Ignorance Explosion

Ignorance Explosion PDF Author: Julius Lukasiewicz
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0886292344
Category : Civilization, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Marshall McLuhan once noted that We do not know who discovered water, (but) it was almost certainly not a fish. Anybody's total surround, or environment, creates a condition of non-perception. This statement has become a metaphor for what has happened in Western societies, caught as they are between states of civilization created by the industrial revolution and emerging post-industrial technology. This unveiling of our cultural condition and the seeming inability of our social sciences to recognize or influence current or future trends, presents forceful challenges to those who believe they are planning for the future of humanity. Lukasiewicz proposes that there are limits beyond which the human mind cannot comprehend its increasingly artificial, unnatural, and, in the end, dehumanized environment. Despite the grim probabilities he sees in the future, Lukasiewicz's work is, nonetheless, undergirded by a sense of optimism, and good humor informs this evocative analysis of our time.A readable, comprehensive and stimulating examination of the changing dilemmas of the human condition. Zbigniew Brzezinski Assistant to the President of the United States for National Security Affairs, 1977-1981.

Ignorance Explosion

Ignorance Explosion PDF Author: Julius Lukasiewicz
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0886292344
Category : Civilization, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Marshall McLuhan once noted that We do not know who discovered water, (but) it was almost certainly not a fish. Anybody's total surround, or environment, creates a condition of non-perception. This statement has become a metaphor for what has happened in Western societies, caught as they are between states of civilization created by the industrial revolution and emerging post-industrial technology. This unveiling of our cultural condition and the seeming inability of our social sciences to recognize or influence current or future trends, presents forceful challenges to those who believe they are planning for the future of humanity. Lukasiewicz proposes that there are limits beyond which the human mind cannot comprehend its increasingly artificial, unnatural, and, in the end, dehumanized environment. Despite the grim probabilities he sees in the future, Lukasiewicz's work is, nonetheless, undergirded by a sense of optimism, and good humor informs this evocative analysis of our time.A readable, comprehensive and stimulating examination of the changing dilemmas of the human condition. Zbigniew Brzezinski Assistant to the President of the United States for National Security Affairs, 1977-1981.

Ignorance Explosion

Ignorance Explosion PDF Author: Julius Lukasiewicz
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773573909
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
The author reveals the darker side of Western society's adoption of, and adaptation to, modern technology. Despite his portrayal of an increasingly complex, artificial and dehumanized technological environment, Lukasiewicz writes with humour and humanism and makes an enlightening contribution to the habitually grim literature on this subject.

Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies

Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies PDF Author: Matthias Gross
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100058206X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Once treated as the absence of knowledge, ignorance has now become a highly influential and rapidly growing topic in its own right. This new edition of the seminal text in the field is fully revised and includes new and expanded chapters on religion; domestic law and jurisprudence; sexuality and gender studies; memory studies; international relations; psychology; decision-theory; and colonial history. The study of ignorance has attracted growing attention across the natural and social sciences where a wide range of scholars explore the social life and political issues involved in the distribution and strategic use of not knowing. This handbook reflects the interdisciplinary field of ignorance studies by drawing contributions from economics, sociology, history, philosophy, cultural studies, anthropology, feminist studies, and related fields to serve as a path-breaking guide to the political, legal and social uses of ignorance in social and political life. This book will be indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the important role played by ignorance in contemporary society, culture and politics.

Ignorance

Ignorance PDF Author: Andrew Bennett
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847796729
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Andrew Bennett argues in this fascinating book that ignorance is part of the narrative and poetic force of literature and is an important aspect of its thematic focus: ignorance is what literary texts are about. He sees that the dominant conception of literature since the Romantic period involves an often unacknowledged engagement with the experience of not knowing. From Wordsworth and Keats to George Eliot and Charles Dickens, from Henry James to Joseph Conrad, from Elizabeth Bowen to Philip Roth and Seamus Heaney, writers have been fascinated and compelled by the question of ignorance, including their own. Bennett argues that there is a politics and ethics as well as a poetics of ignorance: literature’s agnoiology, its acknowledgement of the limits of what we know both of ourselves and of others, engages with the possibility of democracy and the ethical, and allows us to begin to conceive of what it might mean to be human. This exciting approach to literary theory will be of interest to lecturers and students of literary theory and criticism.

Ignorance

Ignorance PDF Author: Rik Peels
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197654517
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
"a brief history of the study of ignorance. There is a lack of serious investigation into ignorance: apart from the apophatic tradition in the ancient world and the Middle Ages and the more recent fields of agnotology, philosophy of race, and feminist philosophy, ignorance itself has received little philosophical attention. It is then laid out how the field that one would expect to have studied ignorance in detail, namely, epistemology, has failed to do so. The chapter also explores why this could be the case. Subsequently, it is explained what is new about this book and how this fills the important gap in the study of ignorance: it develops and applies an epistemology of ignorance. Finally, it gives a brief overview of the chapters ahead"--

Perspectives on Ignorance from Moral and Social Philosophy

Perspectives on Ignorance from Moral and Social Philosophy PDF Author: Rik Peels
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317369548
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This edited collection focuses on the moral and social dimensions of ignorance—an undertheorized category in analytic philosophy. Contributors address such issues as the relation between ignorance and deception, ignorance as a moral excuse, ignorance as a legal excuse, and the relation between ignorance and moral character. In the moral realm, ignorance is sometimes considered as an excuse; some specific kind of ignorance seems to be implied by a moral character; and ignorance is closely related to moral risk. Ignorance has certain social dimensions as well: it has been claimed to be the engine of science; it seems to be entailed by privacy and secrecy; and it is widely thought to constitute a legal excuse in certain circumstances. Together, these contributions provide a sustained inquiry into the nature of ignorance and the pivotal role it plays in the moral and social domains.

The Virtues of Ignorance

The Virtues of Ignorance PDF Author: Bill Vitek
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813138760
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Human dependence on technology has increased exponentially over the past several centuries, and so too has the notion that we can fix environmental problems with scientific applications. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge proposes an alternative to this hubristic, shortsighted, and dangerous worldview. The contributors argue that uncritical faith in scientific knowledge has created many of the problems now threatening the planet and that our wholesale reliance on scientific progress is both untenable and myopic. Bill Vitek, Wes Jackson, and a diverse group of thinkers, including Wendell Berry, Anna Peterson, and Robert Root-Bernstein, offer profound arguments for the advantages of an ignorance-based worldview. Their essays explore this philosophy from numerous perspectives, including its origins, its essence, and how its implementation can preserve vital natural resources for posterity. All conclude that we must simply accept the proposition that our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge and always will. Rejecting the belief that science and technology are benignly at the service of society, the authors argue that recognizing ignorance might be the only path to reliable knowledge. They also uncover an interesting paradox: knowledge and insight accumulate fastest in the minds of those who hold an ignorance-based worldview, for by examining the alternatives to a technology-based culture, they expand their imaginations. Demonstrating that knowledge-based worldviews are more dangerous than useful, The Virtues of Ignorance looks closely at the relationship between the land and the future generations who will depend on it. The authors argue that we can never improve upon nature but that we can, by putting this new perspective to work in our professional and personal lives, live sustainably on Earth.

Democracy and Political Ignorance

Democracy and Political Ignorance PDF Author: Ilya Somin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804789312
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
One of the biggest problems with modern democracy is that most of the public is usually ignorant of politics and government. Often, many people understand that their votes are unlikely to change the outcome of an election and don't see the point in learning much about politics. This may be rational, but it creates a nation of people with little political knowledge and little ability to objectively evaluate what they do know. In Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya Somin mines the depths of ignorance in America and reveals the extent to which it is a major problem for democracy. Somin weighs various options for solving this problem, arguing that political ignorance is best mitigated and its effects lessened by decentralizing and limiting government. Somin provocatively argues that people make better decisions when they choose what to purchase in the market or which state or local government to live under, than when they vote at the ballot box, because they have stronger incentives to acquire relevant information and to use it wisely.

The Philosophy and Practice of Science

The Philosophy and Practice of Science PDF Author: David B. Teplow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009445278
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
This book is a novel synthesis of the philosophy and practice of science, covering its diverse theoretical, metaphysical, logical, philosophical, and practical elements. The process of science is generally taught in its empirical form: what science is, how it works, what it has achieved, and what it might achieve in the future. What is often absent is how to think deeply about science and how to apply its lessons in the pursuit of truth, in other words, knowing how to know. In this volume, David Teplow presents illustrative examples of science practice, history and philosophy of science, and sociological aspects of the scientific community, to address commonalities among these disciplines. In doing so, he challenges cherished beliefs and suggests to students, philosophers, and practicing scientists new, epistemically superior, ways of thinking about and doing science.

Critical Terms in Futures Studies

Critical Terms in Futures Studies PDF Author: Heike Paul
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030289877
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This volume provides the essential vocabulary currently employed in discourses on the future in 50 contributions by renowned scholars in their respective fields, which examine future imaginaries across cultures and time. Not situated in the field of “futurology” proper, it comes at future studies ‘sideways’ and offers a multidisciplinary treatment of a critical futures’ vocabulary. The contributors have their disciplinary homes in a wide range of subjects – history, cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, media studies, American studies, Japanese studies, Chinese studies, and philosophy – and critically illuminate numerous discourses about the future (or futures), past and present. In compiling such a critical vocabulary, this book seeks to foster conversations about futures in study programs and research forums and offers a toolbox for discussing them with an adequate degree of complexity.