Admission: $145 Patreon members / $165 general admission
Dates: Sundays, January 22 - Febraury 26, 2022
Time: 2 pm – 4 pm ET (New York City Time)

PLEASE NOTE: Classes will be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time

This course will take us on a philosophical exploration of the ironic relation between technology and humanity. As Martin Heidegger puts it, technology is both our destiny and our greatest danger. We lack the comparably formidable protection of the claws and muscles of our animal brethren, while we are also hampered by a distinctive awareness of our inevitable death. Nevertheless, we have the power to conform our environment to our needs and whims, which promises a flourishing and longevity that no set of claws and muscles can possibly deliver. The ability to shape a world for ourselves (technology) is our saving power.

Human nature is an odd mix of mortal vulnerability and the promise of self-made immortality.

Our history is inextricably linked to our technological development. Wherever we go, our technology will be there. That destiny, however, has the appearance of a self-inflicted demise, or at least that is the suspicion held by many of us living in this era of atomic warfare, environmental crises, and the digital upheaval of culture. Our technological nature both saves and threatens.

The thinkers we will discuss in this course--including Aeschylus, Plato, David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Keji Nishitani, Hans Jonas, and Mereleau-Ponty--will help us articulate this central irony of human nature: the greatness of humanity depends crucially on our capacity to form our environment to fit our needs (technology). At the same time, that very exercise threatens to undermine the rudiments of our existence.

The goal of the course is not to reach some final resolution to the riddle of our technological being, but to deepen our awareness of the problem by understanding how it has been dealt with by a diverse group of thinkers throughout the history of philosophy. We will see, however, that articulation does take us some way toward a kind of resolution.

Week 1: The Technological and Artistic “Extension” of the Human Life and Death

Sources

• Hans Jonas, “The Burden and the Blessing of Mortality” and “Tool, Image, and Grave: On what is Beyond the Animal in Man”

• Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind”

Week 2: Prometheanism and its Discontents

Sources

• Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

• Plato, Protagoras and Republic

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Week 3: Transhumanism as Destiny – Death Instinct or Life Instinct?

Sources

• Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Genealogy of Morals, and the Will to Power

Week 4: “Giving a Dam” – Mortality and Machine Intelligence.

Sources

• Heidegger, Being and Time

• Haugeland, Having Thought

Week 5: Technology and the Revelation of the Being – What is at Stake in Losing Humanity

Sources

• Nishitani, “Nihility and Sunyata”

• Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”

• Aquinas, On Truth

• Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Recollections

Week 6: Technology and Aesthetics – Is Posthuman Art a Possibility?

Sources

• Kant, The Critique of Judgment

• Merleau-Ponty, “The Eye and the Mind” and The Visible and the Invisible

Jim Madden has been professor of philosophy for over twenty years and has received awards for his teaching. He is the author of Mind, Matter, and Nature (Catholic University Press of America, 2013) and Thinking about Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Technological Nihilism (Cascade – forthcoming) along with numerous other articles on the philosophy of mind and philosophy of religion. He is also a world champion in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and a fitness enthusiast. You may find out more about his work at https://www.jdmadden.com/.