Title: Virtually uninhabitable: A critical analysis of digital environmental anti-toxics activism
Pub No: 3136380
Author: Galusky, Wyatt
Degree: PhD
School: VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY
Date: 2004
Pages: 291
Adviser: Luke, Timothy W.
Source: DAI-A 65/06, p. 2224, Dec 2004
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); MASS COMMUNICATIONS (0708)
Abstract: In this dissertation, I analyze online environmental anti-toxics activism. Environmental activist groups have created a presence on the World Wide Web to help empower people to become aware of and struggle against pollution. The sites that I explore (<italic>http://www.epa.gov/tri/, http://www.epa.gov/enviro/wme/, http://www.rtknet.org/</italic>, and <italic>http://www.scorecard.org/ </italic>) serve as devices of this empowerment and by extension recruit people to the political goals of anti-toxics activism. In my analysis, I focus on a series of questions germane to this context. How can/does this movement go online and utilize that presence to sway others to their cause and ideology? How then is that cause represented digitally, in the online medium? What are the reciprocal impacts of that representation on the movement itself? Most importantly, what form of activist identity is being promoted through the mediation of the online interface? That is, how are the identity of the self as activist and the related understanding of space and place altered through their translation into a digital environment? What are the parameters and limitations of digitally mediated, informed empowerment? I undertake to critique empowerment as found through the digital translation of environmental anti-toxics activism into the virtual space of the Web. I show that particular uses of this Internet application invent (reinvent/reinforce) versions of environmental anti- toxics implications. I break the study into three main parts. The first part lays theoretical groundwork for studying Web-based entities. The second part deals with more particular foundational elements for digital environmental anti-toxics activism, especially in terms of information. In the final section, I analyze and critique the forms of digital identity and empowerment that the websites create. I conclude that digital empowerment, defined primarily through access to expert information, actually represents an impoverished version of empowerment which may do little to aid real-world toxic struggles. My goal involves not dismissing or discouraging this form of online activism, but rather paying careful attention to emerging trends in technological use that may, over the long run, undermine the intentions of users and subvert opportunities for more fundamental change.
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Title: Enterprise hybrids and alternative growth dynamics
Pub No: 3118314
Author: Levin, Kenneth M.
Degree: PhD
School: UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
Date: 2004
Pages: 167
Adviser: Wolff, Richard D.
Source: DAI-A 65/01, p. 246, Jul 2004
Subject: ECONOMICS, THEORY (0511); PHILOSOPHY (0422); SOCIOLOGY, SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT (0700)
Abstract: This dissertation argues that the impetus, growth, and financial success of many North American high-tech companies—biotechnology, computer software development and design, as well as Internet startups—are partly due to their collective way of organizing the production and distribution of gross profits received. The dissertation shows how and why these collectives can be conceived as an alternative to the conventionally understood forms of enterprise organization. Hence, the analysis demonstrates how industrial success and technological innovation can be at least partly attributed to a kind of economic and social energy emanating from collectively structured production sites. The dissertation also presents and analyzes what it defines as the hybrid nature of many high-tech companies. That is, these companies often exhibit at one and the same time both collective and non-collective ways of organizing the production and distribution of gross profits. A class analysis reveals how and why these hybrids are formed, what happens to them, and why enterprises containing these collectively organized class structures can become caught up in cyclical growth patterns—where their collectives emerge from, only to reabsorb back into, fully capitalist class structures. Some famous examples evolved from small, informally run ventures producing in residential car garages into multi- billion dollar public companies with eventual spin-offs of their own. Consequently, the dissertation brings into focus the ironic conclusion that capitalism's supposed “high-tech revolution” might actually derive from different forms of collective production. Accordingly, economic theorists are forced to consider the political as well as economic effects of an analysis that treats collectivity not as the basis for some alternative, potential society that is entirely “futuristic” but rather as an enterprise component contemporarily “realistic.”
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Title: Internet ethics: An examination of information ethics as a theory to address Internet ethical concerns
Pub No: MQ89041
Author: Fox, Dina
Degree: MA
School: CARLETON UNIVERSITY (CANADA)
Date: 2003
Pages: 175
Adviser: Drydyk, Jay
ISBN: 0-612-89041-4
Source: MAI 42/05, p. 1497, Oct 2004
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); INFORMATION SCIENCE (0723); MASS COMMUNICATIONS (0708)
Abstract: The Internet has introduced issues and problems that pose challenges concerning the potential development of an adequate ethical theory and the application of that theory on and to the Internet. Specifically, the global nature of the Internet concomitant with rapid technological change, continuously alters the circumstances to consider in both ethical theory and application. It is this ethical domain specific to the Internet that will be explored in this thesis. Within this domain, I will examine an innovative ethical theory, Floridi's <italic>Information Ethics</italic>, and its success or failure to deal with identified ethical concerns. The first chapter of this thesis examines the historical efforts of Computer Ethics with a view to defining “Internet Ethics”. The second chapter surveys the historical development of the Internet and then describes the existing and emerging ethical concerns on the Internet. The third chapter critically reviews Luciano Floridi's Information Ethic (InfoE) as a potential theory for Internet Ethics (IE). Finally, Chapter Four assesses the usefulness and applicability of Floridi's theory against the emerging ethical concerns identified in Chapter Two.
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Title: A script theory of intentional content
Pub No: NQ85451
Author: Guirguis, Mazen Maurice
Degree: PhD
School: THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (CANADA)
Date: 2003
Pages: 214
Adviser: Savitt, Steven
ISBN: 0-612-85451-5
Source: DAI-A 64/11, p. 4072, May 2004
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: Fred Dretske (1981) claimed that the essence of the kind of cognitive activity that gives rise to Intentional mental states is a process by which the analogue information coming from a source-object is transformed into digital form. It is this analogue-to-digital conversion of data that enables us to form concepts of things. But this achievement comes with a cost, since the conversion must involve a <italic>loss</italic> of information. The price we pay for the lost information is a proportional diminishment in our ability to discriminate the source-object from others that may be similar to it. I argue that this fact underlies an important distinction between what a mental state may be about and to what the state may be <italic>directed</italic>. Aboutness and directedness are two of four Intentional dimensions on which this project concentrates. The other two are <italic>aspectual shape </italic> and <italic>misrepresentation</italic>. The distinction between aboutness and directedness is a part of a proposed approach to Intentionality based on the <italic>script theory</italic> of Roger Schank and Robert Abelson (1977). Scripts are schemata—organized knowledge structures that guide our understanding of the world around us. Schank and Abelson's basic ideas are extended to yield four different script-types: <italic>episodic</italic> (related to situations and events), <italic>instrumental</italic> (related to procedural knowledge), <italic>personal</italic> (representing an agent's goals and plans), and <italic>definitional</italic> (involved in object- recognition). The relationship between scripts and the Intentionality of thought is the main focus of this dissertation. An important secondary concern is the viability of <italic>externalism</italic> and <italic>externalism</italic>. It is argued that neither of these attitudes is independently adequate to provide a full account of Intentional content. Rather, the proper approach is to confine externalistic influences to aboutness and then characterize directedness in a manner that captures the world-according-to-the-agent. This strategy is implemented in the following way: aboutness is construed <italic> causally-evolutionarily</italic>; directedness is constructed with the help of the notion of an <italic>equivalence class</italic>; aspectual shape is shown to be a function of the kind of information a script provides; and an account of misrepresentation is given by comparing the different extensions generated from aboutness and directedness respectively.
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Title: The reality of the virtual: Continental philosophy and the digital age
Pub No: 3085084
Author: Horwitz, Noah M.
Degree: PhD
School: LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Date: 2003
Pages: 312
Adviser: Cutrofello, Andrew
Source: DAI-A 64/03, p. 933, Sep 2003
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: What is the ‘virtual’? While the ‘virtual’ in its traditional, metaphysical determination has been construed as something illusory or ‘less real’ (as ‘mere appearance’ or as false, imaginary, or derivative phenomena), if the virtual poses a contemporary question, it is because the new computer-mediated phenomena (tele-presence, information technologies, ‘Virtual Reality,’ the Internet, computer software, IM, etc.) for which this term is currently invoked do not lack reality, but rather have a specific reality unto themselves. For this reason, instead of trying to understand <italic>virtual reality</italic> as a secondary or illusory world, it is rather, for us, a question of determining the specific<italic> reality of the virtual</italic> or the meaning of ‘virtuality.’ By employing the work of various Continental philosophers (including Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Edmund Husserl amongst others), I argue in my dissertation that the notion of the virtual calls for a metaphysics of pure immanence (as opposed to a dualist metaphysics of transcendence) and that the question of the virtual involves the digitization of reality. The virtual, however, is neither the digital (e.g., binary series) nor the analogical (e.g., what appears on a computer screen). Rather, the virtual involves the relationship between the two. More importantly, instead of viewing computer-mediated phenomena as less real or illusory, one must see understand them as exposing constitutive aspects of all phenomena. For instance, I argue that one's online chat partner is no less real than the other in any intersubjective relation. In this way, I am not merely interested in attempting to characterize the nature of computer-mediated phenomena, but also try to show how virtuality involves all phenomena through both time and meaning. In this way, virtuality does not truly name any specific set of phenomena (does not truly name a special set of entities), but rather characterizes any and all possible phenomena. The virtual is not anything which appears, but rather accounts for why all appearings are partial.
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Title: Cyber-democracy and the politics of space: Critical rhetoric, cultural geography, and radical democracy
Pub No: 3108676
Author: Lee, Jonghwa
Degree: PhD
School: OHIO UNIVERSITY
Date: 2003
Pages: 191
Adviser: McKerrow, Raymie E.
Source: DAI-A 64/10, p. 3538, Apr 2004
Subject: SPEECH COMMUNICATION (0459); POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL
(0615); PHILOSOPHY (0422); LANGUAGE, RHETORIC AND
COMPOSITION (0681)
Abstract: This project discusses and advocates social change, for plural and radical democracy, by analyzing cyberspace as a heterotopia of contemporary cultural/political geography. This project advances its discussion on two levels: on the analytical level, by advancing cultural geography in conjunction with critical rhetoric, this project discusses the discursivity and the spatiality of cyberspace, in terms of its cultural, political, and economic ramifications. On the theoretical and political level, by advancing critical rhetoric in conjunction with Foucault's notion of discourse and Laclau's notion of hegemony, this project advances its discussion of social change in contemporary society and advocates radical and plural democracy, by deconstructing techno-scientific capitalism, for it is the foundation of contemporary society. This project reveals that the history of the Internet shows that there was a gradual transformation of the Internet as a military battlefield to the cyberspace as an e-market. Within this history, a hegemonic alliance of the military-industrial complex played constitutive and ideological roles, within which the CERT/CC and the NIPC serve as academic and governmental nodes, while forming a discursive regime. The discursive regime articulates the truth of cyberspace, by declaring a war, by articulating the clear and present threat of computer viruses and hackers, in defense of safe, clean, and orderly cyberspace for e-commerce. In this discourse, computer hackers and viruses manifest the perfect negativity, constituting a notorious crime, which in turn constitutes a communitas of crisis, constructing the general victim. This hegemonic discourse manifests an extremely commodified version of Cartesian Idealism, Liberalism, and technological optimism, which lacks criticality and democratic participation. However, this articulation is an impossible project due to the undecidability of the subjectivity of hackers. By deconstructing the very ground of hegemonic articulation, this projects compels us to move beyond the contemporary hegemonic imagination of cyberspace, a religio-political battle field where corporate rules dominate, toward cyber-democracy, a space of openness and pluralism, and permanent negotiation between the universal and the particular.
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Title: The digital jeremiad: Democratic articulation and academic exposition in the post-frontier episteme
Pub No: 3095485
Author: Sheaffer, Charles Robert, Jr.
Degree: PhD
School: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
Date: 2003
Pages: 204
Adviser: Mowitt, John W.
Source: DAI-A 64/06, p. 2116, Dec 2003
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); LITERATURE, AMERICAN (0591);
EDUCATION, PHILOSOPHY OF (0998)
Abstract: The concept of the latter-day jeremiad was introduced by the Americanist Sacvan Bercovitch in the mid-1974s. Amongst theological scholars, the term “jeremiad” denotes a form of sermon whereby a static opposition between heaven and earth is ascribed to the agency of divine vengeance. And while Bercovitch's assertion of the on-going <italic>promulgation</italic> of the jeremiad has been criticized as the exclusionary celebration of a narrow tradition. I argue that this response stems from a misunderstanding of two key points: first, the strictly structural focus of Bercovitch's delineation, and second, the transformation of this structure under the auspices of the New England theocracy. In contrast to the binary, opposition inherent to the Old World jeremiad, the latter-day variation is shown by Bercovitch to entail the formulation of each given community in terms of its assertion of <italic>intrinsic</italic> declension, i.e., its inscription of the gap between rhetorical ideal and real impediment as integral to the communal ideal per se. And my thesis is that as such, Bercovitch's analysis prefigures the subsequent theorization of constitutive social antagonism by the theorists associated with the postmarxist movement and the Slovenian school. Focusing on selected writings by Henry James, Mark Twain; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, I map the function of the latter-day jeremiad in the fin-de-siècle United States by correlating it with the tenet of democratic articulation developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. As defined by Laclau and Mouffe, articulation entails the formulation of identity as the point of antagonistic exclusion in a newly invoked discursive context. Issuing from this premise, the concept of the <italic>digital</italic> jeremiad entails the invocation of Bercovitch's trope for the formulation of new political antagonisms within the American scene. For many theorists of epistemological method, the need for a distinctly digital academic discourse is linked with the assertion of a putatively anachronistic gap between scholarly exposition and the modes of knowledge- production which comprise the university's contemporary contexts. In contrast, however, my project demonstrates the enactment of generative, “proto-digital” properties which have imbued the Enlightenment episteme from the outset but which become obfuscated through our academic espousals of expository discourse.
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Title: Constructions of the public and the private in the Internet Age
Pub No: 3085742
Author: Wahl, Shawn Thomas
Degree: PhD
School: THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA - LINCOLN
Date: 2003
Pages: 214
Adviser: Lee, Ronald
Source: DAI-A 64/03, p. 723, Sep 2003
Subject: SPEECH COMMUNICATION (0459); MASS COMMUNICATIONS (0708);
PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: The proliferation of new communication technologies (NCT's) may extend, revise, or subvert traditional notions of the nature and effects of publicity. The purpose of this study is to examine the Internet as it poses questions that force re-theorizing conceptualizations of the public. In order to explore the theoretical stasis of the public in the digital age, I adapt critical flashpoints or reflections about the public to the virtual terrain of the Internet. John Dewey's (1954) <italic>The Public and its Problems</italic> and Walter Lippmann's (1922/1965) <italic>Public Opinion</italic> form a critical lens to examine the relationship between the technical sphere of expertise and the public. Jurgen Habermas's writings about the public and the debates that followed the English translation of the <italic>Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere</italic> and the publication of his work on colonization in <italic>Theory of Communicative Action</italic> capture a sense of how the intimate sphere is colonized by commercial discourse. An analysis of ACT-UP's web site reveals the Internet plays a role in refiguring the relationship between citizens and experts. Ordinary people educate themselves in order to make competent argument against trained experts. Technical information seems to be democratized and demystified on the Internet. The rhetorical markings of a citizenry are problematic in the virtual terrain of the Internet. The vitality of the Internet citizenry is caught in the tensions between the physical and virtual community, private space and public space. An analysis of the Gay.com web site shows that corporate colonization of the intimate sphere is more intrusive on the Internet. Virtual communities offer a free space for highly vulnerable populations. The same contexts that promise escape from dominance are invaded by commercial discourse. The Internet encourages a dynamic milieu for corporate surveillance.
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Title: Difficult choices: Moral decision making and genetic
technologies
Pub No: MQ72099
Author: Cassis, Violette Rawhy
Degree: MA
School: UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY (CANADA)
Date: 2002
Pages: 153
Adviser: Miller, Leslie J.
ISBN: 0-612-72099-3
Source: MAI 41/02, p. 454, Apr 2003
Subject: SOCIOLOGY, THEORY AND METHODS (0344); PHILOSOPHY (0422);
HEALTH SCIENCES, GENERAL (0566)
Abstract: This thesis explores the choices ordinary people make about the use of medical, genetic technologies against the background of professional, principle-based ethics. I compare the moral questions that ordinary social actors raise when they encounter these technologies with the concerns that bioethicists raise about their use. Excerpts from an Internet forum about the medical applications of genetic technologies provide the data for my analysis. My goal is to explore the differences between the “textually mediated” accounts of bioethics and the ordinary accounts that emerge from the everyday world of lived experience. Throughout, I draw on the perspectives of Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman and Dorothy Smith to frame my discussion of moral decisionmaking, the risks genetic technologies pose, and the moral dilemmas they present.
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Title: Reconstructing social theory at a cruising site
Pub No: 3047686
Author: Hollister, John Walker
Degree: PhD
School: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BINGHAMTON
Date: 2002
Pages: 290
Adviser: Murray, Martin
ISBN: 0-493-61783-3
Source: DAI-A 63/03, p. 1149, Sep 2002
Subject: SOCIOLOGY, THEORY AND METHODS (0344); PHILOSOPHY (0422);
GEOGRAPHY (0366)
Abstract: Cruising sites are places where men anonymously seek sexual contact with each other. They appear to happen automatically despite efforts to start them or clamp down. They depend on conducive places and a stream of men who recognize them. The sites are as disconnected from structures of most sociological inquiry as are the men from their own names. Yet hourly shifts in demographics correspond to cycles of work, home, and leisure. They are camouflaged; communication among the cruisers relies on particularities of place. Sex is relatively safe. The main danger is police harrassment. They are structured by variations in how a site is perceived, as by regulars and newcomers, those who figured it out and those shown how it works, those who come alone or with friends. Similarities with Internet discussions suggest rethinking place in terms of marking, accessibility, and visibility. The long history of cruising requires rethinking continuity without essentialist assumptions. Contrasts between the meaning of sexuality there and in gay activist groups challenge assumptions about gay history at the level of entire cultures. Using emplaced situations instead of individuals as a unit of analysis challenges intersectionist models of identity. Without falling into the trap of unmasking identities as mere social constructions, reconstruct them in terms of the situations where they matter. These arguments are based on an extended case method field study of a highway rest area in upstate New York with interviews of nineteen participants. Karl Popper's anti-essentialism guides a search for explanations in terms of <italic>how</italic> things work, rather than <italic>what</italic> they are or are not, without essentializing words, categories, or standpoints.
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Title: The intellectual commons: A pluralistic theory of intellectual property rights
Pub No: 3049691
Author: Mitchell, Henry C., Jr.
Degree: PhD
School: UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
Date: 2002
Pages: 268
Adviser: McKim, Vaughn
ISBN: 0-493-64063-0
Source: DAI-A 63/04, p. 1383, Oct 2002
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: The purpose of my dissertation is to develop a new theory of intellectual property (IP), shifting the focus of intellectual property theory from authors to communities, which both use and produce intellectual works. A number of scholars, including James Boyle, Bernard Kaplan, Pamela Samuelson, and Jessica Litman have argued that an author-centered theory of IP rights is both inappropriate for the emerging world of universal digital information and unjust in many of its consequences. My theory recognizes the rights of authors, but does not make them the foundation of IP rights. IP rights are justified by the necessity of maintaining and expanding a shared framework of knowledge (the “intellectual commons”). The resulting theory is pluralistic in the sense that users and publishers are assumed to have rights that are not derived from the rights of authors. The value of the intellectual commons itself is not ultimately derived from the rights of authors. My approach also recognizes situations in which IP rules have to be extended or overridden because of other intrinsic values (not treating people as instruments, value of a particular work to humanity as a whole). Developing the theory involves exploring the concept of an original commons as it is developed in the natural-law tradition from Duns Scotus to John Locke. My approach does not base the introduction of IP rights solely on the right's potential economic value. The duration of IP rights needs to take into account the varying pace of technological change, and the overall “ecology” of the intellectual commons. I will show that this theory better addresses the emerging context of universal information than an author-centered theory, and also has implications for “unauthored” forms of knowledge.
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Title: The morality of meditation: How meditation guides one to follow the life example of Jesus
Pub No: 1411398
Author: Parish, Grace Pevear
Degree: MA
School: THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
Date: 2002
Pages: 65
Adviser: Oliver, Amy
ISBN: 0-493-88709-1
Source: MAI 41/03, p. 680, Jun 2003
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY OF (0322)
Abstract: Meditation is a form of ethics that was abolished from the Western Church several hundred years after the death of Christ. Meditation leads one to live as Jesus did. Today there is a resurgence of meditation in the Church, but one Christian denomination, the Reconstructionists, see a return to Biblical Law as the way to an ethical society. The procedures for this thesis included research of history and philosophers using books, Internet sources, and interviews. Results show that meditation is a more ethical approach than Reconstructionism. Meditation leads one to live in the compassionate way that Jesus did and is therefore a form of ethics that should be embraced. Reconstructionism and its quest for the return to biblical law goes against that which Jesus taught.
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Title: The I and the me(dia): Social hermeneutics, media audiences, and cultural theory
Pub No: 3023014
Author: Bailey, Steven C.
Degree: PhD
School: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
Date: 2001
Pages: 306
Adviser: Hay, James
ISBN: 0-493-34540-X
Source: DAI-A 62/08, p. 2617, Feb 2002
Subject: MASS COMMUNICATIONS (0708); PHILOSOPHY (0422);
ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL (0326)
Abstract: This dissertation examines the possible value of utilizing theories of the human subject derived from recent philosophical work to understand the practices of mass media audiences. The first half of the manuscript provides an analysis of the theoretical dimensions of this question, beginning with an analysis of the shortcomings of previous work on the relationship of subjects and symbolic fields. The dissertation then raises the possibility of using the hermeneutic theory of subjectivity, initially raised by George Herbert Mead and developed by a number of recent philosophers, as the basis for understanding practices of interpretation and self-formation by media audience members. In the final portion of the theoretical section of the dissertation, the suitability of this approach is examined in light of recent scholarship on the postmodern character of media culture and the use of ethnography as a research strategy is examined. In the second half of the manuscript, the author provides three empirical case studies of actual media audiences to illustrate the value of this new theoretical perspective. The first analyzes the cultural dynamics of a local underground cinema culture and examines the uniquely hybrid character of this social formation. The second study examines the community of fans which surrounds the widely popular rock band Kiss, illustrating the struggle for self-assertion within this culture. The final case study examines the Internet-based audience community surrounding the television program <italic> Futurama</italic>, one which an ironic self- relation is a critical feature. The dissertation concludes with a brief analysis of the way in which all three research sites illustrate varying modes of symbolic self-creation and self-reflection in the face an increasingly unstable cultural environment.
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Title: Moments in space, spaces in time: Phenomenology and the embodied depth of cinematic image
Pub No: 3022834
Author: Elkington, Trevor G.
Degree: PhD
School: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
Date: 2001
Pages: 258
Adviser: Bean, Jennifer M.
ISBN: 0-493-33694-X
Source: DAI-A 62/08, p. 2612, Feb 2002
Subject: CINEMA (0900); PHILOSOPHY (0422); LITERATURE, COMPARATIVE (0295)
Abstract: This study discusses the perception of depth in film, focusing upon how the spectator perceives cinematic spatiality. Pointing to recent examples, new cinematic technologies are shown to mandate new theoretical paradigms in accounting for a developing spatial logic. Contrary to Lacanian, Neo-Formalist, and postmodern paradigms, which posit the film as superficial and passively perceived, the work presents the spectator as an active body engaged with an image that is perceptually deep. Drawing upon the perceptual phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Michel de Certeau, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, each chapter analyzes films that posit the human body as the <italic>zero-point</italic> of spatiality, such that depth is related to the spectator's embodied perception. The dissertation concludes by discussing the relation between space and time in comprehending depth, arguing for a Gestalt-oriented film paradigm. In Chapter Two, Peter Greenaway's films initiate a discussion of the difference between place and space; space and depth are recognized as relying upon the activity of human bodies. Greenaway's films illustrate the conflict between order and chaos; his films' static structures reveal themselves only through the action of character and camera. Chapter Three discusses the zero- point in connection to questions of reality and depth, discussing <italic>The Blair Witch Project</italic> (1999) for its use of hand-held camera before analyzing <italic> The Matrix</italic> (1999) and <italic>Fight Club</italic> (1999) for their ability to place the spectator within a central spatial position via digital image manipulation. Chapter Four looks at the Dogme 95 films for their claims of authenticity; analyzing the Manifesto and Vow of Chastity for their assumptions regarding film and the technological mediation of perception. Drawing upon Don Ihde's concept of instrumental realism, the films are shown to posit the spectator as an active participant in the comprehension of a mediated and yet deep moment. Chapter Five takes up the issue of time, discussing <italic> Pulp Fiction</italic> (1994), <italic>Go</italic> (1999), <italic>Run Lola Run</italic> (1999), and <italic>Time Code</italic> (2000) as spatio-temporal gestalts reliant upon a deep image for their narrative logic. While this dissertation focuses upon recent films, it concludes by pointing to the arguments' theoretical implications regarding perception and cinematic experience.
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Title: The impact of being moral: An ontological explanation of care ethics (Martin Heidegger)
Pub No: 1403965
Author: Garrison, Sandra Lyn
Degree: MA
School: SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY
Date: 2001
Pages: 36
Adviser: Hadreas, Peter
ISBN: 0-493-19739-7
Source: MAI 39/05, p. 1299, Oct 2001
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); RELIGION, GENERAL (0318); PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIAL (0451)
Abstract: This thesis addresses the topic of developing a verifiable moral theory from Heidegger's concept of being. It examines Heidegger's explanation of ‘being-in-the-world’ and in particular how an ethics of care could be developed from ‘being- with’ relationships. In addition, this ethics of care is studied to see how it could also be a defendable view of moral realism. Research on this subject reveals that a new theory, ontological moral realism, would be able to justify moral statements as well as encompass Heidegger's idea of ‘being with’. A defense of this theory follows along with a suggested Wittegensteinian truth theory. The ontological explanation of care ethics is then illustrated through an examination of road rage where ‘being with’ others is shown in action. There is also a phenomenological examination of ‘being with’ others in a car. Some contrast is drawn from ‘being with’ in grocery stores as well as on the internet.
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Title: On sense: Romanticism for a technological age
Pub No: 3037629
Author: Riedle, Ingrid Helga
Degree: PhD
School: PURDUE UNIVERSITY
Date: 2001
Pages: 144
Adviser: Weinstein, Michael A.
ISBN: 0-493-51202-0
Source: DAI-A 63/01, p. 348, Jul 2002
Subject: POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: This research is a philosophical investigation of the digital revolution taking place in our contemporary Western culture and beyond. It traces the increase of human relations through various screens and our gradual alienation from the living world, from nature, or Husserl's <italic>Lebenswelt</italic>. In the context of this revolution I contemplate the loss of a sense of corporeality, that is, an estrangement from our body and more precisely from our senses. The first chapter is a play on sense, a confounding of codes, on the example of the “foole” in Hobbes' <italic>Leviathan</italic>. The second chapter unveils a sensuous dimension of multiple meanings underlying our languages. The third chapter scrutinizes our treatment of the life-world in a technological world. The fourth chapter interrogates a strategy of contemporary business that is modeled on the human nervous system, as perhaps a Foucaultian next step in the disciplinization of man; the fifth chapter speculates on practices and approaches to recuperate the threatened world of sense and the senses, it seeks to counterbalance the technological obsession that interpellates us as the machines of our inventions; and the sixth chapter considers images and metaphors with which scientists explain the workings of nature and their implications for philosophy. Each chapter provides a perspective on sense and the senses in our contemporary world.
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Title: Digital ontology and the possibility of ethics: A Levinasian response
Pub No: 9950740
Author: Anderson, Harold Wayne
Degree: PhD
School: THE ILIFF SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY AND UNIVERSITY OF DENVER
Date: 1999
Pages: 303
Adviser: Surber, Jere Paul
ISBN: 0-599-52592-4
Source: DAI-A 60/11, p. 4033, May 2000
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); COMPUTER SCIENCE (0984)
Abstract: Computers hold a central place in the development of our social structures today. Following the thought of Martin Heidegger, if we are to understand the digital phenomenon, we must understand it ontologically. In my dissertation, I define digital ontology as the fundamental commensurability between artifacts and nature, human beings and machines. Analysts are divided concerning the merits of this. The optimists believe it will remove the hierarchies dividing people from each other, and the naysayers think it eliminates the uniqueness of human beings, and calls into question the principles and mores defining civilization. Digital ontology, they fear, is the reduction of humanity to a machine. The central question of my dissertation is this: What is the nature of digital ontology, and is it possible to define a digital ethics within this digital environment? By examining the digital phenomenon, I determine that it is a cybernetic, systemic environment characterized by what I call “shifting centers.” These are the building blocks of digital ontology, and are momentary responses to the system of which they are a part. Their existence is determined by their purpose, and once that purpose is fulfilled, the center is deconstructed and quickly passes away. As such, digital ontology is the unending erasure and redrawing of boundary conditions that constantly define and redefine the nature of the system and its elements. Digital ethics must take into account the phenomenon of shifting centers, and the way it redefines the self, responsibility, accountability, and what Jean Baudrillard calls “radical otherness.” Most people, I discover, attempt to define digital ontology as totalizing discourse, which is opposed to ethics. If we allow the thought of Emmanuel Levinas to inform our understanding of digital ontology, however, we will discover that digital ontology need not be understood as totalizing discourse, but is more successfully understood as the condition for ethical discourse defined by the other. I conclude by outlining a prolegomena to future digital ethics based upon the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and his definition of ethical discourse as the domain of radical otherness.
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Title: A metaphoric analysis of the Christian identity rhetoric
of Pastor Pete Peters (Colorado)
Pub No: 1394573
Author: Champagne, Brian Alan
Degree: MA
School: UNIVERSITY OF THE PACIFIC
Date: 1999
Pages: 161
ISBN: 0-599-31154-1
Source: MAI 37/05, p. 1306, Oct 1999
Subject: LANGUAGE, RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION (0681); RELIGION,
CLERGY (0319); PHILOSOPHY (0422); AMERICAN STUDIES (0323)
Abstract: Pastor Pete Peters is a minister in La Porte, Colorado. He operates a small church, an Internet website, a newsletter, and a worldwide cassette tape ministry. He teaches Christian Identity, the belief that the white race is Israel of the Bible. His rhetoric contains open derision of Jews, homosexuals, and racial minorities, although he never openly advocates violence toward any group. After tracing the roots of the Christian Identity movement and reviewing the literature on the movement, this thesis examines Peters' rhetoric at the metaphoric level, analyzing the metaphors in four of Peters' key works for their underlying meaning. Metaphoric criticism as a method of rhetorical analysis is introduced and then applied to the metaphors extracted from America the Conquered, Baal Worship, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, and Whores Galore. These books, all by Peters, employ his metaphor of Jews corrupting the United States government and attempting to destroy white Christians through media, courts, and banking, of which Peters asserts they control. Through extracting and analyzing the metaphors in the four books, it was found that Peters does more than warn against corrupt systems: through metaphor and Biblical parallels, he subversively condones and nearly commands violence against Jews, homosexuals, and the government.
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Title: The art of disappearance: Autobiography, race, and technology (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Frederick Douglass, Norbert Wiener, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Italy)
Pub No: 3146640
Author: Coleman, Beth
Degree: PhD
School: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Date: 2004
Pages: 202
Adviser: Harper, Phillip Brian; Ronell, Avital
ISBN: 0-496-05180-6
Source: DAI-A 65/09, p. 3372, Mar 2005
Subject: LITERATURE, COMPARATIVE (0295); HISTORY OF SCIENCE (0585); PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: My project traces the changing value of self-mastery (autonomy) through the literary lens of autobiography. Possessive individualism, to cite the term used by political scientist C. B. MacPherson, is a formulation of autonomous subjectivity that originates just before the European Enlightenment in the late seventeenth-century with the theories of Locke's <italic>tabula rasa</italic> and Newton's perfectible world that continues to this day in relation to our language of autobiography and public personhood. I address aesthetic representations of Enlightenment self-mastery, beginning with particular manifestations of the free subject during the European mid-eighteenth century, and its permutations in the relation to the American slave in the nineteenth-century and the cybernetic machine in the twentieth. The primary figures I address are the eighteenth-century <italic>philosophe </italic> Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the nineteenth century freedman and orator Frederick Douglass—polemicists and serial writers of autobiography both. Other thinkers of speculative and technological “futurisms,” such as Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, and F. T. Marinetti, the inventor of the futurist avant-garde, are included in the study. The Art of Disappearance is a project that concerns race in the sense that race is a primary sign of difference that has been utilized in the discourse of mastery to subject others. It is a project that concerns technology in the sense that the distinction between man and machine presents another crucial boundary between self and other. The literary and cultural histories of race and technology represent distinct ontologies of the “inhuman.” I argue that there is an imperative to read these two histories in tandem.
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Title: The phenomenology of technology: A theoretical exploration of the relationship between technological medium and experience
Pub No: 3133464
Author: Holmberg, Jon Markus Buli
Degree: PsyD
School: ALLIANT INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY, SAN FRANCISCO BAY
Date: 2004
Pages: 189
Adviser: Bilmes, Murray
Source: DAI-A 65/05, p. 1812, Nov 2004
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); PSYCHOLOGY, GENERAL (0621); MASS
COMMUNICATIONS (0708)
Abstract: This dissertation conducted a theoretical study of technology based on the work of Marshal McLuhan, Michel Foucault, and Martin Heidegger, with the goal of analyzing the relationship between human experience and technological mediums, such as television, computers, telephones and books. McLuhan, Heidegger and Foucault all understand technology's major effects as experiential, rather than physical. Phenomenological terminology (such as embodiment, dasein, life-world, clearing, and horizon) is useful for describing technology's effects on the human mind. Phenomenology approaches the experiential world we live in—the life world—in a integrative manner exploring many levels simultaneously: embodied (sensory), psychological, social, and philosophical; this method diminishes the Cartesian subject-object split. From the diverse technological life-world three core mediums were identified: the spoken, the textual, and the electronic. The spoken relates to the auditory experience, the textual to the visual, and the electronic to embodied experience. Specific technological media have been explored in the sense in which they mainly operate: for example, the telephone in the spoken, the book in the textual, and the television in the electronic. Each core technology operates in a specific and unique experiential space, its phenomenological clearing (the conscious aspects of cultures and individuals). The core technologies are archetypal because they foster and maintain specific worldviews (paradigms): the spoken with traditional/archaic, the textual with modernity, and the electronic with post-modernity. Technology's automatic and subliminal influence on the senses are more important than its manifest content, these processes are equal to a technological unconscious. The content of technology is always oriented toward something other than itself, hereby; the processes of the medium remain invisible in the individual and cultural clearing. Electronic technology introduces a paradigm requiring new terminology to be described. The experiential (the personal and collective psyche), the landscape of consciousness and the decentered (egoless experience) are used to describe the phenomenological reality when the subject-object, or ego-self axis, is diffused. McLuhan's term “global village” illustrates the embodied identity and interpersonal focus of the electronic village, while also alluding to the dissolution of space occurring with the global reach of electronic technology.
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Title: Toward freedom: A critique of the ideologies of late capitalism (Herbert Marcuse)
Author: Lau, Josephine Kwan Ching
Degree: MPhil
School: UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG (PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA)
Date: 2004
Source: MAI 43/01, p. 64, Feb 2005
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: The purpose of this thesis is to examine the problem of freedom in advance industrial civilization formulated by Herbert Marcuse in <italic>One Dimensional Man</italic> (1964). Marcuse argues that the specific phenomenon of “unfreedom passing for freedom” in the individual's consciousness is unique of the one- dimensional society under advance industrial capitalism. Fundamental to this problem is an interwoven relationship between capital and labour. Capital's domination of the individual is necessary for its valorisation. Individuals subject themselves on the one hand as labour for production, and on the other, as consumers for commodities. I maintain that in order to liberate the individual, the domination forces need to be identified and understood, and the condition exists for such liberation. What remains become a contention between political will power and the entrenched forces of capitalism. In conclusion, it is my contention that despite the entrenched domination forces, the possibility for freedom has emerged under present condition. This possibility is mainly driven by the latest development in technology which has redefined the dynamics in the productive forces of many post-industrial societies. These changes, as I shall demonstrate, give rise to the possibility for re- formulating the problem of work with the individual's liberation in mind. It will be up to individuals collectively to pursue this opportunity. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
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Title: A life of the dead: Privacy, data subjects and labor
Pub No: 3121846
Author: Sigthorsson, Gauti
Degree: PhD
School: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
Date: 2004
Pages: 322
Adviser: Leppert, Richard
Source: DAI-A 65/02, p. 505, Aug 2004
Subject: LITERATURE, COMPARATIVE (0295); PHILOSOPHY (0422);
AMERICAN STUDIES (0323); INFORMATION SCIENCE (0723)
Abstract: <italic>A Life of the Dead</italic> makes historical connections between information technology on the one hand, and the contentious social and political concepts of privacy and surveillance on the other. My argument, first, is that labor is the missing conceptual link in contemporary studies of this relation. Drawing on Hegel's <italic>Elements of the Philosophy of Right</italic>, contrasting it with the liberalism of John Stuart Mill, and of Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis (authors of the essay “The Right to Privacy”), I view both the claim of individual persons to a “right to privacy” and the practice of data-surveillance by state- and corporate entities who collect data on individuals (as consumers, citizens, and patients) as attempts to appropriate information-capital generated in and through everyday activities. Data-surveillance makes it possible to collect, store and analyze data, and thus generate value from the everyday activities of shopping and traveling, as well as from the more familiar financial, medical and marketing data handled by state and corporate entities. Secondly, I argue that this translation of everyday activities into data, and into information-capital, is part and parcel of a broad historical trend in the English- and French-speaking context, towards reducing scientific and cultural objects of study to code, what Michel Serres has called a “dream of a mathesis universalis.” I study a range of texts from the 1950s and '60s, from the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener, the psychoanalysis- seminars of Jacques Lacan, to the satirical fiction of Kurt Vonnegut and the futurology of Daniel Bell. I study specifically a widely circulating idea of information technology taking over most labor, making human workers redundant. This idea is, in turn, relevant to the case- study which closes the dissertation, of a planned database, the Icelandic Healthcare Database, licensed to deCODE Genetics Inc., in which the population of Iceland would be effectively simulated by feeding their medical data into an extensive database for locating hereditary disease genes and possible treatments.
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Title: An ontological study of an electroacoustic entity: The poiesis and being of Karlheinz Stockhausen's 'Gesang der Juenglinge'
Pub No: 3142676
Author: Sinfelt, Klaus
Degree: PhD
School: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Date: 2004
Pages: 245
Adviser: Fisher, George
ISBN: 0-496-00452-2
Source: DAI-A 65/08, p. 2832, Feb 2005
Subject: MUSIC (0413); PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: This investigation comprises an ontological examination of electroacoustic music as represented in Karlheinz Stockhausen's composition, <italic>Gesang der Jünglinge</italic>. To establish a philosophical background, it includes an extensive discussion of such entities as art, technology, language, truth, essence, being, and causality, with emphasis on ideas advanced by the twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger. The analysis of this work is structured around the ancient Aristotelian idea that four aspects of cause are responsible for the coming into Being of an entity, namely <italic>causa materialis</italic> (materials), <italic> causa formalis</italic> (material form), <italic>causa finalis</italic> (the intended end result), and <italic>causa efficiens</italic> (the effecting of the result). The Latin names, of course, originated centuries after the time of Aristotle. The four <italic>causae</italic> are strongly interdependent, and there is extensive overlap of one with another. Of utmost importance in a Heideggerian analysis of an entity is an attitude that the entity be allowed to show itself for what it is. As a consequence of the adoption of this attitude in the present investigation, <italic>Gesang der Jünglinge</italic> has been accorded the freedom to project symbolically the world of the composer as it existed in the onto-historical moment of his life. With the aid of the ancient Greek words <italic>poiēsis</italic> (meaning a blossoming forth) and <italic>alētheia</italic> (meaning inner truth rather than simple correctness), we characterize the emergence of this symbol; namely, there is a <italic>poiēsis</italic> of the essence or Being of the entity, and with this <italic>poiēsis</italic> a simultaneous revealing of <italic>alētheia</italic>. The approach taken in this investigation is not limited to electroacoustic music. It is applicable to works of art and aesthetics in general, and to other entities as well.
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Title: The obscenity of Internet pornography: A philosophical
analysis of the regulation of sexually explicit Internet
content
Pub No: 3135448
Author: White, Amy E.
Degree: PhD
School: BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY
Date: 2004
Pages: 200
Adviser: Lomasky, Loren
Source: DAI-A 65/06, p. 2228, Dec 2004
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); MASS COMMUNICATIONS (0708); EDUCATION,
TECHNOLOGY (0710)
Abstract: This dissertation has two principle aims: To show that current arguments from proponents and opponents of the regulation of sexually explicit Internet content are unsound and to construct an argument against content regulation that avoids the failures of current arguments. The dissertation is organized into seven chapters. In Chapter One I provide background information on attempts to regulate sexually explicit materials and briefly outline the development of the Internet. Chapter Two examines the current regulation of obscenity on the Internet. Chapter Three investigates the claim that the Internet should not be regulated due to the value of free speech. In this chapter I examine the claims that opponents of Internet regulation make and the applicability of the First Amendment to Internet speech. I argue that proponents' claims, which are often based on the arguments originally expounded by John Stuart Mill, fall short and are not sound. The next three chapters investigate arguments in support of regulation. These arguments include claims that an unregulated Internet can harm children, women and societal morals. I examine each of the arguments proponents give in support of regulatory action and argue that they are defective. Given the faulted nature of proponents' arguments, it is my conclusion that the arguments fail to justify Internet content regulation. Drawing on the conclusions offered in previous chapters, in the final chapter I offer a consequentialist argument against the regulation of sexually explicit Internet materials. Given that, as concluded in previous chapters, the arguments provided to prove that sexually explicit materials on the Internet are harmful fail, there will be little utility gained by regulation. In addition, in this chapter I outline the harm that will be produced by regulating the Internet and conclude that, overall, disutility will ensue if such materials are regulated.
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Title: Energized by inefficient machines: Geometry, epistemes
and cybernetics (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Ridley
Scott, Terry Gilliam)
Pub No: NQ82093
Author: DeFehr, Wayne
Degree: PhD
School: UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA (CANADA)
Date: 2003
Pages: 277
Adviser: Hjartarson, Paul
ISBN: 0-612-82093-9
Source: DAI-A 64/07, p. 2510, Jan 2004
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); MATHEMATICS (0405); CINEMA (0900)
Abstract: Historically, innovations in the disciplines of geometry and epistemology have been mutually influential, despite the fact that the spheres of numbers and words seem to exclude each other. This dissertation argues for the strength of this connection, however, by tracing the role Euclid's rational method plays in the work of several Western philosophers, as well as by showing the attempts of philosophers to increase the rigour of Euclid's method. The dissertation pursues this argument into the postmodern philosophies of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, where geometry and epistemology continue this fertile relationship despite the non-metaphysical milieu. Indeed, this study contends that some rapprochement between Derrida and Foucault might be made through the geometric concepts they deploy, even though Derridean deconstruction operates through a more general economic model than does Foucauldian historicism. Linking Derrida's mechanism of Undecidability to Foucault's concept of the <italic>episteme</italic> might offer a way to ameliorate the bleak determinism that has often been ascribed to Foucault's theories. The discussion then begins a deconstructive reading of a late-twentieth century <italic>episteme</italic>, that of posthumanism, especially as conceived by Kathryn Hayles. The dissertation argues that despite the vigour of posthumanist theories of technological union, other approaches to this same question resist the metaphysical implications of a new, whole entity formed from the merger of bodies and machines. Several narratives representing alternative points of view are juxtaposed with posthumanist theory in order to deconstruct this apparent union. Instead of depicting a simplistic merger, some narratives in genres such as cyberpunk portray machines and bodies as not fusing permanently but in fact remaining undecidably distinct. The dissertation concludes with readings of Ridley Scott's <italic>Blade Runner</italic> (1982) and Terry Gilliam's <italic>Brazil</italic> (1985) that challenge the posthumanist ideal of a body/machine merger by drawing on the geometric mechanism of Undecidability as it operates in Derridean deconstruction. In these narratives, cyborg figures undecidably retain elements of both the biological and the machinic. In <italic>Blade Runner</italic> technology does not merge with biology, but instead ‘evolves’ beyond it, enabling the “replicants” to become “more human than human.” In <italic>Brazil</italic>, the categories of biology and technology both benefit from the ‘productive’ waste of government operations. Although almost certainly directors Ridley Scott and Terry Gilliam were not familiar with Derrida's model of deconstruction and its geometric inflection this dissertation argues, against Kathryn Hayles's posthumanism, that their technologized environments do not run with maximum efficiency, but dissipate energy paradoxically in order to operate at optimal levels.
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Title: A comparative account of substantive technology theory in
the 20th century
Pub No: MQ84950
Author: Hansen, Daniel Bruce
Degree: MA
School: LAKEHEAD UNIVERSITY (CANADA)
Date: 2003
Pages: 105
ISBN: 0-612-84950-3
Source: MAI 42/03, p. 774, Jun 2004
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: In this thesis, I will demonstrate that the solution to the digital problem requires a little from both sides of the issue. I contend that while digital technology is a radically different form of technology, its substantive character as a technology has remained the same. To this end, I will examine claims concerning the essential character and unique nature of modern industrial technology made by Jacques Ellul, Herbert Marcuse, and Martin Heidegger. All of these theorists, regarded as ‘founding fathers’ of contemporary philosophy of technology, asserted modern technology's substantive character as revealed by its unique nature. I will then survey, assess, and compare evaluations made by some contemporary theorists, namely Jean Baudrillard, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Andrew Feenberg, and Albert Borgmann. The purpose of reviewing such a general chronology is, I think, useful in that I will be able to make comparisons between modern age theory and current theory. I believe that modern-age theorists were on to something that current theorists have generally left behind or ignored, perhaps the result of over-sensitivity to the recent unpopularity of modernist modes of thought. My approach is founded in admittedly basic and, some might complain, naïve observations; like many others, I feel the constant pressure of technology, and particularly of digital communication technology, on every aspect of my daily living. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
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Title: Jus in bello: Key issues for a contemporary assessment of just behavior in war
Pub No: 3086861
Author: Iasiello, Louis V.
Degree: PhD
School: SALVE REGINA UNIVERSITY
Date: 2003
Pages: 383
Adviser: Cowdin, Daniel
Source: DAI-A 64/04, p. 1284, Oct 2003
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); POLITICAL SCIENCE, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND RELATIONS (0616); RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY OF (0322)
Abstract: Civilized humanity has long pondered the morality of war and the parameters of just behavior in war. Since ancient times philosophers, theologians, civic leaders, warriors, and jurists have formulated concepts and theories outlining the ethical boundaries of a justified use of force (<italic>jus ad bellum </italic>) as well as for just behavior in war (<italic>jus in bello</italic>). Taken together, these principles define a <italic>bellum justum</italic> or just war. Just war theory, legal interpretation, and international law help to define the rationale for a just declaration of war and for just behavior of those tasked with conducting and fighting wars. This dissertation examines the relevance of just war theory for the 21<super>st</super> century, specifically, the relevance of <italic>jus in bello</italic> to contemporary issues and trends. Following a survey of major philosophies, strategies, and personalities that have significantly contributed to the development of just war theory, the author surveys contemporary scholars who have advanced this theory. The dissertation then examines some modern issues that challenge the application of <italic>jus in bello</italic> principles. These issues call for further study, both external (international law and ethics) and internal (military culture, law, traditions and strategy), in defining the parameters of just behavior in war. Such issues include modern military technology (i.e., precision guided munitions and cyberwarfare), the vulnerability of non-combatants, the ethical use of military contractors, and ecological concerns. This work concludes with suggestions for further scholarship and discussion regarding just war developments.
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10 Title: From awe to anxiety: The nature of wonder and its fate in the current age
Pub No: 3080360
Author: Skitol, Lissa Jill
Degree: PhD
School: EMORY UNIVERSITY
Date: 2003
Pages: 205
Adviser: Verene, Donald Phillip
Source: DAI-A 64/02, p. 529, Aug 2003
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: That “philosophy begins in wonder” is an idiom oft cited and seldom explained. I propose that the relation between wonder and philosophy can be grasped through the conflict between the ancient and modern worldviews, which can be seen to follow from their distinct views on the nature of philosophical wonder. In the first part I claim that this distinction can ultimately be traced back to the original myth of wonder, or to the god <italic> Thaumas</italic> who beget both Iris, the goddess of the rainbow and messenger to the gods, as well as the Harpies, winged creatures who punish and terrify men on earth. I draw on the myth to explain the essentially dualistic nature of wonder, or the <italic>pathos</italic> for the unknown, which may lead either to curiosity about that which one does not know, or to anxiety about the lack of one's certain knowledge. In the second part I assess the general significance of wonder and its value in an age when our desire for novelty, utility, and efficiency dissolves our sense of the unknown with the assurance that “all is possible”. I propose that the advent of totalitarianism, trauma, and technology in the twentieth century has altered the cultural conditions that initially allowed for the primacy of wonder as a central passion of the soul in the ancient and modern worlds.
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Title: Walter Ong's phenomenology of language: Spoken, written and digital words in the classroom (Edmund Husserl)
Pub No: 3107314
Author: Smith, Scott Eaton
Degree: PhD
School: UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
Date: 2003
Pages: 163
Adviser: Hillesheim, James
Source: DAI-A 64/09, p. 3231, Mar 2004
Subject: EDUCATION, PHILOSOPHY OF (0998); EDUCATION, READING (0535); PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to focus on the phenomenological aspects of the work of Walter Ong. Ong's theories about language and culture are often described as being phenomenological in nature. However, to date no work exists that compares Ong's ideas to the fundamental phenomenological tenets of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. This work provides precisely that type of comparison. It proceeds in its treatment of phenomenology, both Husserlian and Ongian, by bringing to bear the concept of digital text, specifically the appearance of the digital word. Thus, this work connects three separate areas: Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, Walter Ong's ideas regarding the phenomenology of language, and the technology of the digital word as it exists in the contemporary classroom. By connecting these three subjects, this dissertation endeavors to provide educators with a theoretical basis whereby they might be able to think critically about language as it exists in different modes.
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Title: The value of privacy in a deliberative democracy
Pub No: 3095949
Author: Sullivan, Thomas James, Jr.
Degree: PhD
School: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Date: 2003
Pages: 269
Adviser: Freeman, Samuel
Source: DAI-A 64/06, p. 2117, Dec 2003
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615)
Abstract: This dissertation explores the function and value of privacy within the political ideal of a deliberative democracy. The motivating insight of the dissertation is that the right to privacy— decisional, informational, and physical—is among the rights that promote and maintain the equal standing of citizens within the political ideal of a deliberative democracy. By rooting an analysis of the value of privacy within the political ideal of a deliberative democracy, the dissertation proceeds from a different starting point than conventional discussions of privacy's value. The conventional view holds that privacy is a right that is valuable to individuals. While this dissertation does not reject the insight that privacy has value for individuals, the dissertation explores the argument that privacy is among the rights that are necessary for individuals to achieve equal standing among other citizens in the political community of the deliberative ideal. The dissertation examines many of our privacy practices to determine whether they are consistent with the role of privacy under the deliberative ideal. The dissertation focuses especially closely on the legal practices in the United States that directly or indirectly bear on the right to privacy. Many of these practices lack a consistent justification or rationale. Accepting the political ideal of a deliberative democracy, and equipped with an understanding that the function and value of privacy is to promote and enhance equal standing, we have the resources to justify consistently our legal practices. At the least, the theory developed here, by focusing on the value that privacy has for a particular (deliberative) understanding of political community, provides a starting point for more consistent reflection on the point of our privacy practices. Finally, this discussion of the value of privacy is of added importance in light of the increasing threats to privacy posed by advances in technology and responses to the tragic events of September 11, 2001.
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Title: Political judgement in a technological age
Pub No: NQ79465
Author: Tabachnick, David Edward
Degree: PhD
School: CARLETON UNIVERSITY (CANADA)
Date: 2003
Pages: 279
Adviser: Darby, Tom
ISBN: 0-612-79465-2
Source: DAI-A 64/05, p. 1836, Nov 2003
Subject: POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: In this thesis, I examine the relationship between politics and technology, with an eye to exposing the weaknesses in both the philosophy of technology and the philosophical revival of phronesis. Part one considers the foundations of the relationship. First, through an exegetical analysis of ancient Greek texts from Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, I show that techne or technical knowledge and phronesis or political judgement are basic elements of the <italic>polis</italic>. This analysis makes clear that only in a <italic> polis</italic> under a leadership practicing good political judgement are human beings able to understand what products they need to live full and happy lives. Second, I show how the modern political thought of Machiavelli and especially Hobbes discredits and replaces the role of political judgement. Third, I consider Heidegger's conclusion that phronesis was the way to an authentic existence for the ancient Greeks and that we are unable to follow the same path because technology now enframes the planet and everything on it. Part two reviews different responses to Heidegger, concerns about the dehumanizing influence of technology and the revival of phronesis. Chapter four focuses on the debate in the philosophy of technology between essentialism and constructivism. The essentialists argue that politics cannot guide technology because it is itself a product of technology. The constructivists argue that technology is a product of the reigning establishment and the only way to guide it toward egalitarian ends is through revolutionary or activist efforts. I offer a third way: rather than understanding politics as entirely the product of technology or technology entirely the product of politics, the essence of politics and technology are intertwined. In turn, rather than abandoning the Western tradition, it may be possible to recover or revive its lost or forgotten elements—namely, phronesis. But, I also show the problems with reviving phronesis in a liberal democratic context. Finally, I explain why and how we should practice a political judgement that guides technology to good ends and ensures that it contributes properly to human flourishing.
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Title: What are humans for? Essays in cyborg culture
Pub No: 3053962
Author: Arike, Ando
Degree: PhD
School: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT ALBANY
Date: 2002
Pages: 212
Adviser: Byrd, Don
ISBN: 0-493-68426-3
Source: DAI-A 63/05, p. 1809, Nov 2002
Subject: LANGUAGE, GENERAL (0679); PHILOSOPHY (0422); MASS
COMMUNICATIONS (0708)
Abstract: If in every era, certain urgent questions set the agenda for thought and the arts, the impending questions today might be posed as follows: (1) What are humans for? (2) What are machines for? (3) How shall we distinguish their differing “purposes” or “uses”—assuming we must—as humans and machines grow increasingly intertwined? With the advent of a First World cyborg culture which is increasingly integrating humans and machines in the articulation of its life-ways and ethos, many of the social, political, and pedagogical institutions structuring industrialized societies are becoming obsolescent. The humanities, which have long prevailed as a sort of artistic-philosophic metonym for the Western cultural tradition, have felt this acutely, as the social value of their disciplinary objects has been radically transformed under an ascendant regime of applied technoscience and electronic mass media. What shall be the role of the humanist in a culture gearing up for posthuman, postbiological development? The four essays collected under the title “What are Humans For?” are each inquiries into various facets of the crisis of the humanities in a cyborg, posthuman world. United by the conviction that, as Gregory Bateson insisted, “we are our own best metaphor,” and that the qualities we most prize in our humanness are derived from and dependent upon our embodiment in a mortal coil of flesh-and-blood, my work explores the implications of our growing alienation from these bodily sources of value and meaning. The estrangement Marx describes as the situation of the industrial worker is now a generalized condition—human self-replacement has revealed itself as the teleology of modern technology. It is beginning to become clear that as technologies of thought, the disciplines of the humanities have long functioned as silent partners in this cultural strategy, a partnership that is made self- apparent in structuralism and its aftermath, where Western rationalism reaches its reductio ad absurdum. If we are to redefine the humanistic project so we may respond more vitally to the thanatological trajectory of our civilization, a more ecological perspective on the human accident—and all the other accidents inhabiting this planet—must ultimately prevail.
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Title: The ethical implications of telemedicine and the Internet
for home healthcare
Pub No: 3062296
Author: Bauer, Keith Alan
Degree: PhD
School: THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE
Date: 2002
Pages: 244
Adviser: Graber, Glenn
ISBN: 0-493-78219-2
Source: DAI-A 63/08, p. 2891, Feb 2003
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); INFORMATION SCIENCE (0723)
Abstract: Information and communication technologies, such as the Internet, are transforming our business, education, and leisure practices. The healthcare industry is no exception to this trend and the burgeoning field of home- based telemedicine is evidence of this. As with many technological innovations in healthcare, assessments of home-based telemedicine and correlative policies are being driven by economic and technological criteria that emphasize cost reduction and technologic efficiency. These are important considerations, but these assessments neither identify the ethical values involved in home- based telemedicine nor address its possible ethical implications. Since the economic and technologic viability of home-based telemedicine is not identical with its ethical appropriateness and justification, this is a serious oversight. Hence, the use of telemedicine and the Internet in home healthcare invite a discussion about their ethical implications for the traditional goals and moral ideals of healthcare practice. The purpose of this study is to argue that the ethical implications of telemedicine and the Internet for home healthcare should be better understood and incorporated into future home-based telemedicine research and policy development. To this end, this study reviews the home- based telemedicine literature and examines the normative connections between home-based telemedicine and (1) provider-patient relationships, (2) healthcare privacy and confidentiality, (3) distributive and family justice, and (4) informed consent. This study concludes that information and communication technologies present both possible harms and benefits for home healthcare recipients and providers, but that on balance the benefits are more likely to outweigh the harms. However, because the exact benefits and harms of home-based telemedicine are unknown at this time, additional empirical research and outcome studies are needed. Finally, as part of a general technology assessment of home-based telemedicine, future research should include an ethical evaluation of all information and communication technologies that will be employed. If this is not done, home-based telemedicine policies will be inadequately informed and many of the possible harms of home-based telemedicine that could be prevented will not be prevented.
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Title: Television time and space: A social history of the
present
Pub No: 3056987
Author: Celebrezze, Catherine E.
Degree: PhD
School: NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH
Date: 2002
Pages: 216
Adviser: Carpignano, Paolo
ISBN: 0-493-72368-4
Source: DAI-A 63/06, p. 2034, Dec 2002
Subject: MASS COMMUNICATIONS (0708); SOCIOLOGY, THEORY AND METHODS
(0344); PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: This dissertation is an attempt to develop an interdisciplinary model for investigating the history of technology using philosophically-informed, sociological methods. Its central hypothesis is that television is—a multiplicity of particular conceptualizations of time and space—‘scannable space’ and ‘relay-instantaneous time’—arising from historical intersections of culture and science occurring prior to 1955. Using Michel Foucault's historical methods, such as archeology and genealogy, along with Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of difference and his concepts of time-image and movement-image, this dissertation explores the historical emergence of television as a political physics and cultural place. My dissertation proceeds by dislodging the history of television technology from strictly progressivist and materialist narratives, tracing instead the invention of television time and space to a 1843 method of telegraphic transmission utilizing the presentational, rather than the representational, principle of electricity. The dissertation then examines the political reasons for presentational electricity's initial non-necessity and the events such as the <italic>Titanic </italic> tragedy and World War I's submarine warfare, that transformed scannable space and relay-instantaneous time into ideological necessities. Next, the dissertation turns to the non-scientific and cultural determinations, such as the 1919 formation of the RCA and the codification of radio between 1922 and 1932, that imbued television time and space with scientific status and organized presentational electricity into a scientific domain. Rather than a strict adherence to the scientific method, the dissertation finds the legal inscriptions arising from the Farnsworth/Zworykin patent battle during the 1930s and long-standing industry conflicts over authority and discourse responsible for television's technological definition and transmission standard. Lastly the dissertation investigates how television's political physics emerged as cultural place for watchers. Although initially experienced through the predictable temporal lens of movement-images, specific historical events, like the coverage of the Kathy Fiscus tragedy, the Kefauver hearings and the Army-McCarthy hearings, introduced time-images to television watching. With their co-presence between ‘event-happening’ and ‘event watching’ these events and their corresponding time-images granted television watching partial legitimacy as a cultural place. In all, this dissertation and the history it excavates presents television time and space as a long standing critique of representation and identity as universal tropes of experience.
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Title: Film and the aesthetic construction of self/sex/gender
Pub No: 3040308
Author: Dahnke, Michael David
Degree: PhD
School: TEMPLE UNIVERSITY
Date: 2002
Pages: 307
Adviser: Dyke, Charles
ISBN: 0-493-53595-0
Source: DAI-A 63/01, p. 212, Jul 2002
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); CINEMA (0900)
Abstract: In the twentieth century film became a complex, powerful, pervasive and influential form of art and entertainment. Its unique, though not completely unfamiliar properties, allowed it to spread quickly around the world. Because of this film scholarship arose early and has had a rich, prolific history. The philosophical treatment of film, however, (even from a narrowly aesthetic point of view) has been rare, sparse and fairly recent. But there is much a philosophical perspective can contribute to the scholarly study of film. In this case, I wish to examine film as an aesthetic phenomenon and its relation to ethics—specifically the ethical formation of self, sex and gender. Part of film's aesthetic uniqueness is the many boundaries it crosses. For one, it is both art and technology. Secondly, while superficially objective in character, it contains a powerful subjective aspect as well. Thirdly, it has been a powerful presence across many tiers of society. Fourthly, in conceptual and historical terms film straddles the modern and the postmodern. These areas of boundary crossing make it an especially fertile ground for philosophical study. Specifically, in terms of “ethics,” my project is a generally “postmodern” one. The ethical models I follow are those from Emmanuel Levinas and Michel Foucault. Levinas provides a particularly “normative” character to postmodern ethics, whereas in Foucault, one finds a probing, aesthetic search for a created self as a form of ethics, an aesthetics of existence. What is of utmost importance for each is the confrontation with the Other. I, then, reinforce this Foucaultian approach with Judith Butler's Foucaultian study of the constructedness of gender and sex. What I find is that the ontology of film reflects and reinforces these postmodern ideas of ethics, aesthetics, gender and sex. The pervasive, imagistic influence of film constructs individual selves and can aid the “re-construction” of selves. Through film one finds the evanescence of ontic being, the transience of the performative self, the constructedness of gender and sex, and the confrontation with the Other.
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Title: Assessment of the impacts of e-commerce technologies on
overall business processes: An analytic Delphi process
Pub No: 3086872
Author: Ewton, Stacey Erica
Degree: PhD
School: PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY
Date: 2002
Pages: 259
Adviser: Kocaoglu, Dundar
Source: DAI-B 64/04, p. 1884, Oct 2003
Subject: ENGINEERING, SYSTEM SCIENCE (0790); PHILOSOPHY (0422);
BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION, GENERAL (0310)
Abstract: The Internet has dramatically changed our lives and the way we do business. With the innovation of e-commerce companies can reach customers and sell products almost instantaneously. As an outcome, e-commerce has grown tremendously and the rapid changes taking place in information technology in conjunction with the dynamic nature of the market provide rich opportunities for research. This research assesses emerging e-commerce technologies and the impact of these technologies on overall business processes. The methodology utilized is an analytic Delphi study where experts assessed the adoption of e-commerce technologies and the impacts of these technologies on overall business processes. Delphi offered a mechanism to make these assessments via a panel of experts and was the chosen methodology because the Internet is a relatively new technology and thus, sufficient historical data were not available to effectively utilize other traditional forecasting methodologies. Once the initial e-commerce technologies were identified via traditional Delphi, the Analytic Hierarchy Process was used to quantify experts' judgments. The research methodology required a team of twelve e- commerce experts to respond to three sets of research instruments. The experts for this study were chosen based on their: (1) knowledge of emerging technologies, (2) existing usage of e-commerce, (3) development of e-commerce technologies, and (4) understanding of existing business processes across functional groups. The results of the research were that experts identified seven major e-commerce technologies that are currently in use and will continue to be in use in their forecasting time horizon of two years: (1) Email, (2) ECRM Tools, (3) E-Teleconferencing, (4) B2C Tools, (5) B2B Tools, (6) M-Commerce, and (7) Streaming Video. Experts also identified eight major business change agents based on the adoption of these e-commerce technologies: (1) Improved Communication, (2) Improved Product Development, (3) Increased Overall Efficiency, (4) Decreased Face-to-Face Interaction, (5) Increased 240 Work, (6) Decreased Overall Costs, (7) Decreased Inventory, and (8) Increased Telecommuting. The experts identified email as the most significant technology to impact overall business processes followed by ECRM tools. According to the panel, the major areas through which these technologies impacted overall business processes were improved communication and product development.
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Title: Reproductive technologies confront traditional ethics:
The capacity of Richard A. McCormick's reformulated
natural law ethic to meet the challenge
Pub No: 3048389
Author: Hill, T. Patrick
Degree: PhD
School: THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Date: 2002
Pages: 255
Adviser: Browning, Don S.
ISBN: 0-493-62736-7
Source: DAI-A 63/04, p. 1380, Oct 2002
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: Given modern technology's penetration of human behavior, it is reasonable to consider what this might mean ethically in the case of emerging technologies being used in association with human reproduction. The nature and reach of these technologies are unprecedented and can legitimately be said to pose serious challenges to traditional ethical assessments of the human good. In addressing these challenges, Richard A. McCormick, a moral theologian and bio-ethicist, has deployed a reformulated natural law ethic that derives from formal rather than material norms and expresses itself, in particular, in terms of an evolving theological tradition, at the center of which is the whole person morally engaged in an unfolding world by means of proportionate reason. While McCormick acknowledges the impressive achievements of modern technology, he asserts that technological advance is more frequently than not ambiguous. Despite this, he also insists that God has committed the natural order to humans as intelligent and creative persons, thus enabling human potentialities by means of their innovative technologies. As McCormick views the unfolding of technology in the arena of human reproduction, he insists on focusing on future possibilities and directions in the aggregate and in the light of our overall convictions about what it means to be human. Otherwise there is the danger of identifying what is humanly and morally good with what is technologically possible. While this agenda goes some way to addressing the ethical challenges in emerging human reproductive technologies, it is hampered in McCormick's case by an incomplete understanding of the nature of technology and the relationship between modern science and modern technology (techno-science). Adding to this limitation is the absence of an analytic method for relating various aspects of his ethical and scientific thought. Drawing upon the thinking of philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Jose Ortega y Gasset, theologian/scientists like Arthur Peacocke, and scientists like Jacques Monod, this study shows how a “thicker” understanding of technology and a method of assessing the moral basis of modern science from within can enrich McCormick's natural law ethic and avoid the possibility of undue theological rigidity to which it is otherwise liable.
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20 Title: The digital story: Binary code as a cultural text
Pub No: MQ75391
Author: Kien, Grant
Degree: MA
School: YORK UNIVERSITY (CANADA)
Date: 2002
Pages: 137
Adviser: O'Neill, John
ISBN: 0-612-75391-3
Source: MAI 41/04, p. 879, Aug 2003
Subject: MASS COMMUNICATIONS (0708); COMPUTER SCIENCE (0984);
PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: This thesis analyses digital code for both its literal technical significance and its connoted philosophical meaning, arguing that the rhetoric built into the code is intended by its inventors to bring about some specific changes in the way we know and understand the universe. Rather than a popular notion of Cartesian dualism, digital code conveys the monistic philosophy of Leibniz. Computer circuitry reflects this logic, creating a digital text based on movement and instability rather than the definitiveness of text that Western society has been accustomed to. This technology was intended to serve humanity as a reasoning tool. As an android, it is meant in some ways to replace the human mind. However, where humans find meaning through analog experiences, computers and the code they operate with are digital, meaning they cannot approach what we might define as actual thought. Based on the prototype of the human brain, even the most sophisticated digital technologies can at best mimic human activities. Above all, the authors of the programs (or the rules the machines must follow) are humans. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
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Title: The sound of meaning: Theories of voice in twentieth-
century thought and performance
Pub No: 3049215
Author: Kimbrough, Andrew McComb
Degree: PhD
School: LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY AND AGRICULTURAL & MECHANICAL
COLLEGE
Date: 2002
Pages: 315
Adviser: Wade, Leslie
ISBN: 0-493-63591-2
Source: DAI-A 63/04, p. 1189, Oct 2002
Subject: THEATER (0465); SPEECH COMMUNICATION (0459); PHILOSOPHY
(0422)
Abstract: This dissertation addresses the problem of the denigration of the voice in poststructural theory and contemporary performance criticism. The problem has antecedents in twentieth-century language philosophy. Saussure defines language as a compendium of arbitrary words recognized according to the degrees of phonetic difference between them. Since for Saussure the arbitrary words of language also designate arbitrary concepts, he concludes that the sounds of words cannot be thought constituent of their sense. After Saussure, structuralism dislodges the voice from its privileged position in the phonologic discourses of Western thought. Poststructuralism views meaning as a product of socially constructed language systems, and it argues that neither the voice nor the speaking subject can be afforded linguistic agency. A strain of contemporary theatre criticism, premised upon poststructuralism, interprets the postmodern stage as a site in which the voice, language, and the speaking subject come under critique and suspicion, stripped of agency and communicative efficacy. This dissertation investigates twentieth-century theories of voice, language, and speech in order to define the status of the voice in various disciplines ranging from paleoanthropology, phenomenology, structuralism, speech act theory, theatre semiotics, the philosophies of technology, and media studies. By comparing the status of the voice in other disciplines, this dissertation argues for a recuperation of the voice against the denigration evident in poststructural theory and performance criticism. Relying on Heidegger's phenomenal view of language, the autonomy of the voice in speech act theory and theatre semiotics, the centrality of vocalized language in human evolution, and the resurgence of orality in electronic media, this dissertation argues that the voice continues to act as an important and primary signifying agent on the postmodern stage, regardless of poststructural arguments to the contrary.
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Title: On the human park (Peter Sloterdijk)
Pub No: MQ68380
Author: Mewes, Frank
Degree: MA
School: CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY (CANADA)
Date: 2002
Pages: 213
ISBN: 0-612-68380-X
Source: MAI 40/06, p. 1381, Dec 2002
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: This paper is inspired by Peter Sloterdijk's book <italic>Regeln für den Menschenpark</italic> (‘Regulations for the Human Park’) which is available as appended, original translation. It seeks to elucidate Sloterdijk's work, assess the theses he posits therein, and sets forth an overview on crucial developments pertaining to human society, i.e., the human park. The developments focussed on are relevant to the humanistic concern addressed by Sloterdijk and comprise General Systems Theory, human genetic engineering, bio- information society, and humanism. The work is supplemented by extensive, personal commentaries as well as a sample of voices urging for prudence in matters of scientific-technological enterprising. The concern lies with the question how and which morality is still regulative of human behaviour in a time when literary humanism as a formative, moral force has been superseded by the permissive, electronic media and their uninhibiting forces. The question that arises is: ‘If humanism is no longer a reliable agent of human domestication, what tames human beings?’ Sloterdijk suggests a harking back to the wisdom of old in order to find clues to the resolution of this domestic predicament of today and implicitly asks whether human genetic engineering could become a domesticating force (an anthropo-technology) that is better captured by a regulative codex lest it might lead to political abuse. While it offers some critical and perhaps provocative reflections on the issues in question, the paper is chiefly suggestive and expository and marked by ambivalence.
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Title: An analysis of the relationship between modern technology and the separation of the arts and sciences
Pub No: 3065377
Author: Post, Jeffrey Robert
Degree: PhD
School: SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY AT CARBONDALE
Date: 2002
Pages: 183
Adviser: Stikkers, Ken
ISBN: 0-493-84082-6
Source: DAI-A 63/09, p. 3225, Mar 2003
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: This dissertation is a reaction to the historical shift toward production that has influenced the separation of the arts and sciences and led to a perversion of ethical values. Rather than allow the development of technology to be determined by “market values,” which has resulted in a number of social difficulties, I believe it more fruitful to follow the ancient Greeks and allow contemplative thought to play this role. In the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, contemplative thought was the route to the virtues, which were to guide all human activities. Modern technology, however, is primarily the result of the calculative thinking that dominates the productionist metaphysics which rules our time, as Heidegger maintained. In breaking down this historical perversion, I begin with the Greeks who had sustained an admirable balance between the arts and sciences, or theory and practice, in their development and use of <italic>techne</italic>. The medieval period saw a shift toward the arts that focused on aesthetical appreciation and religious celebration. Although moral values were preserved, little progress occurred in terms of productivity. The industrial period, however, began with a complete shift toward the sciences and neglect of the arts. This shift resulted in a perversion of values and a number of social difficulties such as the rise of the value of economic gain, economic disparities in society, a loss of focus from human life, and environmental depletion. To alleviate the rupture between the arts and sciences, I recommend recovering the Aristotelian teleology and utilizing contemplative thought in the future of technological development. Other additional steps discussed are Albert Borgmann's suggestion of returning to traditional “focal practices” and “focal concerns,” the bringing together of the humanists with the engineers, in the manner Carl Mitcham prescribes, and the implementation of the highest moral scrutiny and suspicion toward modern technological development.
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Title: Networking, knowledge and power: The control subject from Deleuze and Guattari through the Information Age (Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari)
Pub No: 3078746
Author: Venner, Chris
Degree: PhD
School: DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY
Date: 2002
Pages: 272
Adviser: Wurzer, Wilhelm
ISBN: 0-493-99852-7
Source: DAI-A 64/01, p. 174, Jul 2003
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: <italic>Networking, Knowledge and Power: The Control
Subject from Deleuze and Guattari through the Information Age</italic> explores the concept of control subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari's theory of both power and resistance within societies that use information technology to organize themselves and their subjects. Each of the chapters offers a case study of one of the components that comprises the overall concept of control subjectivity. Chapter One examines the relationship between normalizing language and political authority in <italic> The Logic of Sense</italic>, treating this text as a first step towards a theory of control that builds on the works of Serge Leclaire and Jacques Lacan. Chapter Two deals with the relationship between scientific ideology and subjective repression in <italic>Anti- Oedipus</italic>, placing this work in a tradition of reflection on the repressive character of scientific ideology that includes Gabriel Tarde and Roger Caillois. Chapter Three explores the aesthetic dimension of resistance to control in <italic>Cinema 2: The Time- Image</italic>, treating it as a contribution to a debate on aesthetic resistance begun by Martin Heidegger and Michel de Certeau. Chapter Four investigates the discussion of information technology and subjective identity in <italic>The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque </italic>, reading it as a response to both Martin Heidegger and Michel Serres. Finally, the Conclusion offers further suggestions for applying Deleuze and Guattari's concept of control subjectivity to twentieth century philosophical debates.
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Title: The analog-digital distinction and the flow of information
Pub No: 3002586
Author: Bohan Broderick, Paul Jeremiah
Degree: PhD
School: BOSTON UNIVERSITY
Date: 2001
Pages: 143
Adviser: Hintikka, Jaakko
ISBN: 0-493-11295-2
Source: DAI-A 62/01, p. 195, Jul 2001
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: The analog vs. digital distinction is frequently used in computer science, computer technology and elsewhere. However, its precise nature is more elusive than might be expected. This dissertation defines a set of problems hidden within the conventions of ordinary and technical language, and suggests solutions to them. Chapter 1 examines ordinary language uses of the analog- digital distinction. Chapter 2 considers its use in technical contexts. There are two main ways of making the distinction that appear in both of the opening chapters. The most common is to take it to be equivalent to that between the continuous and the discrete. These two terms are typically used to differentiate either a physical medium, such as the continuous grooves of a vinyl record or the discrete bubbles in a compact disc, or some form of notation by means of which a phenomenon is represented. Systems of discrete characters, such as alphabets, provide means of digital representation, whereas diagrams and figures operate as means of analog representation. It has frequently been argued that an analog representation relies on some form of natural resemblance to what is being represented. As the word suggests, analogy, i.e., a similarity of structure, is the prime candidate to explain this kind of resemblance. In contrast, digital representation requires a conventional means of correlation, which in turn requires a translation manual, to establish the relationship between the notation and what is represented. Chapter 3 shows that the various distinctions considered in the previous chapters have consequences for arguments in the philosophy of mind. Chapter 4 presents a literature survey. Chapter 5 extends the picture developed in the opening chapters beyond the philosophy of mind. The importance of this dissertation lies in its response to a question basic to both philosophy of mind and philosophy of language: how do representations work? Traditional theories of representation have tended to be functional in their descriptions of representations. By contrast, recent developments in cognitive science have offered structural descriptions. Clearly, these two modes parallel the analog-digital distinction. This dissertation, in clarifying the distinction, provides important clues for bridging these two contemporary philosophical movements.
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Title: Making contact: A metaphysics for the millennium
Pub No: 9995477
Author: Polsky, Allyson D.
Degree: PhD
School: THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
Date: 2001
Pages: 199
Adviser: Alcorn, Marshall W. Jr.
ISBN: 0-493-02961-3 Source: DAI-A 61/11, p. 4367, May 2001
Subject: LANGUAGE, MODERN (0291); PHILOSOPHY (0422); ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL (0326)
Abstract: Organ transplantation, virtual reality, video gaming, reproductive technologies, and genetic engineering all confound the logic of limits and highlight an internal otherness that is always present within every subject. In this study, I use critical tools provided by continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and feminist theory to operate on various cultural texts about biomedicine and gaming technology. I explore the positive potential created by the rupture of the cogito and to discover new and even previously unimagined forms of inter- subjectivity that emerge in light of the ongoing corporeal reorganization of the body. I contend that ontological conditions have changed in a post-human episteme where the opposition between conventional barriers like mind/body, real/synthetic, and self/other no longer govern the metaphysical rules of identity. In the new millennium, I demonstrate ways in which we are vulnerable to biomedical and technological mutations that destabilize long-held concepts of selfhood and continually redefine what is, and is not, a human at any given moment. I argue that it is this redefinition of the human where the future stakes of multiculturalism are at their greatest. While the recognition and celebration of one's own differences can enable greater tolerance of the differences of others, rejection and refusal of difference can have disastrous ethical consequences. By casting the concept of difference as the consequence of the intricate workings of chance, I develop an ethical framework that resists humanism's totalizing tendencies while still maintaining political commitments to agency. Situating my study within the emerging field of cultural studies of biomedicine, I demonstrate how critical pedagogies can enable tolerance of ambiguity and paradox, identify and utilize tools that promote critical thinking and insight, and promote awareness of the ethical dimensions of contemporary life. Documenting the ongoing development of my pedagogical practice, I describe a series of courses and seminars I have designed and taught concerned with how bioscience and popular culture mutually inform one another and the psychological ramifications and ethical implications that emerge from this relationship.
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Title: Differential geometric performance and the technologies of writing
Pub No: 3000102
Author: Sha, Xin Wei
Degree: PhD
School: STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Date: 2001
Pages: 295
Adviser: Mazzeo, Rafe
ISBN: 0-493-08968-3
Source: DAI-B 62/01, p. 283, Jul 2001
Subject: MATHEMATICS (0405); PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: Why, after thirty years of remarkable progress in computer graphics and simulation, is it easier for two differential geometers to work together on a chalkboard rather than a computer keyboard? What sort of creative geometric activity can be supported in a writing technology that spans freehand sketching, manipulating diagrams, text, symbolic computation and simulation? How do we Riemannian manifold by manipulating finite material marks using chalk, pencil or computer? Viewing mathematics as performance practice rather than propositional knowledge, I study how experts and apprentice geometers acquire intuitions and computer. This investigation promises both concrete as well as conceptual results. Concretely, this study provides a design lab for future technologies of writing that hybridize sketching and kinetics as well as alphanumeric language. Conceptually, this investigation aims to radically enlarge our notion of writing to the domain of symbolic gesture shaping the infinite and the continuous—a domain that has been legislated out of conventional digital representation. The critical part of this project is informed by insights from literary and performance studies as well as the mathematical sciences. Focusing on differential geometry through the lens of practice, I examine a-linguistic semiotic usage, and through the lens of phenomenological investigation, I examine how differential geometers work with continuous, smooth or infinite structures and processes, entities which have posed severe challenges to conventional philosophy of mathematics and to the symbolic, social and computer technologies designed along logicist and linguistic principles. This critical and historical investigation of a- linguistic uses of writing and associated computational technology can be understood as the first step in a larger research project with implications for the evaluation and design of technologies feeding into not only the material practices of mathematics but of other modes of cultural practice predicated on gesture and performance as well.
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Title: Taking writing on-line: The intersections of rhetoric, technology, and community in the composition classroom
Pub No: 9986526
Author: Archibald, William Charles
Degree: PhD
School: THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH DAKOTA
Date: 2000
Pages: 258 Adviser: Dixon, Kathleen
ISBN: 0-599-92296-6
Source: DAI-A 61/09, p. 3543, Mar 2001
Subject: LANGUAGE, RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION (0681); EDUCATION, TECHNOLOGY (0710); PHILOSOPHY (0422); EDUCATION, LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE (0279)
Abstract: Discourse constructs individuals in community and by analogy constructs students (and teachers) in the networked-writing classroom. This work of constructing subjects moves us alternately toward the group (centripetal) and away toward becoming more individual (centrifugal). In order to understand this coordinate but opposite movement within on-line communication, the dissertation brings together the two strands (within the social) of technology and rhetoric. This rhetoric of technology is defined as the invention, arrangement, and delivery of <italic>computer-mediated</italic> language for the purpose of evoking action upon the part of an audience. The dissertation presents—among others—the discourse theory of Patricia Bizzell, Joseph Harris's ideas concerning the usefulness of the term “community,” the “political unconscious” of Fredric Jameson, Jacques Derrida's notion of <italic> différance</italic> and dissemination, and Hawisher and Selfe's “rhetoric of technology.” It argues that these ideas and those of Susan Wells, especially her “rhetoric of intersubjectivity,” allow us to examine technology within community and see how it reduces multiple discourses while it creates new solidarities between individuals. The dissertation examines the uses on-line language may be put to in networked classroom communities. It recognizes this language as highly volatile and susceptible to manipulation. It presents two case studies of networked classroom practice that profile students' and teachers' work in the new milieu of the on-line writing classroom. The first case study examines the classroom listserv and presents an analysis of its discourse that acts to motivate both the individual and the group. This technology must, however, be let to build community within the forms of the face-to-face classroom. The second case study examines the laptop classroom where students combine resistance and creativity to manage the oppression of the technology's instrumentalism. In a more personal vein, the author reflects on Freud's dream analysis, the cyborg, and one intransigent student that highlight his own uses of technology to discover the work of the network-writing teacher. The challenge to teaching in these on-line virtual environments is to make them more richly inhabited and not to take them for granted or let them be subsumed into the ubiquitous rhetoric of corporate e-commerce.
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Title: Political legitimacy and self-loss (Thomas Hobbes, Judith Butler)
Pub No: 9995336
Author: Axelrod, Paul Scott
Degree: PhD
School: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
Date: 2000
Pages: 250
Adviser: Di Stefano, Christine
ISBN: 0-493-03868-X
Source: DAI-A 61/11, p. 4526, May 2001
Subject: POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: This dissertation challenges liberal theories of political legitimacy by questioning the foundational status of autonomy in the spheres of consent and political obligation. I propose that we conceptualize political legitimacy as a condition of the mind and body in rapture, not as the accordance of power with law or principle. Nevertheless, one of my main contentions is that experiences such as assimilation, imitation, rapture, or what I call “self-loss,” are not categorically opposed to liberal conceptions of autonomy. I see such experiences as part of a continuous movement between self-loss and self-assertion that is constitutive of human identity. In the first chapter, I propose incorporating experiences of self-loss into the theorization of political legitimacy by questioning the pertinence of modern rationalist and social-scientific accounts of legitimacy to the perspective of those for whom power is legitimate. I then proceed with three chapters in which I elucidate the affinities between ancient, early modern and contemporary conceptualizations of identity and power. My main interlocutors in this respect are Plato, Thomas Hobbes, and Judith Butler. With my comments on these authors, I advance the argument that the experience of power can become both meaningful and conducive to self-assertion even without presupposing the autonomy or consent of political actors. Through further readings of Plato, as well as of Herodotus and Xenophon, I explore philosophical, fictional and historical depictions of <italic>techne</italic>, which I interpret as the cunning exercise of self-assertion under the guise of self-effacement. In the final chapter, I posit the idea of assertive self-loss against contemporary fears about the effects of technology on political autonomy. I argue that technology presents less of a threat to autonomy and political legitimacy as much as a way of being human that is capable of unexpected ways of asserting itself in the very course of becoming lost in the worlds of artifacts that embrace it.
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Title: Learning without education: Ivan Illich and the sanctuary of real human presence (Ivan Illich)
Pub No: NQ59936 Author: Bogert-O'Brien, Daniel Henry
Degree: PhD
School: UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA (CANADA)
Date: 2000
Pages: 285
Adviser: Smith, D.; Walker, F.
ISBN: 0-612-59936-1
Source: DAI-A 62/05, p. 1769, Nov 2001
Subject: EDUCATION, PHILOSOPHY OF (0998); PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: Philosophical discourse on learning, or on any other human activity, may give but a generic human who is a no- body. But this idea of a human is only ever a part truth, for every thought is a kind of exposition of a particular human face. In the case of a philosopher like Ivan Illich the particular human face is at the critical centre of the work. Illich questions the validity and benign heuristic value of theoretical, technical, or institutional devices for the focal practice of human learning. It could be said that his position is his attempt to be obedient to “presence” prefaced by the word “real.” Illich is ultimately proposing that the confusion and contradictions of contemporary life are the expression of a misplaced faith in rationalism, technology, and an accompanying disfiguring of human nature. Simply stated, Illich does not believe in educational, technological, and institutional solutions or the capacity of calculative rationality to bring fitting and human learning. Illich argues that education and the technological character of contemporary life mask, pervert, and manipulate the somatic gravity of human encounters. Illich attends to the dilemmas posed by modernity because he wishes to remain loyal to an image of humanity as a somatic presence that is not defined by either modern atomistic individualism or systematic collectivism. He seeks a spiritual austerity that conserves traditions of dependence and communion in communities of locally and somatically felt conviviality. These local communities of friendship may take new forms, but they remain continuous with traditions that honour the wisdom of past practices over the novelty of any “postmodern” devices. To move beyond the despair Illich's critique may inspire, this thesis sees hope for learning in sanctuaries for real human presence. In or outside educational institutions, sanctuaries must be found or be founded that encourage learning built upon the virtues of friendship and in resistance to the values implicit in institutionalized and technically defined education Bianchi, Borgmann, Orr, Berry, and Vanier give some clues for the founding and finding of sanctuary. The image of sanctuary is a modest constructive proposal appreciative of Illich's foundational critique.
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Title: Abstraction: The relational thesis
Author: Drengenberg, Nicholas
Degree: PhD
School: UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES (AUSTRALIA)
Date: 2000
Source: DAI-A 62/01, p. 196, Jul 2001 S
ubject: PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: tools derived from the philosophy of authors such as Deleuze, Serres, Latour object is one of reflection or representativeness, it attempts to understand aspects of it that can be called virtual. This approach forces a reconsideration of the concept of time (and also space), so that the supplement derive from spatio-temporal procedures which, however, allow one to remain firmly within the sphere of the “everyday”, and do not force the recourse to other-worldy metaphysics. In this way it becomes possible to see of <italic>instruments</italic> of some kind) a shareable entity derived from those aspects of the source object that are virtual rather than actual, potential or processual rather than “real”; these “aspects” are often what we may call the <italic>qualitative</italic> attributes of objects, so that the distinction between quantity and quality is also in some ways subverted. The implications of this approach in areas as diverse as symbolism, social theory, information technology, and scientific theory are discussed. A fundamental conclusion of this work is that any common grounding between technique, and that concepts such as interdisciplinarity should focus most forcefully upon such practices, which precede any formulation of “ideas”
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Title: The destiny of freedom in technological-consumer culture (Albert Borgmann, Martin Heidegger)
Pub No: MQ60059 Author: Kennedy, Gregory
Degree: MA School: UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA (CANADA)
Date: 2000
Pages: 114
Adviser: Burch, Robert
ISBN: 0-612-60059-9
Source: MAI 40/01, p. 51, Feb 2002
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: This thesis raises the question of freedom and determinism within the context of modern technological society. More specifically, it examines the extent of individual freedom in the consumption of technologically produced commodities. Albert Borgmann's theory of the device provides the initial language and concepts necessary for establishing a determinative link between technology and consumer culture. Borgmann's theory is then situated in the larger ontological interpretation of history as expressed by Martin Heidegger. The disengaging aspects of the device are shown to be aggravating symptoms of the forgetfulness of Being. Borgmann's project for a reform of technology is criticized from the historical perspective, while Heidegger's notion of art as a cure to the danger of technology is elaborated. The question of freedom becomes the question of understanding the truth of technology.
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Title: Limbs of life: Literature of postmodern anthropomorphic technology and cosmology
Pub No: 9963513
Author: Kim, Ilgu
Degree: PhD
School: TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY
Date: 2000
Pages: 350
Adviser: Whitlark, James
ISBN: 0-599-67604-3 Source: DAI-A 61/03, p. 987, Sep 2000
Subject: LITERATURE, AMERICAN (0591); LITERATURE, MODERN (0298); PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: The postmodern's inevitable coexistence with machines changes humans into a machine-like processing entity while machines become more autonomous like humans. Especially focussing upon Artificial Intelligence, many postmodern writers deal with the newly emerging third space between human and nonhuman. This dissertation argues that as the cognitive base of human thoughts and languages, this paranormally blended space of quasi- objects (such as cyborgs) suggests the new insightful direction of paratactic postmodern culture, which in certain ways parallels with anthropomorphic mythologies. As the term “matrix” means “womb” in Greek, the metaverse in postmodern cyberpunk fiction is inherently related to creation myths. If “technology,” as McLuhan says, “extends creative powers by amputating the natural ones,” postmodern science fiction writers use anthropomorphic creation myths to reunite those dismembered limbs of the natural body, the human's instinctive transpersonal subconscious. Richard Powers's Helen and Neal Stephenson's avatars are mechanical anthropomorphic technologies (Mechs in McHale's terms) whose dilemmas are allegorically reflected in their parallels with the Gilgamesh and Galatea myths. Although homogeneity is seriously criticized through Pygmalion's incestuous relation with Galatea and Bob Rife's recovery of glossolalia via a computer virus, transcendental visions in mechanical anthropomorphic narratives are limited to a less satisfactory level. By contrast, Marge Piercy's Yod and Octavia Butler's Oankali, as the biological anthropomorphic hybrids (“biopunks” in McHale's terms) show the higher reality which is neither matter nor mind. Their parallel to creation myths, to the Gaia hypothesis and to Golem, like chaos theory, reveal that mind and matter are interdependent and correlated. While answering both “why” questions in science and “how” questions in literature, the entrapment and escapism (mostly in mechanical hybrids) as well as excitement and joy (mostly in machines of blood and flesh) of these anthropomorphic technologies are theoretically applied to some important topics in the postmodern literature of science such as the sublime, metamorphoses, information, chaos theory, allegory and linguistics. Finally, this dissertation examines the potential self-idolatry tendency in these “fractal” anthropomorphic hybrids where the finite is reflected as the small scale of the infinite. In the information-flowing society of masquerade, transcendental and sublime moments are rather safety illuminated by implosive personifications such as Octavia Butler's transcultural and persistent metaphor of the humble seed.
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Title: From instructional social computer simulation to Heidegger's aesthetics (Martin Heidegger)
Pub No: 9966058 Author: Saito, Ron Shiro
Degree: PhD
School: INDIANA UNIVERSITY
Date: 2000
Pages: 103
Adviser: Davies, Ivor K.
ISBN: 0-599-70683-X
Source: DAI-A 61/03, p. 956, Sep 2000
Subject: EDUCATION, TECHNOLOGY (0710); EDUCATION, ART (0273); EDUCATION, SOCIAL SCIENCES (0534); PHILOSOPHY (0422); EDUCATION, PHILOSOPHY OF (0998)
Abstract: Using Schon's conception of reflection-in-action as an organizing structure, the author examines instructional social computer simulation by designing and reflecting upon computer prototypes and linking this analysis to appropriate literature. The author begins his study by examining the theoretical antecedents of model and location simulations. However, eventually agreeing with Dilthey's critique that society cannot be represented via scientific, law-like generalizations, he decides that model/location simulation reflects the “standard view of science” approach to the representation of society. Drawing from the interpretivist tradition, the author continues his investigation by creating a computer prototype based on an different framework. Rather than using mathematical models as a foundation, this prototype uses “semantically dense” imagery and texts to represent culture. This aesthetic mode of representation enables viewers to generate a number of different interpretations of the subject matter. The author seeks to further refine this prototype using 3D technology. However, drawing from Merleau-Ponty's work, he decides that 3D is an inauthentic mode of representation because it assumes that vision is a primarily a “physical-optical” engagement in which the world “stands before” a viewer. The author eventually adopts Heidegger's ontological understanding of art not as representation, but as unconcealment. Thus, the author concludes that instructional social computer simulation can be viewed in three ways. The model simulation is a product of a scientific worldview that embodies the Cartesian desire to “make ourselves masters and possessors of nature.” The subjective representation discloses the world as the creation of an artist emphasizing the imaginative and creative power of the individual. An ontological position abandons simulation. In order to discriminate between the ontic and the ontological, the author describes two features of the ontological—anxiety and waiting—linking these features to Heidegger's work on anxiety and Bestand.
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Title: The acts of artifacts: Technology, philosophy, design (Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Don Ihde, Bruno Latour, Albert Borgmann) Author: Verbeek, Peter-Paul
Degree: Dr
School: UNIVERSITEIT TWENTE (THE NETHERLANDS)
Date: 2000
ISBN: 90-5352-630-7
Languange: DUTCH
Source: DAI-C 62/02, p. 174, Summer 2001
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); DESIGN AND DECORATIVE ARTS (0389)
Abstract: What role do artifacts play in our technological culture? Our society is flooded with devices: television sets, cars, microwave ovens, cellular phones. How are all these things affecting us? Classical philosophy of technology gave a very gloomy answer to this question: technology would alienate humans from themselves and from their world. The technological way of thinking would only allow people to approach reality as raw material, and the functionalist outfitting of society was thought to impede people's ability to exist as unique persons. A close analysis of Karl Jaspers' and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of technology, however, shows that this critique is not adequate anymore. They approached technology in a transcendentalist way, reducing devices to the conditions of their possibility. The resulting diagnosis of alienation does not reflect the actual condition of our technological culture. Against this classical transcendentalism, an approach is developed that does not reduce technological artifacts to their conditions, but tries to understand the role they concretely play in people's everyday lives. The ‘philosophy from things’, which is required for this, can be developed along (post) phenomenological lines. Things mediate the relationships between humans and their world. They actively co-shape how people can be present in their world (existentially) and how reality can be present for people (hermeneutically). In doing so, they invite specific actions and experiences, and discourage others. The analysis of this mediating role of technological artifacts is developed by critically discussing the work of Don Ihde on human-technology relationships, of Bruno Latour on humans and nonhumans, and of Albert Borgmann on technological devices and focal things. This ‘philosophy of technological artifacts’, finally, is applied to the context of industrial design. Within design, products are usually approached in terms of their functionality and their style. They should work, and fit the lifestyle of the people that are to buy them. These approaches, however, pay too little attention to technical mediation. Since artifacts influence people's everyday lives in many ways, designers should anticipate this influence in a responsible way.
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Title: Universe City or the risk of posthumanism
Pub No: 9995302
Author: Weinstone, Ann Sydney
Degree: PhD
School: STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Date: 2000
Pages: 238
Adviser: Schnapp, Jeffrey T.
ISBN: 0-493-03288-6
Source: DAI-A 61/11, p. 4382, May 2001
Subject: LITERATURE, MODERN (0298); PHILOSOPHY (0422); RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY OF (0322)
Abstract: Progressive posthumanism centers its thinking about ethics on the increase of capacitating differentiation. Deconstruction centralizes questions of indebtedness and responsibility. Each proceeds from concepts of difference and constitutes a critique of a humanist logic of elitism and exemption. I argue that in order to create the conditions for the emergence of a posthumanist, postdeconstructive ethics of both capacitation and responsibility, we must give up the demand that the inviolably or radically other do the work of ethics as such. Posthumanism's tethering of difference, and thus ethics, to human engagements with technology or the nonhuman has attenuated vocabularies for speaking of the relationship of a human self to a human other. I trace this problem as I see it precipitating in three of the sources for posthumanist thought: the work of Françisco Varela, Deleuze and Guattari, and Niklas Luhmann. I then engage with the thread of thinking about responsibility and indebtedness that runs from Levinas to Derrida and his interlocutors. Here as well, ethics must be guaranteed by what I argue is an untenable supposition of inviolable otherness. At significant points within posthumanist thought, Buddhism and Hinduism underwrite a celibate ethics of no contact. I suggest that more antinomian forms of Hindu Tantrism point both deconstruction and posthumanism toward a thinking of the self as a zone of undecidably possessed emanations. Instead of an ethics inaugurated by a differentiating cut or interruption, Tantrism suggests a syntax of vibration and stretching. As a minoritarian theory of “touchableness” as opposed to “untouchableness,” it posits a concept of otherness that can never be radical or inviolable. The “subject,” as an undecidable zone of relationality, becomes what I call an <italic>avatar body </italic>. This formulation has specific consequences for the question of what belongs to a self and demands an enlarged concept of responsibility while breaking the frame “individual.” Tantrism promotes the making of devotional gestures that sensitize “one” to the condition of always deriving from an elsewhere that is just as truly here. In the final chapter, I practice the ethical gestures I describe through a meditation on diaristic e-mail writing, friendship, and scholarship.
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Title: Vanishing aesthetics: Mediality and literature after Merleau-Ponty, Virilio, and McLuhan (Maurice Merleau- Ponty, Paul Virilio, Marshall McLuhan)
Pub No: 9930180
Author: Baldwin, Charles Alexander
Degree: PhD
School: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Date: 1999 Pages: 465
Adviser: Haverkamp, Anselm
ISBN: 0-599-30158-9
Source: DAI-A 60/05, p. 1554, Nov 1999
Subject: LITERATURE, AMERICAN (0591); PHILOSOPHY (0422); HISTORY OF SCIENCE (0585)
Abstract: The development of high technologies and media networks in the late Twentieth Century parallels the “de- aestheticization” of art objects. Walter Benjamin's influential argument for the “fading of aura” extends this critique to all objects, which are characterized by reproducibility and technical performance, rather than by the beautiful appearance and sense phenomena of traditional aesthetics. The technical object that results is one index of modernity: at stake in this end-state of aesthetic theory is a claim to read the immediacy of history. This dissertation adapts Hans Blumenberg's metaphorological approach to argue for a continuation of aesthetic theory in the re-evaluation of the technological object by theorists of mediation, focusing on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the aesthetics of disappearance of Paul Virilio, and the media analyses of Marshall McLuhan. These theorists problematize the appearance and performance of the technological object to demonstrate its immateriality and mediality. Media theory re-establishes the aesthetics of the technological object, leading to a renewed historicism. Media aesthetics discover the staging of history in technology. The second focus of this dissertation is the role of language in media theory, and, in particular, the role of metaphor as the explanation of mediation. Each media theorist develops a concept of metaphor, best exemplified in literary texts. This dissertation reads fiction by Ballard, Gibson, and Pynchon, poetry by Olson and Pound, and concept art by Flynt and Smithson, to situate literature as necessary to the theorization and use of technological systems. Media theory preserves a concept of the literary as a heuristic maintaining the open-ness of technical systems. Finally, in contrast to the simply teleology of a supposed “death” of literature under technical conditions, this dissertation re-configures the history and lines of influence between media technologies and textual strategies, using examples such as the MIT Media Lab, nanotechnology, and high tech accidents, to argue for complex theoretical borrowings and institutional exchanges.
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Title: Prometheus wired: The hope for democracy in the age of network technology
Pub No: NQ41008
Author: Barney, Darin David
Degree: PhD
School: UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO (CANADA)
Date: 1999
Pages: 377
Adviser: Andrew, Edward
ISBN: 0-612-41008-0
Source: DAI-A 60/09, p. 3504, Mar 2000
Subject: POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: Two claims have accompanied the emergence of digital computer networks as the definitive technology of late modernity. The first is that networks are the infrastructure of a democratic revolution that win fundamentally alter the terms of political life in any society where this technology presides. The second claim asserts that our existing and traditional reservoir of political thought offers few resources for thinking about and understanding this technology and the transformation it promises. In this dissertation, I reject the second claim in order to more fully investigate the first. I assert that the tradition of political thought provides us with considerable resources for specifying what is at stake in the politics of network technology. Drawing on a range of thinkers who have devoted attention to the relationship between technology and politics, I argue that claims regarding the inherently revolutionary and democratic character of digital networks are overstated. The dissertation begins with an examination of the claims being made about network technology, and situates these in the context of the history of technology. Chapter II constructs an approach to technology and politics by reviewing the contributions to the philosophy of technology made by Plato, Aristotle, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger and George Grant. Chapter III gives an account of the technical development of digital computers and networks. Following this, a series of chapters brings the philosophical approach elaborated in Chapter II to bear on various aspects of the politics of network technology. Chapters IV and V consider the political economy of network technology. Chapter VI examines the ontological consequences of an existence mediated by digital instruments. Chapter VII investigates the impact proliferating network technologies have on political sovereignty. The dissertation concludes that the economic, ontological, and political properties of networks suggest they are unlikely to be the technology of a fundamental democratic revolution.
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Title: The secret of technics: Toward an ethical politics of technological society (Francis Bacon, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt)
Pub No: 9928813
Author: Cooper, Roger Allen
Degree: PhD
School: DUKE UNIVERSITY
Date: 1999
Pages: 441
Adviser: Coles, Romand
ISBN: 0-599-28790-X
Source: DAI-A 60/05, p. 1740, Nov 1999
Subject: POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615); PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: The questions critics have typically asked of modern technology have focused on whether we are in control of our machines or whether they now have control over us. And questions concerning the ethics of technology have tended to revolve around some form of this conceptual approach. My dissertation, in contrast, argues that the ethical problematic of technology must begin from the question of how technology fundamentally affects ethics and how ethical relation happens under these technologically affected conditions. The dominant critical view of technology as a process or operation aimed at securing greater control and mastery is no doubt correct, but if technology tends to proceed by substituting for one activity or arrangement a more manageable and predictable system or technical artifice, this substitution itself does not always generate the desired or expected results. Indeed, technological substitution can be responsible for a variety of emergent social arrangements and practices far more contingent, equivocal, and unpredictable than many critics tend to recognize. The consequences of this strange characteristic of technology for selves and social relations is what this dissertation analyzes. It argues for a new techno-ethics of public political life, that strives to be responsible to what resists the transparency of publicity, to the emergent secrecy of technologically affected selves, society, and social relations. Chapters I and II argue that a more robust critical theory of technology must rethink the relation of technological transparency to secrecy by examining the operations of substitution and artificial duplication through which technology essentially proceeds. Chapter III sets out on this trajectory with an analysis of the thought of Martin Heidegger. It is what I take to be the limits of Heidegger's philosophy that directs chapter IV to consider Jacques Derrida's work on the logic of repetition and substitution. Chapter V develops from Derrida and Hannah Arendt a notion of technological spectrality as a new premise of ethical and political relation. I argue that in the equivocal play of transparency and secrecy, technology becomes a rich resource for reimagining public life and for the invention of potentially more ethical and just socio- political associations.
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Title: Some ethical and public policy implications of technological dependency with reference to Innis, McLuhan and Grant Pub No: NQ40370
Author: Gerrie, James Brian
Degree: PhD
School: UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH (CANADA)
Date: 1999
Pages: 297 Adviser: Newman, Jay
ISBN: 0-612-40370-X
Source: DAI-A 60/08, p. 2961, Feb 2000
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); POLITICAL SCIENCE, GENERAL (0615)
Abstract: This thesis is an investigation of an alternative interpretation of certain aspects of the intellectual legacy of three influential Canadian academics: Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and George Grant. Arthur Kroker's seminal work on these three figures emphasizes the dissimilarities of their positions on the ethical and public policy implications of technology. According to Kroker McLuhan is a more optimistic herald of the new information age, Grant is a dark prophet of technological society, and Innis a practical-minded intermediary between these two possible visions of technological society. This investigation, in contrast, argues that a greater fundamental unity can be found in their varied responses to the ethical challenge of technological dependency, and that their responses are significantly more critical of technological development than Kroker acknowledges. This inquiry focuses on the issue of technological dependency. According to Innis, McLuhan and Grant an adequate ethical approach to technology must be capable of dealing with the bias towards technological practice that our dependence on technological practice helps set up. Without awareness of this kind of technologically induced bias any ethical approach to technology, including those which seek to be critical of technological development, can actually help support unquestioned technological expansion. Although Innis, McLuhan and Grant are unique in their individual expressions of the nature of technological bias, each warn that a bias towards technological practice can even threaten philosophical attempts to properly address the issue of technological dependency. Taken together what emerges from their varied insights into the nature of technological dependency is a unique approach to the ethical control of technology. This approach seeks to bridge the divide between pro- and anti-technological attitudes towards technology. This dissertation seeks to clarify this ethical approach and explore its implications for contemporary public policy analysis.
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Title: Clues in transformation: On creating a reflective practice
Author: Hammaren, Maria
Degree: Fildr
School: KUNGLIGA TEKNISKA HOGSKOLAN (SWEDEN)
Date: 1999
Pages: 375
Languange: SWEDISH
Source: DAI-C 61/01, p. 35, Spring 2000
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION, MANAGEMENT (0454); EDUCATION, PHILOSOPHY OF (0998)
Abstract: In her dissertation, <italic>Clues in Transformation</italic>: <italic> On Creating a Reflective Practice,</italic> Maria Hammarén describes a method for the transfer of experience. It focuses on the development of judgement and the creation of new, conscious paths of learning for experience-based knowledge. Taking as a model the Dialogue Seminar, a joint programme run by KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) and Royal Dramatic Theatre, the dissertation describes how a new learning culture is created by carrying out a series of dialogue seminars that use reading and writing. Insights gained from the world of art on indirect knowledge transferral, portrayal, language criticism and the role of tradition in creative work have been central. The method builds on a practice-oriented perspective of professional skill developed from the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. An important result of the study is that impediments to the transfer of experience are localised to the systems theory paradigm. The dissertation opens up a new view of management, namely the way management in a high-technology knowledge- intensive enterprise entails stimulating the taxing intellectual work of reflection. The study <italic>Clues in Transformation</italic>: <italic>On Creating a Reflective Practice</italic> is part of a research programme that is documented in the “Philosophy and Engineering Work” series of publications.
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Title: Tool-being: Elements in a theory of objects
Pub No: 9943404
Author: Harman, Graham
Degree: PhD School: DEPAUL UNIVERSITY
Date: 1999
Pages: 306
Adviser: McNeill, William
ISBN: 0-599-44972-1
Source: DAI-A 60/08, p. 2963, Feb 2000
Subject: PHILOSOPHY (0422); EDUCATION, TECHNOLOGY (0710)
Abstract: This dissertation aims to develop Martin Heidegger's famous analysis of equipment (<italic>Zuhandenheit</italic>) into an ontology of objects. Although numerous commentators have discussed the role of the tool in Heidegger's work, all have interpreted it too narrowly as a question of human practical activity, in connection with a limited range of familiar utensils such as chisels, jackhammers, and saws. Chapter One argues that Heidegger's analysis actually holds good of all possible entities, whether they be “useful” or not. The term ‘tool- being’ holds good for grains of sand as much as saws, for angels as much as windmills. In truth, <italic>all</italic> entities are caught up in Heidegger's famous reversal between readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand, a crippling global dualism from which nothing in the cosmos is immune. My related claim is that all of Heidegger's various attempts to discuss any sort of concrete subject matter quickly implode into a sheer repetition of the duel between tool and broken tool. His supposed discussions of “space,” “truth,” and “time” are nothing more than distracting code words for a repetitive duality that Heidegger tries (and fails) to escape by means of his abortive project for a ‘metontology.’ His monotonous appeal to the drama of tool and broken tool is complicated by only <italic>one</italic> further dualism, one found in his work as early as the 1919 Freiburg course <italic>Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie</italic>. The interplay of these two principles is what leads Heidegger to his infamous notion of the fourfold (<italic>das Geviert</italic>), a concept too hastily ridiculed even by many of his admirers. Chapter Two offers a critical engagement with the secondary literature, focusing in particular on the concepts of Dasein, being, time, truth, Ereignis, language, and technology. Chapter Three attempts to develop the implications of this reading of Heidegger for a theory of the structure of objects in general. I argue in conclusion that Heidegger's holistic theory of the world, expressed in even clearer form in the works of Whitehead, leads to just as many perplexities as the substance-based theories of Aristotle and Leibniz. The concept of ‘tool-being’ requires some sort of compromise position between context and substance.
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Title: An exploration of society's temptation and use of technology to achieve the state of posthumanism
Pub No: 1394709
Author: Horton, Eric Allen
Degree: MFA
School: MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY
Date: 1999
Pages: 21
Adviser: Chartier, Guillaume
ISBN: 0-599-30357-3
Source: MAI 37/05, p. 1275, Oct 1999
Subject: FINE ARTS (0357); PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: This treatise is an exploration of society's unwitting use of technique and technology to achieve the state of posthumanism. Since the beginning of time, technique and technology have functioned as an amplification of sense. It is only recently, with great advances being made in technology, that the threat of this amplification threatens to push our own humanism to the brink of nonexistence. It is this critical point at which we evolve into the posthuman. The state of posthumanism is achieved, subtly, through the plague of technology. The plague's effect is that of replacement of process and tool. The plague is a myriad of extensions and alterations. It relieves society of its humanism, and ultimately its mortality. This work details the aspects of temptation, acquisition, replacement and rebirth throughout this plague.
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Title: Dichotomy: Illusion or Veracity (Original artwork, video installation, multimedia)
Pub No: 1392586
Author: Kwan, Angel Yuen-yi
Degree: MFA
School: CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH
Date: 1999 Pages: 19 ISBN: 0-599-11450-9 Source: MAI 37/02, p. 398, Apr 1999
Subject: FINE ARTS (0357); PHILOSOPHY (0422)
Abstract: Dichotomy: Illusion or Veracity was a video installation about truth, reality, illusion, desire, attachment and confinement. My intention was to create a multi- dimensional, multi-media work that would incorporate visual, aural, tactile, olfactory, and time elements to present a total aesthetic experience for the viewers. Through the manipulation of these sensory systems along with theatrical lighting, the piece functioned like a stage set, simulating a physical as well as an intimate psychological space in which visitors could participate. This project was derived from personal experience and family history. It was also a reflection of my state of mind and my search for parallels between my life and that of my father. By doing so, I wished to gain strength and insight into my purpose in life and to establish a balance between traditional and contemporary values. This video installation challenged the use of non-art materials and electronic technology in a different context and transformed them into high art. Through the relationship between the forms and colors, repetitions of sounds, visuals and textures, the placement of components, and the contrasting scale of objects and images, this work aroused an intensely personal emotion that existed in the netherworld between veracity and illusion.
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