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Author: Dorion Sagan
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816684413
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
In the pursuit of knowledge, Dorion Sagan argues in this dazzlingly eclectic, rigorously crafted, and deliciously witty collection of essays, scientific authoritarianism and philosophical obscurantism are equally formidable obstacles to discovery. As science has become more specialized and more costly, its questing spirit has been constrained by dogma. And philosophy, perhaps the discipline best placed to question orthodoxy, has retreated behind dense theoretical language and arcane topics of learning. Guided by a capacious, democratic view of science inspired by the examples set by his late parents—Carl Sagan, who popularized the study of the cosmos, and Lynn Margulis, an evolutionary biologist who repeatedly clashed with the scientific establishment—Sagan draws on classical and contemporary philosophy to intervene provocatively in often-charged debates on thermodynamics, linear and nonlinear time, purpose, ethics, the links between language and psychedelic drugs, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the occupation of the human body by microbial others. Informed by a countercultural sensibility, a deep engagement with speculative thought, and a hardheaded scientific skepticism, he advances controversial positions on such seemingly sacrosanct subjects as evolution and entropy. At the same time, he creatively considers a wide range of thinkers, from Socrates to Bataille and Descartes to von Uexküll, to reflect on sex, biopolitics, and the free will of Kermit the Frog. Refreshingly nonconformist and polemically incisive, Cosmic Apprentice challenges readers to reject both dogma and cliché and instead recover the intellectual spirit of adventure that should—and can once again—animate both science and philosophy.
Author: Dorion Sagan
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816684413
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the pursuit of knowledge, Dorion Sagan argues in this dazzlingly eclectic, rigorously crafted, and deliciously witty collection of essays, scientific authoritarianism and philosophical obscurantism are equally formidable obstacles to discovery. As science has become more specialized and more costly, its questing spirit has been constrained by dogma. And philosophy, perhaps the discipline best placed to question orthodoxy, has retreated behind dense theoretical language and arcane topics of learning. Guided by a capacious, democratic view of science inspired by the examples set by his late parents—Carl Sagan, who popularized the study of the cosmos, and Lynn Margulis, an evolutionary biologist who repeatedly clashed with the scientific establishment—Sagan draws on classical and contemporary philosophy to intervene provocatively in often-charged debates on thermodynamics, linear and nonlinear time, purpose, ethics, the links between language and psychedelic drugs, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the occupation of the human body by microbial others. Informed by a countercultural sensibility, a deep engagement with speculative thought, and a hardheaded scientific skepticism, he advances controversial positions on such seemingly sacrosanct subjects as evolution and entropy. At the same time, he creatively considers a wide range of thinkers, from Socrates to Bataille and Descartes to von Uexküll, to reflect on sex, biopolitics, and the free will of Kermit the Frog. Refreshingly nonconformist and polemically incisive, Cosmic Apprentice challenges readers to reject both dogma and cliché and instead recover the intellectual spirit of adventure that should—and can once again—animate both science and philosophy.
Author: Dorion Sagan
Publisher: Anchor Books
ISBN: 9780816681365
Category : Philosophy and science
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
Refreshingly nonconformist and polemically incisive, "Cosmic Apprentice "challenges readers to reject both dogma and cliche and instead recover the intellectual adventurousness that should--and can once again--animate both science and philosophy. Informed by a countercultural sensibility, a deep engagement with speculative thought, and a hardheaded scientific skepticism, it advances controversial positions on such seemingly sacrosanct subjects as evolution and entropy.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004312072
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
Narrating Life explores the relationship between literature, science and the arts and the way in which they are informed by the process of narrating life. More specifically, it asks: how do literature, science and the arts affect and are affected by the emergence of a critical culture of biopolitics and its rhetorical figurations? Its topicality for literary and cultural studies lies therefore in its exploration of the question: to what extent could narratives of life (or life-writing) be understood as a special practice through which to access the contemporary discussion about biopolitics with its strategies of immunity, mutation, and contagion. The individual contributions address these questions through focusing on new forms of life writing in traditional and new media, science writing and artistic and critical creative practice. In doing so, they also explore and redraw the boundaries between fictional and factual experimental practices. Contributors: Amelie Björck, Elisabeth Friis, Holly Henry, Stefan Herbrechter, Tom Idema, Moritz Ingwersen, Cristina Iuli, Tanja Nusser, Angela Rawlings, Manuela Rossini, Dorion Sagan, Laura Shackelford, Amalie Smith, Marianne Sommer, Steve Tomasula, David Wagner, Jeff Wallace, Dominik Zechner.
Author: Benjamin Meiches
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452969442
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Examining the appearance of nonhuman animals laboring alongside humans in humanitarian operations Both critical and mainstream scholarly work on humanitarianism have largely been framed from anthropocentric perspectives highlighting humanity as the rationale for providing care to others. In Nonhuman Humanitarians, Benjamin Meiches explores the role of animals laboring alongside humans in humanitarian operations, generating new ethical possibilities of care in humanitarian practice. Nonhuman Humanitarians examines how these animals not only improve specific practices of humanitarian aid but have started to transform the basic tenets of humanitarianism. Analyzing case studies of mine-clearance dogs, milk-producing cows and goats, and disease-identifying rats, Nonhuman Humanitarians ultimately argues that nonhuman animal contributions problematize foundational assumptions about the emotional and rational capacities of humanitarian actors as well as the ethical focus on human suffering that defines humanitarianism. Meiches reveals that by integrating nonhuman animals into humanitarian practice, several humanitarian organizations have effectively demonstrated that care, compassion, and creativity are creaturely rather than human and that responses to suffering and injustice do not—and cannot—stop at the boundaries of the human.
Author: William E. Connolly
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478007257
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144
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Book Description
In this new installation of his work, William E. Connolly examines entanglements between volatile earth processes and emerging cultural practices, highlighting relays among extractive capitalism, self-amplifying climate processes, migrations, democratic aspirations, and fascist dangers. In three interwoven essays, Connolly takes up thinkers in the "minor tradition" of European thought who, unlike Cartesians and Kantians, cross divisions between nature and culture. He first offers readings of Sophocles and Mary Shelley, asking whether close attention to the Anthropocene could perhaps have arrived earlier had subsequent humanists absorbed their lessons. He then joins Deleuze and Guattari's notion of an abstract machine with contemporary earth sciences, doing so to compare the Antique Little Ice Age of the late Roman empire to contemporary relays between extractive capitalism and accelerating climate processes. The final essay stages a dramatic dialogue between Alfred North Whitehead and Michel Foucault about the pursuit of truth during a time of planetary turbulence. With Climate Machines Fascist Drives, and Truth, Connolly forges incisive interventions into key issues of our time.
Author: Axel Michaels
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100005179X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
This volume critically examines the role of science in the humanities and social sciences. It studies how cultures and societies in South Asia and Europe underwent a transformation with the adoption or adaptation of scientific methods, turning ancient cultural processes and phenomena into an enhanced scientific structure. The chapters in this book Discuss the development of science as a method in modern and historical contexts and the differences between modern science, scientification and pseudoscience. Study the interactions between bodies of knowledge such as Sanskrit and computer science; mathematics and Vedic mathematics; science and philosophy. Drawing on textual material, extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of philosophy, Indology, history, linguistics, history and philosophy of science and social science.
Author: Timothy Gitzen
Publisher: Helsinki University Press
ISBN: 9523690833
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
The decades-long fear of South Korean national destruction has routinized national security and the sense of threat. In present day South Korea, national security includes not only war and the military, but national unity, public health, and the family. As a result, queer Koreans have become a target as their bodies are thought to harbor deadly viruses and are thus seen as carriers of diseases. The prevailing narrative already sees being queer as a threat to traditional family and marriage. By claiming that queer Koreans disrupt military readiness and unit cohesion, that threat is extended to the entire population. Queer Koreans are enveloped by the banality of security, treated as threats, while also being overlooked as part of the nation. What does it mean to be perceived as a national threat simply based on who you would like to sleep with? In their desire to be seen as citizens who support the safety and security of the nation, queer Koreans placate a patriarchal and national authority that is responsible for their continued marginalization. At the same time, they are also creating spaces to protect themselves from the security measures and technologies directed against them. Taking readers from police stations and the galleries of the Constitutional Court to queer activist offices and pride festivals, Banal Security explores how queer Koreans participate in their own securitization, demonstrates how security weaves through daily life in ways that oppress queer Koreans, and highlights the work of queer activists to address that oppression. In doing so, queer Koreans challenge not only the contours of national security in South Korea, but global entanglements of security.
Author: Stefan Helmreich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691164819
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
What is life? What is water? What is sound? In Sounding the Limits of Life, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich investigates how contemporary scientists—biologists, oceanographers, and audio engineers—are redefining these crucial concepts. Life, water, and sound are phenomena at once empirical and abstract, material and formal, scientific and social. In the age of synthetic biology, rising sea levels, and new technologies of listening, these phenomena stretch toward their conceptual snapping points, breaching the boundaries between the natural, cultural, and virtual. Through examinations of the computational life sciences, marine biology, astrobiology, acoustics, and more, Helmreich follows scientists to the limits of these categories. Along the way, he offers critical accounts of such other-than-human entities as digital life forms, microbes, coral reefs, whales, seawater, extraterrestrials, tsunamis, seashells, and bionic cochlea. He develops a new notion of "sounding"—as investigating, fathoming, listening—to describe the form of inquiry appropriate for tracking meanings and practices of the biological, aquatic, and sonic in a time of global change and climate crisis. Sounding the Limits of Life shows that life, water, and sound no longer mean what they once did, and that what count as their essential natures are under dynamic revision.
Author: Thomas Nail
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 150362756X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 423
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Book Description
We need a new philosophy of the earth. Geological time used to refer to slow and gradual processes, but today we are watching land sink into the sea and forests transform into deserts. We can even see the creation of new geological strata made of plastic, chicken bones, and other waste that could remain in the fossil record for millennia or longer. Crafting a philosophy of geology that rewrites natural and human history from the broader perspective of movement, Thomas Nail provides a new materialist, kinetic ethics of the earth that speaks to this moment. Climate change and other ecological disruptions challenge us to reconsider the deep history of minerals, atmosphere, plants, and animals and to take a more process-oriented perspective that sees humanity as part of the larger cosmic and terrestrial drama of mobility and flow. Building on his earlier work on the philosophy of movement, Nail argues that we should shift our biocentric emphasis from conservation to expenditure, flux, and planetary diversity. Theory of the Earth urges us to rethink our ethical relationship to one another, the planet, and the cosmos at large.
Author: John Hartigan Jr.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452944547
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 122
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Book Description
Aesop’s Anthropology is a guide for thinking through the perplexing predicaments and encounters that arise as the line between human and nonhuman shifts in modern life. Recognizing that culture is not unique to humans, John Hartigan Jr. asks what we can learn about culture from other species. He pursues a variety of philosophical and scientific ideas about what it means to be social using cultural dynamics to rethink what we assume makes humans special and different from other forms of life. Through an interlinked series of brief essays, Hartigan explores how we can think differently about being human. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
