They would also not be blind consumers of technology, but will have the tools and know-how to weigh, critique, and act on technological issues that requirepublic decisions
Critical theory! Technology is no longer a passive "good." It is important to be aware of its existence, applications and consequences. It is even more important to apply value to it, and promote positive uses while condemning negative applications.
a transformative
This course has centered on transformation. The lens through which technology is being considered is always, and rightfully, shifting. The Greeks believed in techne, because they wanted the natural world to jibe with their technological views. In the middle ages, as the mechanical world emerged it was important to remove valuation from essence, and that was because these people were finally fighting back against a natural world that had severely limited their ability to flourish up to this point! It makes perfect sense. But, now we see Feenberg attempting to recalibrate the moral compass of technology, because another paradigm shift has occurred. Adopting technology now comes with value choices and they need to be considered. This will continue to happen throughout history. It is wise to understand our forebears relationship with technology; to understand the implications of their reasoning, and to compare and contrast that with our own relationship with technology in the current era.
The choices open to us are situated a higher level than the instrumental level.
Delete the internet.
One must look down on mankind from a very great height indeed not tonotice the difference between efficient weapons and efficient medicines, efficient propaganda and efficient education, efficient exploitation and efficient research! This difference is significant socially and ethically and so cannot be discounted as thinkers like Heidegger would claim.
This is a nice point in theory, but it would be very difficult to democratically legislate out. Take a look at the internet in the last decade. It is a great tool for sharing information and educating people, but it is also a fire hose for propaganda. We are seeing real time how difficult it can be to root out malevolent uses of technology.
Critical theory recognizes the catastrophic consequences of technological development highlighted by substantivism but still sees a promise of greater freedom in technology.
So, I may have jumped the gun on Marcuse. This passage seems to indicate that Marcuse fell under the critical theory umbrella.
In this context the autonomy of technology is threatening and malevolent. Once unleashed technology becomes more and more imperialistic, taking over one domain of social life after another.
So would Marcuse stating that technology is totalitarian mean that he held a substantive view of technology?
Religions are based on substantive value choices, choices that reflect a preferred way of life and exclude other disapproved alternatives.
If I am understanding this correctly, Quakers would be a good example of this.
his view corresponds to the liberal faith in progress which was such a prominent a feature of mainstream Western thought until fairly recently.
is liberal faith here meaning that people are open to seeing where technology ends up? I'm having a hard time interpreting this term.
. No amount of scientific study will find in it anything like a purpose. But from another perspective this misses the point. After all, no scientific study will find in a 1000 yen note what makes it money. Not everything is a physical or chemical property of matter. Perhaps technologies, like bank notes, have a special way of containing value in themselves as social entities.
This reminds me of technologies as stories from earlier in the class. A sword is just a sword but Excalibur is more because of the mythology incorporated into it. I like thinking of technology this way, and the distinction hadn't occurred to me before this course.
concatenation
a series of interconnected things or events
(hell of a word)
Note that technology is still the model of being in this modern conception. This was particularly clear in the 18th century Enlightenment, when philosophers and scientists challenged the medieval successors to Greek science with the new mechanistic worldview of Galileo and Newton. These thinkers explored the machinery of being. They identified the workings of the universe with a clockwork mechanism. Thus strange though it may seem, the underlying structure of Greek ontology survived the defeat of its principles.
I am having a difficult time digesting this entire paragraph.
This is especially true of the concept of essence. For us essences are conventional rather than real.
The debate between essence being real or man-made has run through a lot of the things we have read. Whenever something's essence is viewed as man-made it becomes easier to exploit. It actually seems like that was a large part of what Heidegger was saying about "our way of thinking."
The centralized mass media indoctrinate even as they entertain. False needs are created by advertising--just the "needs" that more consumption can solve,of course--but real needs, that might dangerously lead to liberation from the meaningless round, are suffocated.
consumerism vs social welfare
Even if technological consciousness appears still to appreciate the river as landscape, it will only be as transformed into an aesthetic commodity available for purchase by tourists.
This is true/depressing.
The more we will to master it, the more it masters us through the technological quality of our act of willing.
We are part of nature and mastery over it includes us.
In earlier days, the earth was cultivated, cared for, and maintained; now the earth beneath what was the peasant's field is "challenged" for its mineral deposits, which are stored and ordered, mined for our use.
common theme: man with nature versus man against nature
a priori
relating to or denoting reasoning or knowledge that proceeds from theoretical deduction rather than from observation or experience.
The correct always fixes upon something pertinent in whatever is under consideration. However, in order to be correct, this fixing by no means needs to uncover the thing in question in its essence. Only at the pointwhere such an uncovering happens does the true come to pass. For that reason the merely correct is not yet the true.
I can't quite work it out but it feels like this is connected to the Greek idea of techne somehow.
phenomenological
denoting or relating to an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience
within the span of afour-year administration is now the quantitative equivalentofthe events ofa four-hundred-year pre-industrial dynasty.
Technology is evolving so exponentially that a 4 year presidential term is equivalent to a 400 dynasty. How can we possibly make adequate decisions for the future within this structure?
The individual intellect disciplinedly paces thehuman individual. The individual disciplinedly paces science. Science disciplinedly paces technology by opening up, both widened and refined, limits of technical, advantage generating, knowledge. Technology paces industry by progressively increasing the range and velocity inventory of technical capabilities. Industry in turn paces economics by continually altering and accelerating the total complex of environment controlling capabilities of man. Economics in turn paces the everyday evolution acceleration of man's affairs.
Does this mean that people as "individual units" are the basis of evolutionary acceleration?
individual intellect < individual < science < technology <industry < economics < evolution acceleration
paucity
scarcity
"My continuing philosophy is predicated ... on the assumption that in dynamical counterbalance of the expanding universe of entropically increasing random disorderliness, there must be a universal pattern of omnicontracting, convergent, progressive orderliness and that man is that antientropic reordering function of universe.
I think he is saying that human technology is counteracting the universe's tendency towards entropy? The universe wants to be messy but man is here to tidy it up.
we were given our faculties to permit and induce our progressively greater apprehension and comprehension of the universal phenomena
The world we know with our senses is only a gateway to a much larger world. The creation of the Hadron collider seems like a good example.
He also reflected extensively on his inventions and designs, pushing his thought to cosmic dimensions
reminiscent of Newton
Thus feudalism led paradoxically to its own destruction by encouraging the rise of cities in which, eventually, the bourgeoisie would form capitalism
The feudal lords were the architects of their own demise.
glib-tongued Plato
burn
The proper approach, Marx believed, was the complete inverse of Hegel's. The fundamental, he asserted, is the material, not the spiritual.
Marx seems to be in Bacon's corner, again.
The Primacy of the Practical
This header seems to echo Bacon.
From thetime of the Enlightenment on, the individual is reduced to the hedonistic activities of production and consumption to find meaning and purpose.
It has been a while since I have read Locke but I think the author is placing a value on this stuff that Locke didn't really intend. To Locke this was a natural extension of mathematics.
Don't get me wrong, I think anyone who tries to apply Locke's ideas to contemporary society is missing the whole point.
Alfred North Whitehead
(15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.
Wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russel.
for their wisdom abounds inwords but is barren of work
The divide between Eastern and Western Christianity.
Man and nature are two things, and man is master
This is a departure from earlier readings.
clepsydra
an ancient time-measuring device worked by a flow of water.
A water clock.
A hundred years later, in the mystery playsthat by that time were presented outside the churches, an organ was the indispensable accompaniment of any representation of Paradise;indeed, it became almost a symbol of Heaven
Humans are interpreting the divine through technology. This, again, goes back to the Greeks trying to interpret the world through techne.
Part of the reason for this differential development between Latin and Greek mon astic is m lie s in the fact th at in the B yzantine wo rld a lite rate laity continued to preserve the worldly aspects of high culture, with the result that Greek monks felt able to devote themselves more exclusively to sacred studies. In the West, thelevel of civilization for a time sank so disastrously that the monks assumed almost sole responsibility for preserving and encouraging all aspects of culture, profane as well as churchly.Thus in the Occident monks tended to be more deeply involved in secular matters than in the East.
Since average western people in this period were so illiterate, the monks were tasked with carrying secular technological threads for safekeeping. This changed the lens through which westerners view technology.
by joining head and hand
The confluence of science and technology.
Two hundred years later the European affirmation of the primacy of action reaches almost absurd heights in one of Meister Eckhart's vernacular sermons on this text.Martha, the older and wiser sister, fears lest the adolescent Mary may become so ecstatic in contemplation that she will not mature spiritually b y realizing that action is essential to holiness. Christ's apparent rebuke to Martha and praise fo r Mar y are, in Eckhart's opin ion, the e xact re vers e: the y are h is way of telling the perceptive Martha not to be troubled by Mary's sentimental condition; she will grow out of it. The Greek Church could not have produced, much less tolerated, such a sermon. The mood of activism which Eckhart reflects surely fostered technological growth in the West.
At a very base level the Marthas are laborers who create and the Marys are those that consider creation's meaning. The Marthas are the Greek slaves and the Marys are the Greek philosophers, yet this passage implicates that they are two sides of the same coin.
As medieval machine design became more intricate, God the builder developed into God themechanic. Theterm "machina mundi” [[univers as machine]] is at least as old as Lucretius, but was rejected on religious grounds by Arnobius Afer. By the thirteenth century, however, it was commonly used by Latin clerical scientists and had strongly affirmative overtones. The first to foreshadow the Deist concept of the clockmaker God was Nicole Oresme who died asbishop of Lisieux in 1382. He proposed that, to prevent the celestial spheres fro m accelerating as they turned, the Creator had provided the equivalentof a clock's escapement mechanism to keep them rotating at a constant speed. The subsequent success of the simile indicates the direction of Europe's thought ab ou t God , na tu re an d ma n .
This is all a propagation of the Greeks interpreting nature in the terms of techne.
Nevertheless, the processes of the human mind are so curious that our judgment of the forces that produced Western techno log y mus t be based upon what ap pear to be the re le van t facts even when the result contains elements of irony. Since people are often comic, so also history may be.
Does this seem like a rebuttal to critics?
The sense that intelligent craftsmanship is shown in the world's design
The Greeks applying their concept of techne to nature.
The Christian Creator God, the architect of the cosmos and the potter who shaped man from clay in his own image, commands man to rule the world and to help to fulfill the divine will in it as a creative cooperator with him. History, far from being cyclical as it is in most religions, in Christianity is unique and unilineal; it is acceleratingtoward a spiritual goal; there is no time to lose; therefore, work, including manual work, is an essential and pressing form of worship.
This is the concept of a ritual pattern. Moving from hunter/gatherer to sedentary societies was a boon to those societies. For the nomad, sedentary life was easier and therefore desirable. Creation myths were built around the formations of sedentary cultures and there was a belief that rites were needed to appease an unknowable world in order to keep circumstances favorable. When Marquit said, "since the rituals to a large extent are considered necessary components of the technology" this is what he meant.
triune
consisting of three in one (used especially with reference to the Trinity).
Not sure if this modifier is referring to Cairo, Constantinople and Paris? Is he saying that these three places were the seat of theological power in the middle ages?
arts
This usage can be applied to Nye's article on the etymology of the world technology.
initiative in improving military technology, as distinct from military organization.
It was practical to make improvements that benefited soldiers in battle. Strategy was a separate category. This is part of the divide between science and technology.
Reasoning does not make a conclusion certain, unless the mind discover it by the method of experiment.”
The opposite of the Greek approach.
aegis
the protection, backing, or support of a particular person or organization.
him
I find this quotation confusing. I believe the "him" is a feudal lord of some sort? I may be missing something easy here but if anyone else is having a better time with it, I would appreciate the clarification.
technological determinist
Technological determinism is a reductionist theory that assumes that a society's technology determines the development of its social structure and cultural values. The term is believed to have originated from Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), an American sociologist and economist.
We have used this term before but I found having this definition nearby helped.
marl
Geology. a friable earthy deposit consisting of clay and calcium carbonate, used especially as a fertilizer for soils deficient in lime.
the completion of what lies hidden in nature
I read this as him suggesting that by manipulating nature and creating artifacts (poiesis) we are discovering the essence of nature (physis).
teleological
: exhibiting or relating to design or purpose especially in nature
But there are other things in the world, things which depend on something else to come into being.
I find it interesting that the Greeks didn't consider humans as part of nature. In my Art of Africa class textbook there was a section that explained that when humans began making art the idea of the individual began to emerge. It seems like once humans realized they could manipulate nature they began to see themselves removed from it.
The gradual improvement in the technological system that characterized Greek technology after the third century B.C.was continued by the Romans, who acquired through their conquests the technological traditions of Greece, the Near East, and Egypt, absorbing whatever was useful for them from other peoples in their expanding empire
When writing about the relationship between building culture and technology Nye said, " Each society both invents tools and selects devices from other cultures to establish its particular technological repertoire of devices" This is a good example of that concept in action.
“For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule”
It is not surprising that a society that valued logic would be on the forefront of inventing rationalization!
compound interest
Could have done without this one. =P
Ultimately, the tokens became unnecessary, as their shapes and markings were reproduced on clay tablets
This is paralleled by advanced economies trending towards cashless societies. What stopped the tablet keepers/accountants of this age from abusing their positions? If we do end up removing physical currency from society what are the implications?
The new technologies significantly increased the level of agricultural production and thereby stimulated larger-scale irrigation projects. The agricultural surplus made possible an increase in the number of people who could separate themselves from agriculture, thus contributing to the growth of urban settlements.
This makes me consider the millions of people today who still face food scarcity. It is difficult to be productive in other parts of society if so much energy is spent seeking basic necessities.
Stored supplies can be exchanged among different communities or even be produced specifically for exchange
We were talking about comparative advantage in our International Business class this week. Here is where the theory was born.
tructures that appear to have been communal storehouses suggest the need for administering and redistribution of the goods stored. Similarly, ceremonial structures suggest leaders (Henry, 1989, p. 212), and some central management may have been needed for housing the larger population.
It is interesting to think that this simple technological change led to this small societal change that eventually led to the institutional forms of government we see today.
Mbuti net hunters establish their symbioticrelationship with the forest ecology by a culture of minimal hunting, spending a daily average of only four to five hours away from camp
Reminiscent of this quote from the Nye Chapter: "Stonehenge suggests the truth of Walter Benjamin's observation that 'technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relations between nature and man.'"
with hunting scenes in northwestern Spain and southwestern France
Cave of Altamira in Spain. Lascaux and Chauvet caves in France. h/t Julia May
pongids
a primate of a family ( Pongidae ) that comprises the great apes.Pronounced ponjid.
Australopithecus
a fossil bipedal primate with both apelike and human characteristics, found in Pliocene and lower Pleistocene deposits ( c. 4 million to 1 million years old) in Africa.
Homo erectus
Homo erectus is an extinct species of archaic humans that lived throughout most of the Pleistocene geological epoch. Its earliest fossil evidence dates to 1.9 million years ago
Homo habilis
Homo habilis was a species of the tribe Hominini, during the Gelasian and early Calabrian stages of the Pleistocene geological epoch, which lived between roughly 2.1 and 1.5 million years ago.
Among philosophical approaches, technological determinism sees technological development as a spontaneous evolutionary process requiring a given society to organize itself so as to make efficient use of the technologies becoming available.
The Broadband Technology Opportunities Program that was supposed to bring high speed internet to rural communities with little internet access is an example of this playing out. Here is an article about it from the NY Times. l[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/technology/waste-is-seen-in-program-to-give-internet-access-to-rural-us.html]
Nicomachean Ethics'
Published 349 BC (85% of Google users like this book)
The central purpose of technologies has not been to provide necessities, such as food and shelter
It looks like Nye is referring to hunting/gathering here, but I think it is arguable that agriculture was the technology that made rapid technological progress possible. People needed a steady source of food in one place in order to be afforded the leisure time to observe and experiment. So, if humans have been around for 1-2 million years and agriculture is ~12,000 years old, it doesn't seem like the important part of harnessing necessities was figured out very early on and that it was a very central purpose.
activity that transformed matter for human use.
This is a simple and useful definition of technology.
For example, legal records from the thirteenth and fourteenth centur ies sho w that in r ur al England wo men were entirelyresponsible for producing ale, the most common drink of the peasantry. Men took control of alemakingonly when it was commercialized.
Interesting to see technology used as a patriarchal method of control. Women were allowed to participate in technological fields as long as it was a chore or only beneficial to others. As soon as they had the opportunity to commercialize their skill, which would in turn make money and provide freedom it was commandeered
The danger is not machines becoming humans, but humansbecoming machines
I'm all for cyborgs.