Manuel De Landa: A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997)
Filed under book | Tags: · abstract machine, economy, history, linguistics, meshwork, non-linear history, philosophy, self-organization
“Following in the wake of his groundbreaking work War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a radical synthesis of historical development of the last thousand years. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, while engaging the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history merely as the arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. The result is an entirely novel approach to the study of human societies and their always mobile, semi-stable forms, cities, economies, technologies, and languages.
De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In each case, De Landa discloses the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress and, even more important, free of any deterministic source for its urban, institutional, and technological forms. The source of all concrete forms in the West’s history, rather, is shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energy itself.”
Publisher Zone Books, 1997
Swerve Editions, New York, 2000
ISBN 0942299329
333 pages
PDF (4 MB, updated on 2015-9-1)
Comment (1)Thomas S. Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962–) [EN, IT, ES, BR-PT, RU, GR, CZ, CR, CN, RO]
Filed under book | Tags: · history, history of science, non-linear history, philosophy of science, science, sociology of knowledge, theory
“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is an analysis of the history of science. Its publication was a landmark event in the sociology of knowledge, and popularized the terms paradigm and paradigm shift.
Kuhn’s approach to the history and philosophy of science has been described as focusing on conceptual issues: what sorts of ideas were thinkable at a particular time? What sorts of intellectual options and strategies were available to people during a given period? What types of lexicons and terminology were known and employed during certain epochs? Stressing the importance of not attributing modern modes of thought to historical actors, Kuhn’s book argues that the evolution of scientific theory does not emerge from the straightforward accumulation of facts, but rather from a set of changing intellectual circumstances and possibilities. Such an approach is largely commensurate with the general historical school of non-linear history.”
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1962
Third edition, 1996
ISBN 0226458083, 9780226458083
212 pages
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (English, 3rd ed., 1962/1996; updated on 2015-7-10)
La struttura delle rivoluzioni scientifiche (Italian, trans. Adriano Carugo, 2nd ed., 1969, DJVU)
La estructura de las revoluciones cientificas (Spanish, trans. Agustin Contin, 1971/2004)
A estrutura das revoluções científicas (Brazilian Portuguese, trans. Beatriz Vianna Boeira and Nelson Boeira, 5th ed., 1975/1998)
Struktura nauchnykh revolutsiy (Russian, trans. I.Z. Naletov, 1975/2003, DJVU)
Η δομή των επιστημονικών επαναστάσεων (Greek, trans. Β. Κάλφας, 1997)
Struktura vědeckých revolucí (Czech, trans. Tomáš Jeníček, 1997)
Struktura znastvenih revolucija (Croatian, trans. Mirna Zelić, 2nd ed., 2002)
科学革命的结构 (Chinese, 2003)
Structura revoluțiilor științifice (Romanian, trans. Radu J. Bogdan, 2008)