconstructions are heritage as much as, if not more than, other “historic” urban fabrics.

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