Nanjing Lectures (2016-2019).

Nanjing Lectures (2016-2019).

Author: Daniel Ross

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 9781785420795

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In this series of lectures, delivered at Nanjing University from 2016 to 2019, Bernard Stiegler rethinks the so-called Anthropocene in relation to philosophy's failure to reckon with the manifold and indeed “cosmic” consequences of the entropic and thermodynamic revolution. Beginning with the Oxford Dictionaries' decision to make “post-truth” the 2016 word of the year, and taking this as an opportunity to understand the implications for Heidegger's “history of being”, “history of truth” and Gestell, the first series of lectures enter into an original consideration of the relationship between Socrates and Plato (and of tragic Greece in general) and its meaning for the history of Western philosophy. The following year's lecture series traverse a path from Foucault's biopower to psychopower to neuropower, and then to a critique of neuroeconomics. Revising Husserl's account of retention to focus on the irreducible connection between human memory and technological memory, the lectures culminate in reflections on the significance of neurotechnology in platform capitalism. The concept of hyper-matter is introduced in the lectures of 2019 as requisite for an epistemology that escapes the trap of opposing the material and the ideal in order to respond to the need for a new critique of the notion of information and technological performativity (of which Moore's law both is and is not an example) in an age when the biosphere has become a technosphere.


Nanjing Lectures (2016-2019)

Nanjing Lectures (2016-2019)

Author: Daniel Ross

Publisher:

Published: 2020-10-09

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9781013295362

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In this series of lectures, delivered at Nanjing University from 2016 to 2019, Bernard Stiegler rethinks the so-called Anthropocene in relation to philosophy's failure to reckon with the manifold and indeed "cosmic" consequences of the entropic and thermodynamic revolution. Beginning with the Oxford Dictionaries' decision to make "post-truth" the 2016 word of the year, and taking this as an opportunity to understand the implications for Heidegger's "history of being", "history of truth" and Gestell, the first series of lectures enter into an original consideration of the relationship between Socrates and Plato (and of tragic Greece in general) and its meaning for the history of Western philosophy. The following year's lecture series traverse a path from Foucault's biopower to psychopower to neuropower, and then to a critique of neuroeconomics. Revising Husserl's account of retention to focus on the irreducible connection between human memory and technological memory, the lectures culminate in reflections on the significance of neurotechnology in platform capitalism. The concept of hyper-matter is introduced in the lectures of 2019 as requisite for an epistemology that escapes the trap of opposing the material and the ideal in order to respond to the need for a new critique of the notion of information and technological performativity (of which Moore's law both is and is not an example) in an age when the biosphere has become a technosphere. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.


Bernard Stiegler

Bernard Stiegler

Author: Bart Buseyne

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-01-25

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1350410462

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Honouring the memory of the late Bernard Stiegler, this edited collection presents a broad spectrum of contributions that provide a complex and coherently articulated image of Stiegler's thought which reached beyond the boundaries of academic, artistic and experimental techno-scientific enclaves where it had been originally received. Stiegler's philosophical work encompassed theorization, social diagnosis, planning, practical and territorial experimentation, politics, and aesthetics. In its wake, the essays in this volume celebrate and explore the wealth of this multi-dimensional legacy. They examine the conditions of human life in general, its foundational intermittence, and carry forward Stiegler's post-phenomenological unfolding of the distinctive spatio-temporalities that weave together the epoch we call 'present'. Engaging closely with Stiegler's original impetus for the creation of technologies of care, as well as of communities of knowledge and artistic practice,


The Politics of Curiosity

The Politics of Curiosity

Author: Enrico Campo

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-26

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1040017290

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Through a variety of studies in the emerging field of attentional studies, this book examines and seeks alternatives to the current attention economy. Bringing together the work of leading scholars of ‘critical attention studies’ to reflect on issues such as techno-politics, socio-politics, and the politics of distraction, it offers a new and multi-disciplinary conceptualization of attention that emphasizes the connections between attention and curiosity, distraction, decoloniality and care. Above all, The Politics of Curiosity asks us to consider the nature and ambivalence of the curious forms of politics that might be taking shape in the shadow of our current attention economy. The “attention economy” has become a household name: we all know our attention is being harvested, commodified and packaged to be sold to advertisers by capitalist platforms. We all complain about it; some of us dream of disconnection; others call to fight back. By focusing on attentional deficits, and by reducing attention to being focused, however, the common view may miss wider stakes, and more promising opportunities. This collective volume provides a new frame of analysis based on three displacements. First, it relocates attentional issues within a triangulation that explores a continuum between attention, distraction and curiosity. Second, it invites us to investigate into the mental infrastructures that socially condition our perceptions and understandings of the world. Third, it points towards emancipatory politics of curiosity to provide alternatives to the attention economy. Contributions range from pedagogy to media theory, via digital studies, epistemology, sociology, political philosophy, literary history, aesthetics, film and dance studies. They gather some of the leading scholars who shaped the study of attention, questioned the values of distraction and explored the potentials of curiosity over the recent years. They extend across nine countries, four continents and seven languages, to provide a multicultural approach to these debates. Together, they help us understand how our current mental infrastructures have taken shape, under specific regimes of power and authority, in a world dominated by capital, colonialism and patriarchy. But they also sketch what can be done to redeploy them around imperatives of respect and care – from a better awareness of our mental biases, online behaviors and bodily movements, to our collective capacity to restructure classroom interactions, to launch alternative digital platforms, to build democratic movements. The first platform for discussion of the politics of attention and curiosity – and an essential point of reference for future debate – this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, politics and psychology.


Fifteen Lectures On Traditional Chinese Culture

Fifteen Lectures On Traditional Chinese Culture

Author: Peng-cheng Kung

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2022-01-10

Total Pages: 549

ISBN-13: 9811239770

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This book is edited based on a series of lectures on Chinese cultural history delivered at the Peking University in 2004. It stands out with its distinctive methodology and unique stand, and is popular with readers, with 17 reprints for the Chinese edition since 2006.Before the 1980s, traditional culture was often the target of criticisms and put in a negative light in China. After the 1980s, due to the belief that traditional culture can contribute to modernization, people decided to 'take its essence and discard its dregs'. As of today, most books on this theme have been written in accordance with this principle.However, in this book, the author argues that many problems have emerged from the modernization of the Western society, and thus the need for reflection and re-examining. Traditional Chinese culture is a source for comparison and reflection. As such, when we discuss traditional culture nowadays, not only should we excavate its long-hidden meanings, but we should also develop contrastive resources to facilitate our collaborative development in future.The discussions in this book adopt a vertical structure that begins with how Chinese define a human, followed by topics on the human body, Qi, food, male and female, home and state, the relationship between heaven and human beings, ritual systems, historical consciousness, thinking patterns, the art of expressing sentiments, commitments to the politics of virtues and achievements, and cultural practices. In every chapter, there is also a horizontal method of comparison on Chinese, Western and Indian cultures, to foreground the particularities and advantages of the Chinese culture.Apart from elaborating on the major characteristics of traditional Chinese culture, there is also a discussion on how the modern disdain for and misunderstandings of the traditional culture originated from the West. The author also elaborates on Montesquieu's views of China and the various misconceptions and misunderstandings of the traditional Chinese legal systems. Finally, it ends with the author's thoughts on the revitalization of the Chinese civilization.


On Bernard Stiegler

On Bernard Stiegler

Author: Jean-Luc Nancy

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-02-08

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 1350329053

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"What I love, and those whom I love, you, that is to say us in so far as we are capable of forming a we, all this I love, and I love them, and I love you infinitely" (Bernard Steigler April 1952- August 2020). When Bernard Stiegler writes "I love you" in the quote above, he openly provokes us to question or experience the meaning or contact of these words. He also invites us to question the relationship between a thinker's life and their thought. For Stiegler, they were inextricable. His life was one that focused on friendship but not friendships at a purely social level but ones that produced philosophy, politics, and existential truths. Bringing together scholars who knew Stiegler, including Shaj Mohan, Achille Mbembe, Divya Dwivedi, Peter Szendy, and Emily Apter, this volume provides an original - and personal - insight into his life and philosophy. Each piece gives a sense of the wide range of Stiegler's work and how it affected the praxis of the philosopher in different parts of the world.


The Standard Model And Beyond

The Standard Model And Beyond

Author: Ioannis John Demetrius Vergados

Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company

Published: 2017-08-11

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9813228571

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This book contains a systematic and pedagogical exposition of recent developments in particle physics and cosmology. It starts with two introductory chapters on group theory and the Dirac theory. Then it proceeds with the formulation of the Standard Model (SM) of Particle Physics, particle content and symmetries, fully exploiting the material of the first two chapters. It discusses the concept of gauge symmetries and emphasizes their role in particle physics. It then analyses the Higgs mechanism and the spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB). It explains how the particles (gauge bosons and fermions) after the SSB acquire a mass and get admixed. The various forms of the charged currents are discussed in detail as well as how the parameters of the SM, which cannot be determined by the theory, are fixed by experiment, including the recent LHC data and the Higgs discovery. Quantum chromodynamics is discussed and various low energy approximations to it are presented. The Feynman diagrams are introduced and applied, at the level of first year graduate students.Examples are the evaluation of the decay widths of the gauge bosons and some cross sections for interesting processes such as Rutherford scattering, electron-proton scattering (elementary proton or described by a form factor, and inelastic scattering) and Compton scattering.After that the classic topics like the role of C, P, CP symmetries and the experimental methods needed to verify their conservation or violation are discussed in some detail. Topics beyond the standard model, like supersymmetry for pedestrians and grand unification, are discussed.To this end neutrino oscillations, dark matter and baryon asymmetry are also briefly discussed at the first year graduate level. Finally, the book contains an exhibition of recent developments in cosmology, especially from the elementary particle point of view.


Cosmotechnics

Cosmotechnics

Author: Yuk Hui

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-18

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1000396363

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This volume is initial reflections on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics, which opens up an anti-universalist and pluralist perspective on technology beyond the West. Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa, and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with decolonial studies and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.


Rearticulating Motives

Rearticulating Motives

Author: Morten Nissen

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-11-20

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 3031434943

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This book presents a theory of motives that has evolved over decades in dialogue with academics and with practitioners. The key proposal is that of collectively cultivating meta-motives – rather than the ubiquitous recipes for manipulating self-regulation. Cultivating meta-motives can proceed through rearticulating motives. Such rearticulation engages with theories and practices of motivation and motives. First, this is a discussion of the psychologies of motivation, and a reflection of post-psychology as a way forward. Second, this discussion takes us back to fundamental problems with subjectivity, and with psychology, even critical psychology, as a way of addressing it. Third, out of this theoretical work come concepts that are put to work in understanding practices of modelling and cultivating motives – clinical, social work, and educational practices. In the first instance, as a critique of contemporary pragmatic practices, and then by rearticulating aesthetic practices as ways to expand and overcome those. Fourth, this has implications for the cultivation of the competence in care for motives, and for the place of theory in this competence. The book provides both a theoretical argument and a resource for those professionals in education, social work, and health who seek a qualitative understanding of what they do.