philosophy items › MachineMachine /stream

March 11 2010, 9:35am | Comments

Link Is "Science Fiction Humanism" A Contradiction In Terms?

People talk about science fiction as the literature of humanism. But actually, science fiction's explorations put it into conflict with humanism's tenets. The best science fiction questions the nature of…

March 10 2010, 10:54am | Comments

Link Chtodelat? / What is to be done?

Chto delat? / What is to be done? was founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod…

March 9 2010, 11:10am | Comments

Link Open-Source A Movement in Search of a Philosophy

by Manuel DeLanda The plan of the essay is as follows. I will begin with a few definitions of technical terms ("source code", "compiler", "operating system") which are necessary to…

February 19 2010, 7:37am | Comments

Metafilter De-constructing 'code' (picking apart its assumptions) De-constructing 'code': I am looking for philosophical (from W. Benjamin through to post-structuralism and beyond) examinations of 'code'. That both includes the assumptions contained in the word 'code'…

February 2 2010, 7:35am | Comments

Wikipedia Other The Other or constitutive other (also referred to as othering) is a key concept in continental philosophy, opposed to the Same. It refers, or attempts to refer, to…

January 26 2010, 2:48pm | Comments

Link Philip K. Dick: A 'plastic' paradox

When, one evening in 1976, Philip K. Dick invited Tim Powers to his Fullerton apartment, the Cal State student expected the kind of night he often passed with the science-fiction…

January 24 2010, 6:06pm | Comments

Link Transitzone/ Against an Aesthetics of Noise

Ray Brassier – My stance is not particularly original: it’s indebted to the work of several more genuinely original philosophers. The confluence of their influence in my thinking represents my…

January 15 2010, 5:38am | Comments

Link Divine Wilderness

PLANNING IS SOMETHING that people learned from God. The lesson might be said to have begun with the prescriptions God laid out for His earthly habitation among the Israelites: the…

January 8 2010, 10:02am | Comments

Link The cognitive benefits of time-space synaesthesia

SYNAESTHESIA is a neurological condition in which there is a merging of the senses, so that activity in one sensory modality elicits sensations in another. Although first described by Francis…

December 7 2009, 6:11pm | Comments

Link Into the Uncanny Valley

Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in…

December 7 2009, 6:08pm | Comments

Blog Post The Unveiled Divide

November 10 2009, 12:50pm | Comments

Writing from 3quarksdaily Mapping The Cracks: Thinking Subjects as Book Objects

November 1 2009, 10:02pm | Comments

Link The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English

In depicting the emergence of the world’s languages as a curse of gibberish, the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel makes us moderns smile. Yet, considering the headache that…

November 1 2009, 4:32am | Comments

Link Troubling new revelations about Arendt and Heidegger

Will we ever be able to think of Hannah Arendt in the same way again? Two new and damning critiques, one of Arendt and one of her longtime Nazi-sycophant lover,…

October 30 2009, 6:20pm | Comments

Link Monsters and the Moral Imagination

Monsters are on the rise. People can't seem to get enough of vampires lately, and zombies have a new lease on life. This year and next we have the release…

October 27 2009, 12:01pm | Comments

Link Who’s afraid of the avant-garde?

There's a reason why we find it easier to "get" modern art than avant-garde music, and it's not just about our natural conservatism and love of Mozart... Arts & books…

October 27 2009, 11:53am | Comments

Link Atheism: class is a distraction

For some reasons it seems to be anathema to say that there might be an intrinsic reason for the correlation between educational level and the rejection of religion: atheism takes…

October 15 2009, 8:14am | Comments

Link An Interview with W. Brian Arthur

Technology so pervades our culture that it's sobering to consider how poorly we understand it. How do new tools and techniques arise? What principles guide their evolution? And how does…

October 4 2009, 4:26pm | Comments

Link Thinking literally

Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to…

September 28 2009, 8:59am | Comments

Link 3quarksdaily Philosophy Competition (Judged by Daniel Dennet)

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Professor Dan Dennett, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog…

September 13 2009, 8:37am | Comments

Writing from 3quarksdaily On Being in Japan and Elsewhere

September 6 2009, 9:05pm | Comments

Link The Art-Work of the Future

AS Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man. When Nature had developed in herself those attributes which included the conditions for the existence of Man, then Man spontaneously…

July 22 2009, 4:37pm | Comments

Link Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory

Art is imitation only to the extent to which it is objective expression, far removed from psychology. There may have been a time long ago when this expressive quality of…

July 13 2009, 7:19am | Comments

Link Beyond Postmodernism? Paul Virilio's Hypermodern Cultural Theory

Paul Virilio is one of the most significant French cultural theorists writing today.1 Increasingly hailed as the inventor of concepts such as 'dromology' (the 'science' of speed), Virilio is renowned…

July 7 2009, 9:34am | Comments

Link What Skepticism Reveals about Science

“The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It’s all lies. But they’re entertaining lies, and in the end isn’t that the real truth?…

June 24 2009, 3:26pm | Comments

Link Michel Serres's Milieux

Mediation means that which stands, comes or moves between things otherwise separated or opposed. Serres’s work has never ceased to meditate upon mediation in every possible sense: as arbitration; moderation;…

June 23 2009, 2:38pm | Comments

Video

May 24 2009, 2:52pm | Comments

Link The Origin of Life

How did life arise from inorganic matter? Our progress on this question has been impeded by a formidable cognitive barrier. Because we perceive a deep gap when we think about…

May 23 2009, 4:48am | Comments

Writing for 3quarksdaily The Next Great Discontinuity: The Data Deluge

Through the topology of the network we have begun to perceive what Michel Serres calls ‘The World Object’, an ecology of interconnections and interactions…

April 20 2009, 3:11am | Comments

Writing for 3quarksdaily The Next Great Discontinuity: Grapholectic Thought and the…

Of course my mini-history of scientific revolution should not be taken itself as a “truth”. I draw it as a parable of progress, as…

March 23 2009, 2:38am | Comments

Link Within Any Possible Universe, No Intellect Can Ever…

Deep in the deluge of knowledge that poured forth from science in the 20th century were found ironclad limits on what we can know. Werner Heisenberg discovered that improved precision…

March 17 2009, 9:35am | Comments

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