Human, Animal & Machine
"The Human Condition Today: The Challenge of Science"
"The Human Condition Today: The Challenge of Science," in Arendt Studies (v. 2, 2018).
Great books, Nietzsche taught, are made small by their readers, "who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole. Hannah Arendt's The Human Conditionhas too often been made small, picked over for Arendt's conceptual analysis exploring labor, work, and action. So much attention has been focused on these chapters that we forget that The Human Conditionis not principally a conceptual account; it is, first and foremost, an "historical analysis".
Read the essay here.
The Wonders of Man in the Age of Simulations
The Fortnightly Review (2010)
A Fortnightly Review of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier, and Simulation and Its Discontents by Sherry Turkle.
IN “THE ODE TO MAN” from Antigone, Sophocles conjures “Man” as the wondrous being who wears out the “imperishable earth” with his ploughs. This man “overpowers the rough-maned horses with his devices” and tames the “unbending mountain bull.” He flees the “stormy darts” of winter’s frost and he escapes “needful illness.”
Read the full article here.
Liberating the Animal
Theory & Event (2010). Review of Vanessa Lemm's Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy
The animality of humans has been a basic axiom of philosophical thinking at least since Aristotle characterized the human being as the animal having logos. Logos is sometimes translated as speech, so that humanity is distinguished as the animal having language. Others, building upon Kant, translate logos as reason, itself a multi-faceted idea that alternates between the sense of calculative rationality and logic on the one side and a higher and less-well-defined sense of freedom and knowing on the other. Ambiguous as it remains, the appeal to man’s logos has for millennia named a hierarchical relationship, one in which human beings stand above irrational animals lacking logos.
Read the full article here.
Human Being in an Inhuman Age
Published in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, v. 1 2012.
Read the essay here.
"The Singularity and the Human Condition"(Philosophy Today, 2018).
"The Singularity and the Human Condition,"(Philosophy Today, 2018).
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is frequently read as offering a “theory” of what it means to be human. But the bite of Arendt’s book is to think through the transformation of the human condition in the Modern Age. She argues that the rise of a scientific worldview fundamentally alters the earthly and worldly conditions in which human beings live. Since humans are conditioned beings, the change from our pre-modern subjection to fate to our modern human capacity to create a humanly built world threatens a fundamental shift in human being.
Read the essay here.
Drones and the Question of "The Human"
Drones and the Question of "The Human," Roger Berkowitz, Ethics & International Affairs, volume 28, issue 02, pp. 159-169.
The increasing reliance on drones is threatening our humanity—but not because of the inhumane ways we use Predator drones in warfare. It is a mistake “to use the term “drone” to refer only to these much publicized military devices. Drones, more precisely understood, are intelligent machines that—possessed of the capacity to perform repetitive tasks with efficiency, reliability, and mechanical rationality—increasingly displace the need for human thinking and doing. The trend Jünger and Turkle worry about is unmistakable: we are at risk of losing the rich and mature relationships that mark us as human.
Download the essay here.
Melville's War Poetry and the Human Form
Printed in A Political Companion to Herman Melville, ed. by Jason Frank.
You can read the essay here.
Lost in the Loneliness of Anti-Social Networks
The Fortnightly Review, (2011). Review of Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
THE UNMANNED DRONES DROPPING laser-guided bombs in Pakistan do what they are told. But now the military is pursuing ethically programmed robots that could make autonomous decisions about when and when not to fire. As roboethicist Ronald Arkin has argued, these robots might very well act more humanely than humans.
Read the full article here.
Earth Alienation from Galileo to Google
Language & Thinking Rostrum Lecture
Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Arendt Center, held a lecture this week titled "Earth Alienation from Galileo to Google," as part of the Rostrum Lecture Series sponsored by Bard's Language & Thinking Program.
View a video of the lecture here.