Jeremy Price's Library tagged humanism → View Popular

This frame cuts out a lot of context in order to focus on the specific interactions.
Where are we to make the cut between human and machine in a given research frame? How do we make those frames? How might we expand those frames? How can we take responsibility for the cuts we make?
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- Suchman says that this illustration is a good way to illustrate the word “reconfiguration”, which she finds to be a vital part of using technology. She cites Donna Haraway’s notion of technologies as ‘materialized figurations’ (from her book, “Modest Witness”). That is: Technologies take part of our activities and practices and materialize them. Configuring a tool to fit with a certain activity or practice.
- She uses the example that when roboticists are designing human-like machines, they are expressing their notions of what it means to be human - of human practices - in their design.
- What they found was that this sort of utilizing different information sources is unremarkable everyday stuff to the controllers. This led to a new understanding of what an information system is:
  
  - multiple, partial information sources
  
  - assembled into a working system through the skilled practices of their use
- practices … used by members of a profession [that] shape events in the domains subject to their professional scrutiny. The shaping process creates the objects of knowledge that become the insignia of profession’s craft.
- We get different entities when we put technology and people together. She ends by quoting the feminist physicist Karen Barad (in her book “Meeting the universe halfway” (2007)):
  
  Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world.

21 Sep 09

What Immortal Hand or Eye... Science Musings by Chet Raymo

www.sciencemusings.com/...2005_05_22_musings.html - Preview

science humanism humanities art

23 Aug 09

Truth, hope and light | New Humanist

newhumanist.org.uk/2092 - Preview

morality humanism ethics politics

But to dismiss the Right's appeal to moral values is to forget what it offers. However shabbily its partisans may behave, they offer a public conception of goodness the Left forgot how to defend.
The Left, by contrast, has deflated the concepts themselves. Most of the voices willing to speak in universal moral terms at all now consider themselves conservative.
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- The Right also lacks something that may be even more important than what it has: namely, embarrassment. Its partisans may abuse words like evil and hero, but they aren't afraid to take them in their mouths. Wary of simplification, and even more wary of kitsch, the Left tends to reject not only words like true or noble, but words like legitimate and progress which were meant to replace them. If used at all, they are subject to quotation marks to put distance between the speaker and her language - in the ultimate postmodern gesture to ensure that nobody takes anything very seriously at all.
- we have moral needs
- the need to express reverence and the need to express outrage, the need to reject euphemism and cant and call things by their proper names
- They include the need to see our own lives as stories with meaning - meanings we impose on the world, a crucial source of human dignity - without which we hold our lives to be worthless.
- while moral needs may be furthered by religion, it is not what keeps them alive. Rather, morality is grounded in the structure of reason itself.
- Moral inquiry and political activism start where reasons are missing.
- there are roots in the Bible, for believers, and in the epics of Homer, for secular readers, which reached their best expression in the much-maligned Enlightenment
- We must take back the Enlightenment from the clichés that surround it: that the Enlightenment held human nature to be benevolent and progress inevitable, faith to be a worn-out answer to the questions of the past and technology a solution to all the problems of the future. In fact, no era was more aware of the existence of evil, no era took more care in probing human limits and bounds.
- The Enlightenment took aim not at reverence but at idolatry and superstition; it never believed that progress is necessary, only that it is possible.
- Rejections of the Enlightenment result in premodern nostalgia or postmodern suspicion; where Enlightenment is at issue, modernity is at stake. A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you're committed to Enlightenment, you are committed to understanding the world in order to improve it. Twenty-first century Enlightenment must extend the work of the 18th by pointing out new dangers to freedom of thought within our own culture as well as without it, and extend social justice by expanding older attacks on injustice.
- Scepticism and tolerance will not take us very far; while it's possible they may prevent harm, it's unlikely that they can inspire anyone to do good.
- human beings have equal rights to happiness on earth
- the commitment to reason - not as opposed to passion, which was as riotous during the 18th century as at any other period, but as opposed to blind authority and superstition
- reverence for Creation is a form of gratitude, and a sign of humility: whatever you think made the world, you had better remember it wasn't you
- Hope, a fourth Enlightenment value, is what drives all the others, but it is not the same as optimism. Hope is not a statement of fact but a foundation of action: if you think everything has been getting worse since the old days, you are unlikely to do much to stop the decline.

26 Jun 09

Medical Humanities Blog: On Neuroreductionism

www.medhumanities.org/...on-neuroreductionism.html - Preview

neuroscience reductionism critique humanism humanities brain mind

23 Jun 09

A Humanities Halliburton: The Govindaraj Sisters’ Minerva « Generation Bubble

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humanism humanities education work economics economy2.0 critical theory critique

“To really be prepared for a job — any job — you need to have some understanding of who you are and what your history is, and where you want to go. You need to be able to think clearly and write a good English sentence, to have a good critical awareness, and that is fostered by a liberal arts awareness.”
There’s a specter haunting humanities, the specter of worker productivity. Technology marches ever onward, demanding that skill development keep pace. Expectations of having to retrain at regular intervals in the future only motivate university students to maximize the amount of know-how acquired in the present, meaning the humanities, which emphasize general over specialized knowledge, only get more and more marginalized.
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- Minerva resembles a sort of humanities Halliburton, an outsourcing option that today’s streamlined college course offerings all but cry out for
- The German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel wrote, “The owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk,” which essentially means one can never understand an event’s significance until the event has completely transpired.
- No, the humanities’ survival depends on their withstanding all compulsions to profitability, and not on their adapting themselves to whatever humble capacity corporate imperatives ordain for them. The success of Govindaraj sisters’ Minerva is, ultimately, symptomatic of a creeping technocratic hegemony. This, friends, we must resist.