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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 57. Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London Hosted by King's Digital Lab www.dhhumanist.org Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org Date: 2019-05-30 09:32:52+00:00 From: Willard McCartySubject: bridge-building Allow me to recommend a look into Fernand Hallyn's The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler (1987), translated from La Structure poétique du monde: Copernic, Kepler (1987) by Donald M. Leslie. This is how it begins: > I intend to grapple with the "poetics" of Copernicus and Kepler. But > what does this mean? What justification is there for applying the > term "poetics" to the study of the scientific enterprise? What is > there in that enterprise to which it can be applied? What relevance > does the practice of poetics have for the epistemology and history of > science? Hallyn's book should help address a lamentable tendency to turn away from the natural sciences and so from a deeper understanding of the technoscientific machinery that shapes the reasoning we do with its help. John Culkin's observation (often attributed to Marshall McLuhan) says it in a few words: “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.”* It seems to me that there are rich openings for important work that obscured by this turning away, e.g. on the subject of AI, probing the space between technical efforts to build ever better imitations of us and theorising safely abstracted from the machinery and the sciences involved in building them. We seem to be awash in notions of what lies ahead (the revolution so often postponed for technical reasons), some of it quite seriously scary. Well-written fiction based on these notions tells us a lot about our dreams and nightmares. But for effective scholarship we need something else, I think. Comments? Yours, WM ----- *“A schoolman’s guide to Marshall McLuhan.” Saturday Review, March 18, 1967, 51– 53, 70–72. -- Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/), Professor emeritus, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London; Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (www.tandfonline.com/loi/yisr20) and Humanist (www.dhhumanist.org) _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/ Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
Editor: Willard McCarty (King's College London, U.K.; Western Sydney University, Australia)
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