scholarly journals Technology understanding in a more-than-human world

Learning Tech ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 169-190
Author(s):  
Peter Danholt
Keyword(s):  

In this article, I wish to unfold the question: "what is technology actually and what characterizes our relation to technology?” and relate it to the technology understanding course, since how we think about and perceive technology, is arguably consequential for how we practice and conduct our lives and societies and for what we consider possibilities, problems, solutions and necessary actions. What I will argue is that we need to challenge a preferred and inherently humanistic and anthropocentric understanding of technology that sees technology as ideally a designed object subject to human control. This is an understanding that has dominated throughout enlightenment and modernity. However, my argument in this text is that it is both inadequate and problematic because it keeps us in a frame of thinking that perpetually reproduces the idea of technological solutions to problems.

2021 ◽  
pp. 193-218
Author(s):  
Christopher Coker

We are about to enter a post – human world in which war will not yet have exhausted its evolutionary possibilities. It may be a world of man – machine hybrids as soldiers become gradually indistinguishable from the machines they use. It may witness the artificial enhancement of biological performance, the theme of many Hollywood B-movies. It may be a world in which artificial intelligence will dominate and robots roam tomorrow’s battle spaces. But war is unlikely to escape human control. Machines are unlikely to gain self-consciousness any time soon. Instead they will be our collaborators, members of the same team. War, in other words, will still remain what the military historians Thucydides called it: ‘the human thing’’ and will still be susceptible to Tinbergen’s original methodology


Chelovek RU ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 217-220
Author(s):  
Natalia Rostova ◽  

The article analyzes the current state of affairs in philosophy in relation to the question «What is hu-man?». In this regard, the author identifies two strategies – post-humanism and post-cosmism. The strat-egy of post-humanism is to deny the idea of human exceptionalism. Humanity becomes something that can be thought of out of touch with human and understood as a right that extends to the non-human world. Post-cosmism, on the contrary, advocated the idea of ontological otherness of the human. Re-sponding to the challenges of anthropological catastrophe, its representatives propose a number of new anthropological projects.


Derrida Today ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Polish

In this essay, I argue that Derrida cannot pursue the question of being/following unless he thinks through the question of sexual difference posed by figures of little girls in philosophical texts and in literature, specifically as posed by Lewis Carroll's Alice whom Derrida references in L'animal que donc je suis. At stake in thinking being after animals after Alice is the thought of an other than fraternal following, a way of being-with and inheriting from (other than human) others that calls for an account of development that is not dictated by a normative autotelic and sacrificial logic. I argue that Derrida's dissociation of himself and his cat from Alice and her cat(s) in L'animal que donc je suis causes him to risk repeating the closed, teleological gestures philosophers like Kant and Hegel perpetuate in their accounts of human development. The more sweeping conclusion towards which this essay points is the claim that the domestication of girls and their subjection to familial fates in narratives and the reduction of development to teleology more generally, require the sacrifice and forgetting of ‘nature’, including animals, so that the fates of girls and ‘nature’ are intertwined in the context of projects of human world-building and home-making.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-105
Author(s):  
Jane Bennett
Keyword(s):  

I explore two walks, one by Henry Thoreau on a hot day in 1851 and one by a line as it winds its way into a doodle today. Walks, I contend, generate circuits of energies and affects, some issuing from people, some from elsewhere. The goal is to accent how ahuman energies and affects inscribe themselves upon selves and inflect their positions and dispositions. Borrowing a term from Lorenz Engell, I call this inscriptive inflection an ›ontographic‹ procedure. Ontography will mark the operations of a creative cosmos, of a more-than-human world continuously impressing itself upon us. At the end, I leave the ontographic to return to the linguistic, to human attempts to ›write up‹ the ahuman ontographies they experience


Author(s):  
Paul B. Thompson ◽  
Zachary Piso

Though environmental philosophers trace the roots of environmental awareness to the decades of John Dewey’s prominence, Dewey himself was conspicuously mum about the environmental controversies of his day. A Deweyan environmental pragmatism, then, must find sustenance in less prosaically environmental themes of the American philosopher’s project. This chapter attends to Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction, which is at the core of Dewey’s understanding of experience and which informs Dewey’s philosophy from epistemology to aesthetics. The chapter stresses that Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction is an account of how organisms dynamically respond to changes in their environment. However, contrary to several misinterpretations of environmental pragmatism, this dynamic responsiveness is not a call for human control over nature. Indeed, we conclude that an environmental philosophy oriented by Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction provides promising approaches to interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and environmental justice.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026732312097872
Author(s):  
Maria Laura Ruiu

This article explores British newspaper descriptions of the impact of climate change across three time periods. It shows a reduction in representing the consequences of climate change as ‘out of human control’. It also shows a decrease in adopting alarming and uncertain descriptions within the centre-left group, whereas mocking the effects of climate change is a peculiarity of right-leaning narratives. The complexity of climate narratives produces a variety of representations of the consequences of climate change, which in turn might increase ‘uncertainty’ in public understanding of climate change.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaobin Wang ◽  
Yun Tong ◽  
Yupeng Fan ◽  
Haimeng Liu ◽  
Jun Wu ◽  
...  

AbstractSince spring 2020, the human world seems to be exceptionally silent due to mobility reduction caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. To better measure the real-time decline of human mobility and changes in socio-economic activities in a timely manner, we constructed a silent index (SI) based on Google’s mobility data. We systematically investigated the relations between SI, new COVID-19 cases, government policy, and the level of economic development. Results showed a drastic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on increasing SI. The impact of COVID-19 on human mobility varied significantly by country and place. Bi-directional dynamic relationships between SI and the new COVID-19 cases were detected, with a lagging period of one to two weeks. The travel restriction and social policies could immediately affect SI in one week; however, could not effectively sustain in the long run. SI may reflect the disturbing impact of disasters or catastrophic events on the activities related to the global or national economy. Underdeveloped countries are more affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.


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