"What is it like to be a bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked in 1974. “How do forests think?” asked anthropologist Eduardo Kohn more recently. As we barely understand the totality of our own ...selves (much less that of another person), how can we even begin to know what it would be like to be a chair, a coastline, a beetle, a virus? Given the state of the world today, thinking about how we think the nonhuman (and other humans) is urgent. Yet any time we think about something, that something is inevitably filtered through our humanness. How can acknowledging the hybrids that are created when we think things help us to better share the planet and, difficult that it may be, better empathize with one another? This essay looks at how humanist writers in the Italian Renaissance worked to decenter the human and, as such, did not conceive of “man as the measure of all things” in the way that many posthuman studies have claimed. Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, and Andrea Alciato, for example, attempted to “think like” the nonhuman, and in doing so, they consciously created textual nonhumans in their writing through both anthropomorphosis and the more empathic strategy of allomorphosis, in which a writer attempts to “think like” something other-than-human. The textual nonhumans of Renaissance humanism are fascinating creations of minds that sought to bind themselves to the beauties, powers, and mysteries of the nonhuman world in order to become better humans in the here and now.
This book traces the intellectual life of the Kingdom of Italy, the area in which humanism began in the mid thirteenth century, a century or more before exerting its influence on the rest of Europe. ...Covering a period of over four and a half centuries, this study offers the first integrated analysis of Latin writings produced in the area, examining not only religious, literary, and legal texts. Ronald G. Witt characterizes the changes reflected in these Latin writings as products of the interaction of thought with economic, political, and religious tendencies in Italian society as well as with intellectual influences coming from abroad. His research ultimately traces the early emergence of humanism in northern Italy in the mid thirteenth century to the precocious development of a lay intelligentsia in the region, whose participation in the culture of Latin writing fostered the beginnings of the intellectual movement which would eventually revolutionize all of Europe.
This book offers a major contribution for understanding the spread of the humanist movement in Renaissance Florence. Investigating the connections between individuals who were part of the humanist ...movement, Maxson reconstructs the networks that bound them together. Overturning the problematic categorization of humanists as either professional or amateurs, a distinction based on economics and the production of original works in Latin, he offers a new way of understanding how the humanist movement could incorporate so many who were illiterate in Latin, but who nonetheless were responsible for an intellectual and cultural paradigm shift. The book demonstrates the massive appeal of the humanist movement across socio-economic and political groups and argues that the movement became so successful and widespread because by the 1420s–30s the demands of common rituals began requiring humanist speeches. Over time, humanist learning became more valuable as social capital, which raised the status of the most learned humanists and helped disseminate humanist ideas beyond Florence.
Ein Faktencheck Krafft, Tobias D; Zweig, Katharina A
Informatik-Spektrum,
01/2017, Letnik:
40, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Die Wahl des Präsidenten der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika im Jahr 2016 wurde von hitzigen Diskussionen um mögliche Manipulationen der Bevölkerung und ihrer Meinungsbildung begleitet. Insbesondere ...wendeten sich diese Manipulationsvorwürfe gegen die sozialen Medien und auch gegen Google: Vor der Wahl wurden viele Stimmen laut, die behaupteten: ,,Google manipuliert für Hillaryi‘ Als Trumps Wahlsieg feststand, wendeten sich diese Vorwürfe gegen Facebook: Jetzt führte man die Phänomene von Filterblasen und Echokammern ins Feld, gegen die die Social-Media-Plattform nicht genügend unternehme. Der folgende Beitrag nimmt diese Debatte zum Anlass, die Manipulationsmöglichkeiten bei der öffentlichen Meinungsbildung durch die beiden Großkonzerne Google und Facebook aufzuzeigen, die jeweils auf ihrem Dienstleistungssektor – Google auf dem Suchmaschinenmarkt und Facebook unter den Social-Media-Plattformen – eine Monopolstellung besitzen. Wir kommen zu dem Schluss, dass eine interne Manipulation der dahinterstehenden Algorithmen momentan eher unwahrscheinlich ist. Deshalb diskutieren wir mögliche Nutznießer der algorithmischen Infrastrukturen, die sie nutzen, um Fake-News zu verbreiten oder gezielt für bzw. gegen einzelne Kandidaten einzutreten.
The 2015 Antipode RGS‐IBG Lecture was delivered by Prof. Paul Gilroy on 2 September at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Annual International Conference. ...Prof. Gilroy's lecture interrogates the contemporary attractions of post‐humanism and asks questions about what a “reparative humanism” might alternatively entail. He uses a brief engagement with the conference theme—“geographies of the Anthropocene”—to frame his remarks and try to explain why antiracist politics and ethics not only require consideration of nature and time but also promote a timely obligation to roam into humanism's forbidden zones.
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