“Legitimating the Machine: The Epistemological Foundations of Technological Metaphor in the Natural Philosophy of René Descartes”
Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and his Contemporaries.
Edited by Claus Zittel. Volume 11: Intersections - Yearbook for Early Modern Studies (Brill: Leiden and Boston: 2008).
I post here a draft version, uncorrected.
Reensamblar lo Social: Una Introducción a la Teoría del Actor-Red
Bruno Latour
Ediciones Manantial, 2008, 390 páginas
(Revista de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad, number 11, vol 4, July 2008)
¿Qué es lo social? ¿Qué es una sociedad? ¿Qué quieren decir los científicos “sociales” cuando hablan de ciertos fenómenos como “enmarcados en lo social”, socialmente “construidos”, “constituidos” o “determinados”?
La respuesta [...]
H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
By Michel Houellebecq
(The Australian December 2-3, 2006)
In this short but eventful study of H.P.Lovecraft, Michel Houellebecq suggests the pioneering writer created modern horror while exhausting its possibilities. Perhaps the horror genre never lived up to its early promise because practitioners such as Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft are [...]
The Brain Takes Shape: An Early History
By Robert L. Martensen (Oxford University Press, 2004)
(Published in Metascience 15:3, December 2006)
Few people nowadays would dispute that the brain is the seat of personhood, the locus of all cognitive, sensory and emotional processes. This commonsensical, distinctively Western idea has had a relatively short but convoluted history, beginning in [...]
Is there anything NEW to say about 2001: A Space Odyssey?
I watched it again the other day for the fiftieth time. It occurred to me that we can read the film as presenting a synoptic, imagined history of technology. This imagined history perpetuates many myths about technology, as well as offering a comprehensive range [...]
Evening in the Palace of Reason
by James Gaines
(The Weekend Australian May 6-7, 2006)
History is a messy business that rarely offers neat closures or a good story. Nonetheless, the exceptions can be more wonderful than any fiction. One such case is the meeting of Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick the Great of Prussia, the subject of [...]
The World According to Y
by Rebecca Huntley (Allen & Unwin)
(Weekend Australian 18 march 2006)
While the notion of a ‘generation’ is largely a fabrication, it is useful to market researchers and sociologists as a way to study populations who lived through similar historical circumstances, and share certain attitudes and beliefs.
Just as I was beginning to figure [...]
He dreamed. Dreaming was for free and perfectly unproductive. In the dream it was the Future®. In the Future® everything looked strange to him. For a start it was all monochrome, and it took him some time to work out this was because everything—the buildings, the clothes and faces of passerbys, the roads, cars, his [...]
Descartes: The Life of René Descartes and its Place in his Times
By A. C. Grayling
(The Australian January 14-15, 2006)
Three and a half centuries after his death, René Descartes still has some surprises under his wig. Descartes was, without doubt, one of the founders of the modern world. An exceptional philosopher, scientist and mathematician, he was [...]
The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
By Ray Kurzweil
(The Australian December 17-18, 2005)
Our bodies will soon be obsolete. Genetic engineering, smart drugs and nanotechnology will reverse the ageing process and make us immortal. Machines will do all the unpleasant work for us, producing all the energy we need. We will download our minds into [...]