Pragmatism, Technology, and the Persistence of the Postmodern PDF Download

Author: Andrew Wells Garnar
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498597602
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Is postmodernity over? Does postmodernism still have anything important to say? Pragmatism, Technology, and the Persistence of the Postmodern argues “yes” to both. Despite the claims of a number of scholars that “postmodern” is over and done with, Andrew Wells Garnar demonstrates its continued relevance by carefully examining the use of information and communication technologies. These technologies illustrate many important postmodern concepts, thus showing the continued significance of postmodern philosophy. Garnar reconstructs these concepts with the tools of classical pragmatism. By engaging with pragmatists as well as with the thought of Jean-François Lyotard, Albert Borgmann, and others, this book produces a revitalized vision of both pragmatism and the postmodern. This version of pragmatism reflects the tenor of the times in a more nuanced way, while also showing how the postmodern continues to play out in contemporary life. Pragmatism, Technology, and the Persistence of the Postmodern shows how a pragmatic conception of technology opens up possibilities for working within postmodernity to materially address social and technical problems.

Author: Anthony Giddens
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509548106
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Social life is in a constant process of change, and sociology can never stand still. As a result, contemporary sociology is a theoretically diverse enterprise, covering a huge range of subjects and drawing on a broad array of research methods. Central to this endeavour is the use of core concepts and ideas which allow sociologists to make sense of societies, though our understanding of these concepts necessarily evolves and changes. This clear and jargon-free book introduces a careful selection of essential concepts that have helped to shape sociology and continue to do so. Going beyond brief, dictionary-style definitions, Anthony Giddens and Philip W. Sutton provide an extended discussion of each concept which sets it in historical and theoretical context, explores its main meanings in use, introduces relevant criticisms, and points readers to its ongoing development in contemporary research and theorizing. Organized in ten thematic sections, the book offers a portrait of sociology through its essential concepts, ranging from capitalism, identity and deviance to the digital revolution, environment, postcolonialism and intersectionality. It will be essential reading for all those new to sociology as well as anyone seeking a reliable route map for a rapidly changing world.

Author: Larry A. Hickman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253214440
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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"Hickman['s] . . . style of pragmatism provides us with flexible, philosophical 'tools' which can be used to analyze and penetrate various technology and technological cultural problems of the present. He, himself, uses this toolkit to make his analyses and succeeds very well indeed." —Don Ihde A practical and comprehensive appraisal of the value of philosophy in today's technological culture. Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture contends that technology—a defining mark of contemporary culture—should be a legitimate concern of philosophers. Larry A. Hickman contests the perception that philosophy is little more than a narrow academic discipline and that philosophical discourse is merely redescription of the ancient past. Drawing inspiration from John Dewey, one of America's greatest public philosophers, Hickman validates the role of philosophers as cultural critics and reformers in the broadest sense. Hickman situates Dewey's critique of technological culture within the debates of 20th-century Western philosophy by engaging the work of Richard Rorty, Albert Borgmann, Jacques Ellul, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and Martin Heidegger, among others. Pushing beyond their philosophical concerns, Hickman designs and assembles a set of philosophical tools to cope with technological culture in a new century. His pragmatic treatment of current themes—such as technology and its relationship to the arts, technosciences and technocrats, the role of the media in education, and the meaning of democracy and community life in an age dominated by technology—reveals that philosophy possesses powerful tools for cultural renewal. This original, timely, and accessible work will be of interest to readers seeking a deeper understanding of the meanings and consequences of technology in today's world.

Author: Yaron Ezrahi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401108765
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
HOWARD P. SEGAL, FOR THE EDITORS In November 1979 the Humanities Department of the University of Michi gan's College of Engineering sponsored a symposium on ''Technology and Pessimism. " The symposium included scholars from a variety of fields and carefully balanced critics and defenders of modern technology, broadly defined. Although by this point it was hardly revolutionary to suggest that technology was no longer automatically equated with optimism and in turn with unceasing social advance, the idea of linking technology so explicitly with pessimism was bound to attract attention. Among others, John Noble Wilford, a New York Times science and technology correspondent, not only covered the symposium but also wrote about it at length in the Times the following week. As Wilford observed, "Whatever their disagreements, the participants agreed that a mood of pessimism is overtaking and may have already displaced the old optimistic view of history as a steady and cumulative expansion of human power, the idea of inevitable progress born in the Scientific and Industrial Rev olutions and dominant in the 19th century and for at least the first half of this century. " Such pessimism, he continued, "is fed by growing doubts about soci ety's ability to rein in the seemingly runaway forces of technology, though the participants conceded that in many instances technology was more the symbol than the substance of the problem.

Author: Joan Broadhurst Dixon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134784597
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
Virtual Futures explores the ideas that the future lies in its ability to articulate the consequences of an increasingly synthetic and virtual world. New technologies like cyberspace, the internet, and Chaos theory are often discussed in the context of technology and its potential to liberate or in terms of technophobia. This collection examines both these ideas while also charting a new and controversial route through contemporary discourses on technology; a path that discusses the material evolution and the erotic relation between humans and machines. Virtual Futures brings together diverse fields such as cyberfeminism, materialist philosophy, postmodern fiction, computing culture and performance art, with essays by Sadie Plant, Stelarc and Manuel de Landa (to name a few). The collection heralds the death of humanism and the ride of posthuman pragmatism. The contested zone of debate throughout these essays is the notion of the posthuman, or the possibility of the cyborg as the free human. Viewed by some writers as a threat to human life and humanism itself, others in the collection describe the posthuman as a critical perspective that anticipates the next step in evolution: the integration or synthesis of humans and machines, organic life and technology. This view of technology and information is heavily influenced by Anglo American literature, especially cyberpunk, Pynchon and Ballard, as well as the materialist philosophies of Freud, Deleuze, and Haraway, Virtual Futures provides analyses by both established theorists and the most innovative new voices working in conjunction between the arts and contemporary technology.

Author: John J. Stuhr
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317958373
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Author: Robert Hollinger
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 0275965244
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
American pragmatism can be best understood against the background of 20th-century American culture and politics. The essays in this volume, by philosophers, cultural critics, and historians, explore the development of pragmatism in this context. The emphasis in this volume is on the interrelations between the philosophical or foundational issues raised by pragmatism as a philosophical movement, and the cultural, political, and educational programs that have been associated with pragmatism from James, Dewey, and Mead to Rorty and Cornel West. The book is divided into three parts, reflecting the periods of Progressivism, Positivism, and Postmodernism. The contributors explore the ways in which pragmatist writings have been appropriated or misappropriated in the literature and practice of Progressive reformers, positivist academics, end-of-ideology liberals, and postmodernists.

Author: Robert Hollinger
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 027594882X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
These essays explore the development of American pragmatism against the background of 20th-century American culture and politics. The book emphasises the inter-relations between the philosophical or foundational issues raised by pragmatism as a philosophical movement.

Author: Andrew Wells Garnar
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498597637
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
In a world of information technologies, genetic engineering, controversies about established science, and the mysteries of quantum physics, it is at once seemingly impossible and absolutely vital to find ways to make sense of how science, technology, and society connect. In Feedback Loops: Pragmatism about Science & Technology, editors Andrew Wells Garnar and Ashley Shew bring together original writing from philosophers and science and technology studies scholars to provide novel ways of rethinking the relationships among science, technology, education, and society. Through critiquing and exploring the work of philosopher of science and technology Joseph C. Pitt, the authors featured in this volume investigate the complexities of contemporary technoscience, writing on topics ranging from super-computing to pedagogy, engineering to biotechnology patents, and scientific instruments to disability studies. Taken together, these chapters develop an argument about the necessity of using pragmatism to foster a more productive relationship among science, technology and society.

Author: Joseph C. Pitt
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400708203
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
As science becomes more deeply embedded in a complex technological infrastructure, has this changed the relationship between the sciences and the various technologies that support them? As our technologies help shrink our world, can we restrict our ethical concerns or must we find a way to face the fact that we are now one world? What do new forms of architecture say about whom we are? Is the design process the new epistemological paradigm? The answers to all of these is "yes" according to Joseph C. Pitt (VirginaTech). Doing Philosophy of Technology presents an updated and integrated overview of the most important thinking from this prominent philosopher of technology. Throughout his career Joseph C. Pitt has defended the view that to say anything meaningful about the value of a technology one must know something about that technology and how it functions in the world. This starting point leads naturally to a pragmatist philosophical stance, since it is the real world consequences of introducing a technology that must be the basis for any further normative judgements. In the book we find an extended set of arguments that challenge the idea that there are eternal philosophical issues that transcend the impacts that technologies make on human beings and their world. Rather, it is claimed that as our technologies transform our world they transform us and the kinds of questions we find important to answer.