Rationality and Normativity: Science Politics, Religion
Prof. Menachem Fish
The ability to act for a reason and to deliberate the propriety and impropriety of a move are exclusively human capacities, by means of which human societies establish their world pictures, their social and political outlooks, and their religious cultures. However, the ability to act rationally turns out to be surprisingly and vexingly constrained by normative commitment. In the first part of the course, the problem will be explored against contemporary philosophical accounts of rationality, normativity, mind and self, and a general solution will be proposed. In the second part, the problem and proposed solution will be examined against the strained context of Kuhn’s account of scientific framework transitions and its aftermath. In the third part of the course the rabbinic literature of late antiquity, exegetical and halakhic will be discussed as intriguingly aware of both the problem of rationality’s normative constraints and its solution.
Contemporary Issues in Digital Culture
Dr. Carmel Vaisman
Can we understand digital artifacts and contemporary phenomena with the available social and critical theory, or do we need new concepts and frameworks? In this course we engage with a variety of digital objects, genres, and phenomena through key approaches in digital cultural research in pursuit of the "new" in new media; identifying the issues in which past theories are more relevant than ever, alongside emergent issues which the tools to grasp them are a work in-progress.
The Sociology of the Net-The Cyber Age: Society, Technology & Knowledge
Dr. Ofer Nordheimer Nur
The course surveys the cultural origins, social conditions and various discourses that have shaped and generated what is termed cyber culture (how life online changes us as individuals and as groups). At the core, we examine what cybernetic space does to human interaction, to knowledge and knowing and to society and politics. We examine the ambivalence towards technology as shaping society and culture. We begin with an introduction to the science and discourse of cybernetics as it developed since the late 1940s. We examine the ambivalence towards technology and the various cyber discourses from the point of view of those who justified its redeeming and even utopian qualities and follow closely the historical development of the internet as a culture and as a product of the Information Society. Temporary configurations of techno-social participation and concepts such as public participation, participatory inequality, civic technoscience, feminist data science, community science, and data ideologies.
Progress and its Discontents
Dr. Ori Rotlevy
Does technological progress lead to moral or political progress? Many saw the development of the Internet in general and social networks in particular as a political-moral promise for further democratization. However, despite historical moments such as the Arab Spring, in which it seemed that this promise would come true, the attention today is focused rather on the power of corporations that control social networks and search engines, and the subsequent limits on freedom, democracy, and even access to the truth.
As a matter of fact, the initial question regarding progress has been present since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. This seminar seeks to introduce the fundamental philosophical concepts concerning the distinction between technological progress and moral progress since the Enlightenment until contemporary techno-optimism and techno-pessimism. It also seeks to explore why some thinkers link the two while others link technological progress with moral regression, as well as the relationship between technological progress and freedom, and the relationship between technological progress and human nature, and to what extent is the former related to the realization of human nature or to the disassociation of human beings from their nature.
