High-Tech Pan-Materialism and Humanist Ethics
High-Tech Pan-Materialism and Humanist Ethics

Author: Youzheng Li

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2022-08-02

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1527586936

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This book explores how the human-scientific mode of spiritual resources may be reorganized to balance the extremely materialist civilization of today. It discusses the dominance of the high-tech commercialization of the Earth and the serious weakening of rational-spiritual stamina, as well as institutional rigidity in the humanities. The book also considers traditional Chinese intellectual history inspired by the classical Chinese humanist-ethical spirit as revealing the cross-historical universality of humanist-lined ethics rooted in human nature. Although the natural sciences and social sciences have led to the unprecedented progress of material human civilization, the fundamental factor that determines the rational orientation of spiritual civilization should be the modern human sciences that are reorganized in terms of semiotic strategy and humanistic ethics, leading hopefully to a new era of enlightenment for mankind. The book asserts that humanistic ethics, as the central spirit of the humanities, includes both epistemology and action dynamics. The pertinent activation of both depends definitively on the subject’s free willpower.

High-Tech Pan-Materialism and Humanist Ethics
High-Tech Pan-Materialism and Humanist Ethics

Author: YOUZHENG. LI

Publisher:

Published: 2022-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781527586925

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This book explores how the human-scientific mode of spiritual resources may be reorganized to balance the extremely materialist civilization of today. It discusses the dominance of the high-tech commercialization of the Earth and the serious weakening of rational-spiritual stamina, as well as institutional rigidity in the humanities. The book also considers traditional Chinese intellectual history inspired by the classical Chinese humanist-ethical spirit as revealing the cross-historical universality of humanist-lined ethics rooted in human nature. Although the natural sciences and social sciences have led to the unprecedented progress of material human civilization, the fundamental factor that determines the rational orientation of spiritual civilization should be the modern human sciences that are reorganized in terms of semiotic strategy and humanistic ethics, leading hopefully to a new era of enlightenment for mankind. The book asserts that humanistic ethics, as the central spirit of the humanities, includes both epistemology and action dynamics. The pertinent activation of both depends definitively on the subject's free willpower.

The Posthuman
The Posthuman

Author: Rosi Braidotti

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-07-11

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0745669964

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The Posthuman offers both an introduction and major contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. Digital 'second life', genetically modified food, advanced prosthetics, robotics and reproductive technologies are familiar facets of our globally linked and technologically mediated societies. This has blurred the traditional distinction between the human and its others, exposing the non-naturalistic structure of the human. The Posthuman starts by exploring the extent to which a post-humanist move displaces the traditional humanistic unity of the subject. Rather than perceiving this situation as a loss of cognitive and moral self-mastery, Braidotti argues that the posthuman helps us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities. Braidotti then analyzes the escalating effects of post-anthropocentric thought, which encompass not only other species, but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole. Because contemporary market economies profit from the control and commodification of all that lives, they result in hybridization, erasing categorical distinctions between the human and other species, seeds, plants, animals and bacteria. These dislocations induced by globalized cultures and economies enable a critique of anthropocentrism, but how reliable are they as indicators of a sustainable future? The Posthuman concludes by considering the implications of these shifts for the institutional practice of the humanities. Braidotti outlines new forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism that emerge from the spectrum of post-colonial and race studies, as well as gender analysis and environmentalism. The challenge of the posthuman condition consists in seizing the opportunities for new social bonding and community building, while pursuing sustainability and empowerment.

A Geology of Media
A Geology of Media

Author: Jussi Parikka

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2015-03-27

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1452944571

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Media history is millions, even billions, of years old. That is the premise of this pioneering and provocative book, which argues that to adequately understand contemporary media culture we must set out from material realities that precede media themselves—Earth’s history, geological formations, minerals, and energy. And to do so, writes Jussi Parikka, is to confront the profound environmental and social implications of this ubiquitous, but hardly ephemeral, realm of modern-day life. Exploring the resource depletion and material resourcing required for us to use our devices to live networked lives, Parikka grounds his analysis in Siegfried Zielinski’s widely discussed notion of deep time—but takes it back millennia. Not only are rare earth minerals and many other materials needed to make our digital media machines work, he observes, but used and obsolete media technologies return to the earth as residue of digital culture, contributing to growing layers of toxic waste for future archaeologists to ponder. He shows that these materials must be considered alongside the often dangerous and exploitative labor processes that refine them into the devices underlying our seemingly virtual or immaterial practices. A Geology of Media demonstrates that the environment does not just surround our media cultural world—it runs through it, enables it, and hosts it in an era of unprecedented climate change. While looking backward to Earth’s distant past, it also looks forward to a more expansive media theory—and, implicitly, media activism—to come.

Passion of the Western Mind
Passion of the Western Mind

Author: Richard Tarnas

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2011-10-19

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 0307804526

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"[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.

Sophie's World
Sophie's World

Author: Jostein Gaarder

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2007-03-20

Total Pages: 599

ISBN-13: 1466804270

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A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

The Speculative Turn
The Speculative Turn

Author: Levi Bryant

Publisher: re.press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 0980668344

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Continental philosophy has entered a new period of ferment. The long deconstructionist era was followed with a period dominated by Deleuze, which has in turn evolved into a new situation still difficult to define. However, one common thread running through the new brand of continental positions is a renewed attention to materialist and realist options in philosophy. Among the current giants of this generation, this new focus takes numerous different and opposed forms. It might be hard to find many shared positions in the writings of Badiou, DeLanda, Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, and Zizek, but what is missing from their positions is an obsession with the critique of written texts. All of them elaborate a positive ontology, despite the incompatibility of their results. Meanwhile, the new generation of continental thinkers is pushing these trends still further, as seen in currents ranging from transcendental materialism to the London-based speculative realism movement to new revivals of Derrida. As indicated by the title The Speculative Turn, the new currents of continental philosophy depart from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself. This anthology assembles authors, of several generations and numerous nationalities, who will be at the center of debate in continental philosophy for decades to come.

The Incorporeal
The Incorporeal

Author: Elizabeth Grosz

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-03-14

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 0231543670

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Philosophy has inherited a powerful impulse to embrace either dualism or a reductive monism—either a radical separation of mind and body or the reduction of mind to body. But from its origins in the writings of the Stoics, the first thoroughgoing materialists, another view has acknowledged that no forms of materialism can be completely self-inclusive—space, time, the void, and sense are the incorporeal conditions of all that is corporeal or material. In The Incorporeal Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ideal is inherent in the material and the material in the ideal, and, by tracing its development over time, she makes the case that this same idea reasserts itself in different intellectual contexts. Grosz shows that not only are idealism and materialism inextricably linked but that this "belonging together" of the entirety of ideality and the entirety of materiality is not mediated or created by human consciousness. Instead, it is an ontological condition for the development of human consciousness. Grosz draws from Spinoza's material and ideal concept of substance, Nietzsche's amor fati, Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence, Simondon's preindividual, and Raymond Ruyer's self-survey or autoaffection to show that the world preexists the evolution of the human and that its material and incorporeal forces are the conditions for all forms of life, human and nonhuman alike. A masterwork by an eminent theoretician, The Incorporeal offers profound new insight into the mind-body problem