An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence
Diana E. Forsythe was a leading anthropologist of science, technology, and work, and especially of the field of artificial intelligence. This volume collects her best-known essays, along with other major works that remained unpublished upon her death in 1997. The essays proceed as a series of developing variations on the key questions that still ......
Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
In the 'dispute of the New World' many eighteenth and nineteenth century historians, naturalists, and moral philosophers from Europe and the Americas sought either to confirm or refute the views of the French naturalist Buffon, who had contended that the New World was in fact geologically new. This book maintains that 'dispute' was also a debate ......
The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China
In 1644, the Manchus, a relatively unknown people inhabiting China's northeastern frontier, overthrew the Ming, Asia's mightiest rulers, and established the Qing dynasty, which endured to 1912. From this event arises one of Chinese history's great conundrums: How did a barely literate alien people manage to remain in power for nearly 300 years ......
This book, by one of the most innovative and challenging contemporary thinkers, consists of an extensive essay from which the book takes its title and five shorter essays that are internally related to Being Singular Plural. One of the strongest strands in Nancy's philosophy is his attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a ......
These two lectures by Jacques Derrida, Foreigner Question and Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality, derive from a series of seminars on hospitality conducted by Derrida in Paris, January 1996. His seminars, in France and in America, have become something of an institution over the years, the place where he presents the ongoing evolution of his ......
This is the definitive analysis of art as a social and perceptual system by Germany s leading social theorist of the late twentieth century. It not only represents an important intellectual step in discussions of art in its rigor and in its having refreshingly set itself the task of creating a set of distinctions for determining what counts as art ......
Marlene Dietrich had the last line in Orson Welles's "A Touch of Evil": What does it matter what you say about other people? The author ponders the question: What does it matter what you say about yourself? She wonders why the requirement to be a something-or-other should be so hard to satisfy in a manner that rings true in the ears of its own ......
This volume records a remarkable encounter in critical and philosophical thinking: a meeting of two of the great pioneers in contemporary thought, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, who are also bound together by friendship and a complex relation to their own pasts. More than a literary text with critical commentary, it constitutes an event of ......
This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. With one exception, the fifteen essays, which reflect the wide range of the author s interests, appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy (such as Plato, ......