Nanjing Lectures (2016-2019)

Author: Daniel Ross
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781013295379
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
In this series of lectures, delivered at Nanjing University from 2016 to 2019, Bernard Stiegler rethinks the so-called Anthropocene in relation to philosophy's failure to reckon with the manifold and indeed "cosmic" consequences of the entropic and thermodynamic revolution. Beginning with the Oxford Dictionaries' decision to make "post-truth" the 2016 word of the year, and taking this as an opportunity to understand the implications for Heidegger's "history of being", "history of truth" and Gestell, the first series of lectures enter into an original consideration of the relationship between Socrates and Plato (and of tragic Greece in general) and its meaning for the history of Western philosophy. The following year's lecture series traverse a path from Foucault's biopower to psychopower to neuropower, and then to a critique of neuroeconomics. Revising Husserl's account of retention to focus on the irreducible connection between human memory and technological memory, the lectures culminate in reflections on the significance of neurotechnology in platform capitalism. The concept of hyper-matter is introduced in the lectures of 2019 as requisite for an epistemology that escapes the trap of opposing the material and the ideal in order to respond to the need for a new critique of the notion of information and technological performativity (of which Moore's law both is and is not an example) in an age when the biosphere has become a technosphere. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Bernard Stiegler

Author: Bart Buseyne
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350410462
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
Honouring the memory of the late Bernard Stiegler, this edited collection presents a broad spectrum of contributions that provide a complex and coherently articulated image of Stiegler's thought which reached beyond the boundaries of academic, artistic and experimental techno-scientific enclaves where it had been originally received. Stiegler's philosophical work encompassed theorization, social diagnosis, planning, practical and territorial experimentation, politics, and aesthetics. In its wake, the essays in this volume celebrate and explore the wealth of this multi-dimensional legacy. They examine the conditions of human life in general, its foundational intermittence, and carry forward Stiegler's post-phenomenological unfolding of the distinctive spatio-temporalities that weave together the epoch we call 'present'. Engaging closely with Stiegler's original impetus for the creation of technologies of care, as well as of communities of knowledge and artistic practice,

The Standard Model And Beyond

Author: Ioannis John Demetrius Vergados
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
ISBN: 9813228571
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Book Description
This book contains a systematic and pedagogical exposition of recent developments in particle physics and cosmology. It starts with two introductory chapters on group theory and the Dirac theory. Then it proceeds with the formulation of the Standard Model (SM) of Particle Physics, particle content and symmetries, fully exploiting the material of the first two chapters. It discusses the concept of gauge symmetries and emphasizes their role in particle physics. It then analyses the Higgs mechanism and the spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB). It explains how the particles (gauge bosons and fermions) after the SSB acquire a mass and get admixed. The various forms of the charged currents are discussed in detail as well as how the parameters of the SM, which cannot be determined by the theory, are fixed by experiment, including the recent LHC data and the Higgs discovery. Quantum chromodynamics is discussed and various low energy approximations to it are presented. The Feynman diagrams are introduced and applied, at the level of first year graduate students.Examples are the evaluation of the decay widths of the gauge bosons and some cross sections for interesting processes such as Rutherford scattering, electron-proton scattering (elementary proton or described by a form factor, and inelastic scattering) and Compton scattering.After that the classic topics like the role of C, P, CP symmetries and the experimental methods needed to verify their conservation or violation are discussed in some detail. Topics beyond the standard model, like supersymmetry for pedestrians and grand unification, are discussed.To this end neutrino oscillations, dark matter and baryon asymmetry are also briefly discussed at the first year graduate level. Finally, the book contains an exhibition of recent developments in cosmology, especially from the elementary particle point of view.

On Bernard Stiegler

Author: Jean-Luc Nancy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350329053
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Book Description
"What I love, and those whom I love, you, that is to say us in so far as we are capable of forming a we, all this I love, and I love them, and I love you infinitely" (Bernard Steigler April 1952- August 2020). When Bernard Stiegler writes "I love you" in the quote above, he openly provokes us to question or experience the meaning or contact of these words. He also invites us to question the relationship between a thinker's life and their thought. For Stiegler, they were inextricable. His life was one that focused on friendship but not friendships at a purely social level but ones that produced philosophy, politics, and existential truths. Bringing together scholars who knew Stiegler, including Shaj Mohan, Achille Mbembe, Divya Dwivedi, Peter Szendy, and Emily Apter, this volume provides an original - and personal - insight into his life and philosophy. Each piece gives a sense of the wide range of Stiegler's work and how it affected the praxis of the philosopher in different parts of the world.

The Making of the "Rape of Nanking"

Author: Takashi Yoshida
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199724822
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army attacked and captured the Chinese capital city of Nanjing, planting the rising-sun flag atop the city's outer walls. What occurred in the ensuing weeks and months has been the source of a tempestuous debate ever since. It is well known that the Japanese military committed wholesale atrocities after the fall of the city, massacring large numbers of Chinese during the both the Battle of Nanjing and in its aftermath. Yet the exact details of the war crimes--how many people were killed during the battle? How many after? How many women were raped? Were prisoners executed? How unspeakable were the acts committed?--are the source of controversy among Japanese, Chinese, and American historians to this day. In The Making of the "Rape of Nanking Takashi Yoshida examines how views of the Nanjing Massacre have evolved in history writing and public memory in Japan, China, and the United States. For these nations, the question of how to treat the legacy of Nanjing--whether to deplore it, sanitize it, rationalize it, or even ignore it--has aroused passions revolving around ethics, nationality, and historical identity. Drawing on a rich analysis of Chinese, Japanese, and American history textbooks and newspapers, Yoshida traces the evolving--and often conflicting--understandings of the Nanjing Massacre, revealing how changing social and political environments have influenced the debate. Yoshida suggests that, from the 1970s on, the dispute over Nanjing has become more lively, more globalized, and immeasurably more intense, due in part to Japanese revisionist history and a renewed emphasis on patriotic education in China. While today it is easy to assume that the Nanjing Massacre has always been viewed as an emblem of Japan's wartime aggression in China, the image of the "Rape of Nanking" is a much more recent icon in public consciousness. Takashi Yoshida analyzes the process by which the Nanjing Massacre has become an international symbol, and provides a fair and respectful treatment of the politically charged and controversial debate over its history.

Cosmotechnics

Author: Yuk Hui
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000396363
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
This volume is initial reflections on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics, which opens up an anti-universalist and pluralist perspective on technology beyond the West. Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa, and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with decolonial studies and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Eighteen Lectures on Dunhuang

Author: Xinjiang Rong
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004252339
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 573

Book Description
In Eighteen Lectures on Dunhuang, Rong Xinjiang provides an accessible overview of Dunhuang studies, an academic field that emerged following the discovery of a medieval monastic library at the Mogao caves near Dunhuang. The manuscripts were hidden in a cave at the beginning of the 11th century and remained unnoticed until 1900, when a Daoist monk accidentally found them and subsequently sold most of them to foreign explorers and scholars. The availability of this unprecedented amount of first-hand material from China’s middle period provided a stimulus for a number of scholarly fields both in China and the West. Rong Xinjiang’s book provides, for the first time in English, a convenient summary of the history of Dunhuang studies and its contribution to scholarship.

Fifteen Lectures On Traditional Chinese Culture

Author: Peng-cheng Kung
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9811239770
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 549

Book Description
This book is edited based on a series of lectures on Chinese cultural history delivered at the Peking University in 2004. It stands out with its distinctive methodology and unique stand, and is popular with readers, with 17 reprints for the Chinese edition since 2006.Before the 1980s, traditional culture was often the target of criticisms and put in a negative light in China. After the 1980s, due to the belief that traditional culture can contribute to modernization, people decided to 'take its essence and discard its dregs'. As of today, most books on this theme have been written in accordance with this principle.However, in this book, the author argues that many problems have emerged from the modernization of the Western society, and thus the need for reflection and re-examining. Traditional Chinese culture is a source for comparison and reflection. As such, when we discuss traditional culture nowadays, not only should we excavate its long-hidden meanings, but we should also develop contrastive resources to facilitate our collaborative development in future.The discussions in this book adopt a vertical structure that begins with how Chinese define a human, followed by topics on the human body, Qi, food, male and female, home and state, the relationship between heaven and human beings, ritual systems, historical consciousness, thinking patterns, the art of expressing sentiments, commitments to the politics of virtues and achievements, and cultural practices. In every chapter, there is also a horizontal method of comparison on Chinese, Western and Indian cultures, to foreground the particularities and advantages of the Chinese culture.Apart from elaborating on the major characteristics of traditional Chinese culture, there is also a discussion on how the modern disdain for and misunderstandings of the traditional culture originated from the West. The author also elaborates on Montesquieu's views of China and the various misconceptions and misunderstandings of the traditional Chinese legal systems. Finally, it ends with the author's thoughts on the revitalization of the Chinese civilization.

Critical Essays on Bernard Stiegler

Author: Joff P. N. Bradley
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152759212X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
Over the past decade, Joff P. N. Bradley has carefully considered Bernard Stiegler’s influence on political philosophy, technology, and the philosophy of education. Driven by the belief that across various humanities subjects Stiegler’s nuanced philosophy will emerge as a dominant force in the coming decades, this compendium offers a comprehensive examination of Stiegler’s ideas and their impact on contemporary thought. Immerse yourself in this insightful exploration of Stiegler’s enduring intellectual legacy.

Rearticulating Motives

Author: Morten Nissen
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031434943
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
This book presents a theory of motives that has evolved over decades in dialogue with academics and with practitioners. The key proposal is that of collectively cultivating meta-motives – rather than the ubiquitous recipes for manipulating self-regulation. Cultivating meta-motives can proceed through rearticulating motives. Such rearticulation engages with theories and practices of motivation and motives. First, this is a discussion of the psychologies of motivation, and a reflection of post-psychology as a way forward. Second, this discussion takes us back to fundamental problems with subjectivity, and with psychology, even critical psychology, as a way of addressing it. Third, out of this theoretical work come concepts that are put to work in understanding practices of modelling and cultivating motives – clinical, social work, and educational practices. In the first instance, as a critique of contemporary pragmatic practices, and then by rearticulating aesthetic practices as ways to expand and overcome those. Fourth, this has implications for the cultivation of the competence in care for motives, and for the place of theory in this competence. The book provides both a theoretical argument and a resource for those professionals in education, social work, and health who seek a qualitative understanding of what they do.