Langdon Winner: The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1986)
Filed under book | Tags: · critique of technology, deep ecology, ecology, environment, genetics, history of technology, philosophy of technology, technē, technology
“This collection of ten essays explores the social, political, and philosophical ramifications of the information technologies. While Winner looks at computer networking, nuclear reactors, genetic engineering, the so-called appropriate-technology movement and a variety of other specific issues, his main focus is on the way we think about technology.”
Publisher University of Chicago Press
ISBN 0226902110, 9780226902111
xiv+200 pages
Reviews: Craig Calhoun (Science, 1986), David Dickson (New York Times, 1986), James R. Temples (American Political Science Review, 1987), Stanley R. Carpenter (J Business Ethics, 1987), Slawomir Magala (Organization Studies, 1989), Scott London (1995), Heather Wiltse (2008).
PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)
Comment (0)Verena Andermatt Conley: Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought (1997)
Filed under book | Tags: · deep ecology, ecofeminism, ecology, environment, feminism, poststructuralism, structuralism
Ecopolitics is a study of environmental awareness – or non-awareness – in contemporary French theory. Arguing that it is now impossible not to think in an ecological way, Verena Andermatt Conley traces the roots of today’s concern for the environment back to the intellectual climate of the late 50s and 60s.
The author considers key texts by influential figures such as Michael Serres, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel de Certeau, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Ecopolitics rehabilitates some ecological components of French intellectual thought of the past thirty years, and reassesses French poststructural thinkers who explicitly deal with ecology in their work.
Publisher Routledge, 1997
Opening Out: Feminism for Today Series
ISBN 0415102847, 9780415102841
188 pages
PDF (updated on 2013-2-5)
Comments (2)Bruno Latour: Politics of Nature. How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropology, deep ecology, ecology, metaphysics, political ecology
A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology–transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society–and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced.
In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division–which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation.
Translated by Catherine Porter
Publisher Harvard University Press, 2004
ISBN 0674012895, 9780674012899
307 pages
More info (publisher)
More info (wikipedia)
More info (google books)
PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)
Comment (0)