Technology and the City

Technology and the City
Author: Michael Nagenborg
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2021-01-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030523136

The contributions in this volume map out how technologies are used and designed to plan, maintain, govern, demolish, and destroy the city. The chapters demonstrate how urban technologies shape, and are shaped, by fundamental concepts and principles such as citizenship, publicness, democracy, and nature. The many authors herein explore how to think of technologically mediated urban space as part of the human condition. The volume will thus contribute to the much-needed discussion on technology-enabled urban futures from the perspective of the philosophy of technology. This perspective also contributes to the discussion and process of making cities ‘smart’ and just. This collection appeals to students, researchers, and professionals within the fields of philosophy of technology, urban planning, and engineering.

Planning, Time, and Self-governance

Planning, Time, and Self-governance
Author: Michael Bratman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2018
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 019086785X

Our human capacity for planning agency plays central roles in the cross-temporal organization of our agency, in our acting and thinking together (both at a time and over time), and in our self-governance (both at a time and over time). Intentions can be understood as states in such a planning system. The practical thinking at the bottom of this planning capacity is guided by norms that enjoin synchronic plan consistency and means-end coherence as well as forms of plan stability over time. The essays in this book aim to deepen our understanding of these norms and to defend their status as norms of practical rationality for planning agents. The general guidance by these planning norms has many pragmatic benefits, especially given our cognitive and epistemic limits. But appeal to these general pragmatic benefits does not fully explain the normative force of these norms in the particular case. In response to this challenge some think these norms are, at bottom, norms of theoretical rationality on one's beliefs; some think these norms are constitutive of intentional agency; some think they are norms of interpretation; and some think the idea of such norms of practical rationality is a myth. These essays chart an alternative path. This path sees these planning norms as tracking conditions of a planning agent's self-governance, both at a time and over time. It seeks associated models of such self-governance. And it appeals to the idea that the end of one's self-governance over time, while not essential to intentional agency per se, is, within the planning framework, rationally self-sustaining and a keystone of a rationally stable reflective equilibrium that involves the norms of plan rationality. This end is thereby in a position to play a role in our planning framework that parallels the role of a concern with quality of will within the framework of the reactive emotions, as understood by Peter Strawson.

The Good Life Method

The Good Life Method
Author: Meghan Sullivan
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1984880314

Two Philosophers Ask and Answer the Big Questions About the Search for Faith and Happiness For seekers of all stripes, philosophy is timeless self-care. Notre Dame philosophy professors Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko have reinvigorated this tradition in their wildly popular and influential undergraduate course “God and the Good Life,” in which they wrestle with the big questions about how to live and what makes life meaningful. Now they invite us into the classroom to work through issues like what justifies our beliefs, whether we should practice a religion and what sacrifices we should make for others—as well as to investigate what figures such as Aristotle, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Iris Murdoch, and W. E. B. Du Bois have to say about how to live well. Sullivan and Blaschko do the timeless work of philosophy using real-world case studies that explore love, finance, truth, and more. In so doing, they push us to escape our own caves, ask stronger questions, explain our deepest goals, and wrestle with suffering, the nature of death, and the existence of God. Philosophers know that our “good life plan” is one that we as individuals need to be constantly and actively writing to achieve some meaningful control and sense of purpose even if the world keeps throwing surprises our way. For at least the past 2,500 years, philosophers have taught that goal-seeking is an essential part of what it is to be human—and crucially that we could find our own good life by asking better questions of ourselves and of one another. This virtue ethics approach resonates profoundly in our own moment. The Good Life Method is a winning guide to tackling the big questions of being human with the wisdom of the ages.

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City
Author: Sharon M. Meagher
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 580
Release: 2019-08-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317400631

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind. Comprising 40 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into clear sections addressing the following central topics: • Historical Philosophical Engagements with Cities • Modern and Contemporary Philosophical Theories of the City • Urban Aesthetics • Urban Politics • Citizenship • Urban Environments and the Creation/Destruction of Place. The concluding section, Urban Engagements, contains interviews with philosophers discussing their engagement with students and the wider public on issues and initiatives including experiential learning, civic and community engagement, disability rights and access, environmental degradation, professional diversity, social justice, and globalization. Essential reading for students and researchers in environmental philosophy, aesthetics, and political philosophy, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is also a useful resource for those in related fields, such as geography, urban studies, sociology, and political science.

Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering

Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering
Author: Carl Mitcham
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2019-12-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1786611287

The rise of classic Euro-American philosophy of technology in the 1950s originally emphasized the importance of technologies as material entities and their mediating influence within human experience. Recent decades, however, have witnessed a subtle shift toward reflection on the activity from which these distinctly modern artifacts emerge and through which they are engaged and managed, that is, on engineering. What is engineering? What is the meaning of engineering? How is engineering related to other aspects of human existence? Such basic questions readily engage all major branches of philosophy --- ontology, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics --- although not always to the same degree. The historico-philosophical and critical reflections collected here record a series of halting steps to think through engineering and the engineered way of life that we all increasingly live in what has been called the Anthropocene. The aim is not to promote an ideology for engineering but to stimulate deeper reflection among engineers and non-engineers alike about some basic challenges of our engineered and engineering lifeworld.

Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy

Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy
Author: Sahotra Sarkar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2005-09-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780521851329

This book explores the epistemological and ethical issues at the foundations of environmental philosophy, emphasising the conservation of biodiversity. Sahota Sarkar criticises attempts to attribute intrinsic value to nature and defends an anthropocentric position on biodiversity conservation based on an untraditional concept of transformative value. Unlike other studies in the field of environmental philosophy, this book is as much concerned with epistemological issues as with environmental ethics. It covers a broad range of topics, including problems of explanation and prediction in traditional ecology and how individual-based models and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology is transforming ecology. Introducing a brief history of conservation biology, Sarkar analyses the consensus framework for conservation planning through adaptive management. He concludes with a discussion of directions for theoretical research in conservation biology and environmental philosophy.

Towards a Philosophy of Critical Mathematics Education

Towards a Philosophy of Critical Mathematics Education
Author: Ole Skovsmose
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013-03-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9401735565

In Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell gives a description of different forms of suppression. We learn about the telescreens placed everywhere, through which it is possible for Big-Brother to watch the inhabitants of Oceania. However, it is not only important to control the activities of the inhabitants, it is important as well to control their thoughts, and the Thought Police are on guard. This is a very direct form of monitoring and control, but Orwell also outlines a more imperceptible and calculated line of thought control. In the Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell explains some struc tures of 'Newspeak', which is going to become the official language of Oceania. Newspeak is being developed by the Ministry of Truth, and this language has to substitute 'Oldspeak' (similar to standard English). Newspeak should fit with the official politics of Oceania ruled by the Ingsoc party: "The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impos sible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc - should be literally unthink able, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience
Author: John Bickle
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 652
Release: 2009-07-27
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0195304780

This title is a collection of interdisciplinary research from contributors including both philosophers and neuroscientists. Topics covered include the neurobiology of learning and memory perception and sensation, neurocomputational modelling neuroanatomy, neuroethics, and neurology and clinical neuropsychology.