Tom Stoppard’s Science Plays: Metaphor and Experiment

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-89
Author(s):  
Tomáš Kačer
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Structural Level ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Tom Stoppard ◽  
Dramatic Writing ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
Science Show

The science play is a well-established genre of dramatic writing in the Englishspeaking theatrical tradition. This paper discusses three full-length science plays by the prominent British playwright Tom Stoppard. These are Hapgood, Arcadia, and The Hard Problem. The plays are based on popular science sources and offer their audience an access to science. After providing a brief history of the science play and the science show, the paper shows that Stoppard develops the dramatic and theatrical traditions by involving science on the textual (giving popularised scientific knowledge in the form of dialogised lectures) and performative levels (demonstrating or illustrating science on stage), primarily to turn it into a metaphor of human behaviour. Hapgood and Arcadia further engage with science on the structural level, thus becoming thought experiments reflecting upon science. The most recent play, The Hard Problem, develops textual and performative strategies related to science but ceases to experiment with the form, leaving more space for the audience to draw ethical conclusions.

Zombies and Dolls

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcello Massimini ◽  
Giulio Tononi
Keyword(s):  
Body Problem ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Turing Test ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

This chapter uses thought experiments and practical examples to introduce, in a very accessible way, the hard problem of consciousness. Soon, machines may behave like us to pass the Turing test and scientists may succeed in copying and simulating the inner workings of the brain. Will all this take us any closer to solving the mysteries of consciousness? The reader is taken to meet different kind of zombies, the philosophical, the digital, and the inner ones, to understand why many, scientists and philosophers alike, doubt that the mind–body problem will ever be solved.

C. A. Campbell and the Reprise of Cartesian Subjectivity

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 189-210
Author(s):  
David Scott ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Hard Problem

In his Meditations Descartes advances an argument that contains the essentials of the so-called “hard problem” of explaining consciousness. I show how this Cartesian argument was taken up in the twentieth century by C. A. Campbell, the moral libertarian and student of idealist Henry Jones. Campbell can be regarded as the model of what John Passmore and Simon Glendinning have respectively dubbed a “recalcitrant metaphysician” or “honorary Continental” philosopher—labels that attach largely to metaphysically-minded, mainly British thinkers who, with varying degrees of affiliation to idealism, resisted the twentieth-century trends of logical behaviorism and the “revolutionary” linguistic method. In the course of this paper, I situate Campbell’s version of Descartes’ argument within the broader history of the development of the hard problem.

scholarly journals HISTORY OF RUSSIAN MONGOLIAN STUDIES OF THE 1920–1930s ON THE PAGES OF «VOSTOK» JOURNAL

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 15-19
Author(s):  
Semushev Ivan N. ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Socialist Revolution ◽  
Subsequent Change ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
History Of

Studies of Mongolian history and culture in the context of the events of the October Socialist Revolution and the subsequent change of the agenda of our state have moved to a new stage of development. Academic and popular science periodicals played an important role in the process of studying and spreading scientific knowledge during that period. The article analyzes the development of Russian Mon-golian studies on the pages of the Soviet journal of literature, science and art “Vos-tok”.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri ◽  
John Hawthorne
Keyword(s):  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Hilary Putnam ◽  
Tyler Burge ◽  
Narrow Content ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come

The Introduction outlines the history of the narrow content debate. It introduces the famous thought experiments by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, discusses why the debate only came to prominence in the 1970s, and outlines what is to come.

LITERARY HISTORIES OF THE NATURAL HISTORICAL BOOK

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-421
Author(s):  
Jonathan V. Farina
Keyword(s):  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Tour Guides ◽  
Online Databases ◽  
History Of ◽  
Knowledge Of Evolution ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Correspondence Project ◽  
Darwin Correspondence Project

Inspired in part by the coincident bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the sesquicentennial of The Origin of Species in 2009, scholars have been hard at work these last ten years writing substantial histories of nineteenth-century natural history and geology. These histories include exceptional books by scholars trained primarily in literary studies: Cannon Schmitt's Darwin and the Memory of the Human (2009); Daniel Brown's The Poetry of Victorian Scientists (2013); and Gowan Dawson's Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (2007). With a few notable exceptions, however, the books I was invited to review here are written mostly by historians of science. And yet they are no less literary for that. All are marked by a tacit, pragmatic adoption of actor-network theory; by the extraordinary resources of the Darwin Correspondence Project and online databases of British periodicals; and often, too, by glossy illustrations. Further, nearly all of these histories share a methodological investment in what we call the history of the book, including all the economics of publishing (formats, sizes, fonts, prices, print runs, reviews, sales, generic conventions) and a political and heuristic stake in popularization and the general reading public. While Darwin (and Lyell, Herschel, Hooker, Huxley, and Spencer) remain at the center of the discussion, the empirically-minded history-of-the-book approach and investment in everyday readers reconstructs and legitimates a robust popular science that was engaged with, but not subordinate to, and often more liberal than the elite science of the X Club, the Royal Society, and other exclusive institutions. With the help of museums, lectures, tour guides, and other natural scientific literature, everyday readers produced their own knowledge of evolution, stratigraphy, speciation, animal emotion, and the sex life of plants.

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