Recursivity and Contingency

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Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1786600544
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (866 download)

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Book Synopsis Recursivity and Contingency by : Yuk Hui

Download or read book Recursivity and Contingency written by Yuk Hui and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-01-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book employs recursivity and contingency as two principle concepts to investigate into the relation between nature and technology, machine and organism, system and freedom. It reconstructs a trajectory of thought from an Organic condition of thinking elaborated by Kant, passing by the philosophy of nature (Schelling and Hegel), to the 20th century Organicism (Bertalanffy, Needham, Whitehead, Wiener among others) and Organology (Bergson, Canguilhem, Simodnon, Stiegler), and questions the new condition of philosophizing in the time of algorithmic contingency, ecological and algorithmic catastrophes, which Heidegger calls the end of philosophy. The book centres on the following speculative question: if in the philosophical tradition, the concept of contingency is always related to the laws of nature, then in what way can we understand contingency in related to technical systems? The book situates the concept of recursivity as a break from the Cartesian mechanism and the drive of system construction; it elaborates on the necessity of contingency in such epistemological rupture where nature ends and system emerges. In this development, we see how German idealism is precursor to cybernetics, and the Anthropocene and Noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin) point toward the realization of a gigantic cybernetic system, which lead us back to the question of freedom. It questions the concept of absolute contingency (Meillassoux) and proposes a cosmotechnical pluralism. Engaging with modern and contemporary European philosophy as well as Chinese thought through the mediation of Needham, this book refers to cybernetics, mathematics, artificial intelligence and inhumanism.

Recursivity and Contingency

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Author :
Publisher : Media Philosophy
ISBN 13 : 9781786600530
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Recursivity and Contingency by : Yuk Hui

Download or read book Recursivity and Contingency written by Yuk Hui and published by Media Philosophy. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an investigation of algorithmic contingency and an elucidation of the contemporary situation that we are living in: the regular arrival of algorithmic catastrophes on a global scale. Through a historical analysis of philosophy, computation and media, this book pro...

Art and Cosmotechnics

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452963991
Total Pages : 362 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Art and Cosmotechnics by : Yuk Hui

Download or read book Art and Cosmotechnics written by Yuk Hui and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In light of current discourses on AI and robotics, what do the various experiences of art contribute to the rethinking of technology today? Art and Cosmotechnics addresses the challenge of technology to the existence of art and traditional thought, especially in light of current discourses on artificial intelligence and robotics. It carries out an attempt on the cosmotechnics of Chinese landscape painting in order to address this question, and further asks: What is the significance of shanshui (mountain and water) in face of the new challenges brought about by the current technological transformation? Thinking art and cosmotechnics together is an attempt to look into the varieties of experiences of art and to ask what these experiences might contribute to the rethinking of technology today.

The Question Concerning Technology in China

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0995455007
Total Pages : 347 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (954 download)

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Book Synopsis The Question Concerning Technology in China by : Yuk Hui

Download or read book The Question Concerning Technology in China written by Yuk Hui and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-09-02 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A systematic historical survey of Chinese thought is followed by an investigation of the historical-metaphysical questions of modern technology, asking how Chinese thought might contribute to a renewed questioning of globalized technics. Heidegger's critique of modern technology and its relation to metaphysics has been widely accepted in the East. Yet the conception that there is only one—originally Greek—type of technics has been an obstacle to any original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought. Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger's challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and technologies as anthropologically universal. This investigation of the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of modern Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani, sheds new light on the obscurity of the question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological modernity and westernization? In The Question Concerning Technology in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical questioning of globalized technics.

Cosmotechnics

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000396363
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (3 download)

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Book Synopsis Cosmotechnics by : Yuk Hui

Download or read book Cosmotechnics written by Yuk Hui and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is initial reflections on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics, which opens up an anti-universalist and pluralist perspective on technology beyond the West. Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa, and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with decolonial studies and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

On the Existence of Digital Objects

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452949921
Total Pages : 393 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis On the Existence of Digital Objects by : Yuk Hui

Download or read book On the Existence of Digital Objects written by Yuk Hui and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-02-29 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital objects, in their simplest form, are data. They are also a new kind of industrial object that pervades every aspect of our life today—as online videos, images, text files, e-mails, blog posts, Facebook events.Yet, despite their ubiquity, the nature of digital objects remains unclear. On the Existence of Digital Objects conducts a philosophical examination of digital objects and their organizing schema by creating a dialogue between Martin Heidegger and Gilbert Simondon, which Yuk Hui contextualizes within the history of computing. How can digital objects be understood according to individualization and individuation? Hui pursues this question through the history of ontology and the study of markup languages and Web ontologies; he investigates the existential structure of digital objects within their systems and milieux. With this relational approach toward digital objects and technical systems, the book addresses alienation, described by Simondon as the consequence of mistakenly viewing technics in opposition to culture. Interdisciplinary in philosophical and technical insights, with close readings of Husserl, Heidegger, and Simondon as well as the history of computing and the Web, Hui’s work develops an original, productive way of thinking about the data and metadata that increasingly define our world.

A Systems Theory of Religion

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Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 080478793X
Total Pages : 382 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (47 download)

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Book Synopsis A Systems Theory of Religion by : Niklas Luhmann

Download or read book A Systems Theory of Religion written by Niklas Luhmann and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Systems Theory of Religion, still unfinished at Niklas Luhmann's death in 1998, was first published in German two years later thanks to the editorial work of André Kieserling. One of Luhmann's most important projects, it exemplifies his later work while redefining the subject matter of the sociology of religion. Religion, for Luhmann, is one of the many functionally differentiated social systems that make up modern society. All such subsystems consist entirely of communications and all are "autopoietic," which is to say, self-organizing and self-generating. Here, Luhmann explains how religion provides a code for coping with the complexity, opacity, and uncontrollability of our world. Religion functions to make definite the indefinite, to reconcile the immanent and the transcendent. Synthesizing approaches as disparate as the philosophy of language, historical linguistics, deconstruction, and formal systems theory/cybernetics, A Systems Theory of Religion takes on important topics that range from religion's meaning and evolution to secularization, turning decades of sociological assumptions on their head. It provides us with a fresh vocabulary and a fresh philosophical and sociological approach to one of society's most fundamental phenomena.

The Speculative Turn

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Publisher : re.press
ISBN 13 : 0980668344
Total Pages : 442 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (86 download)

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Book Synopsis The Speculative Turn by : Levi Bryant

Download or read book The Speculative Turn written by Levi Bryant and published by re.press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Continental philosophy has entered a new period of ferment. The long deconstructionist era was followed with a period dominated by Deleuze, which has in turn evolved into a new situation still difficult to define. However, one common thread running through the new brand of continental positions is a renewed attention to materialist and realist options in philosophy. Among the current giants of this generation, this new focus takes numerous different and opposed forms. It might be hard to find many shared positions in the writings of Badiou, DeLanda, Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, and Zizek, but what is missing from their positions is an obsession with the critique of written texts. All of them elaborate a positive ontology, despite the incompatibility of their results. Meanwhile, the new generation of continental thinkers is pushing these trends still further, as seen in currents ranging from transcendental materialism to the London-based speculative realism movement to new revivals of Derrida. As indicated by the title The Speculative Turn, the new currents of continental philosophy depart from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself. This anthology assembles authors, of several generations and numerous nationalities, who will be at the center of debate in continental philosophy for decades to come.

Niklas Luhmann

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Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319499750
Total Pages : 129 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (194 download)

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Book Synopsis Niklas Luhmann by : Claudio Baraldi

Download or read book Niklas Luhmann written by Claudio Baraldi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an insight into the ideas of one of the world’s greatest sociologists: Niklas Luhmann. It explains, in clear and concise language, the basic concepts of Social Systems Theory and their application to the specific case of the Education System, which was considered by Luhmann as a primary subsystem of modern society. It illustrates the complex and sophisticated thinking that characterises Luhmann’s work and explains that Luhmann’s theory has given an important and original contribution to the study of education from a sociological point of view. His contribution has some resonance in recent social constructionist and relational approaches to education, as well as in studies of educational interaction. In addition, research methodologies, in particular mixed methods strategies, draw heavily on epistemological issues. The book finally argues that educationists can appreciate the extent of Luhmann’s contribution to the field of education, although their perspective cannot be fully harmonised with, nor reduced to, the sociological one. This divergence of perspectives can stimulate pedagogy to call into question its conceptual framework as well its approach to social situations in the classroom.

Observing Complexity

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452903921
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Observing Complexity by : William Rasch

Download or read book Observing Complexity written by William Rasch and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rubric of systems theory brings together conceptual models and approaches in the sciences and social sciences that study complexity. It attempts to provide a coherent means of describing all systems, whether organic or inorganic, and offers a theory of knowledge that can account for the integration of humans in the social, informational, and ecological systems in which we are enmeshed. An introduction to the major concepts and foremost thinkers of systems theory, this book brings systems theory into interaction with the major figures of postmodern theory. The format is multiplex and open -- a rich montage, including interviews, exemplary essays, and staged dialogues. Throughout, the writers' aim is not to solidity theory but to provide a thorough explication and an open-ended exploration of how systems theory can address, in a fresh and productive way, theoretical questions that too often have led to impasses between different schools of postmodern theory.

Cultural Techniques

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Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 0823263770
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (232 download)

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Book Synopsis Cultural Techniques by : Bernhard Siegert

Download or read book Cultural Techniques written by Bernhard Siegert and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Cultural Techniques aims to forget our traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium’s individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and nonhuman, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting, or image-making. The analysis of artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as “in-betweens,” shifting from firstorder to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating to the production of the sign-signaldistinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic. Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.

Law's Cosmos

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139483714
Total Pages : 377 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (394 download)

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Book Synopsis Law's Cosmos by : Victoria Wohl

Download or read book Law's Cosmos written by Victoria Wohl and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-07 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent literary-critical work in legal studies reads law as a genre of literature, noting that Western law originated as a branch of rhetoric in classical Greece and lamenting the fact that the law has lost its connection to poetic language, narrative, and imagination. But modern legal scholarship has paid little attention to the actual juridical discourse of ancient Greece. This book rectifies that neglect through an analysis of the courtroom speeches from classical Athens, texts situated precisely at the intersection between law and literature. Reading these texts for their subtle literary qualities and their sophisticated legal philosophy, it proposes that in Athens' juridical discourse literary form and legal matter are inseparable. Through its distinctive focus on the literary form of Athenian forensic oratory, Law's Cosmos aims to shed new light on its juridical thought, and thus to change the way classicists read forensic oratory and legal historians view Athenian law.

International Practice Theory

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Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319733508
Total Pages : 221 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (197 download)

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Book Synopsis International Practice Theory by : Christian Bueger

Download or read book International Practice Theory written by Christian Bueger and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-03-21 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International Practice Theory is the definitive introduction to the practice turn in world politics, providing an accessible, up-to-date guide to the approaches, concepts, methodologies and methods of the subject. Situating the study of practices in contemporary theory and reviewing approaches ranging from Bourdieu’s praxeology and communities of practice to actor-network theory and pragmatic sociology, it documents how they can be used to study international practices empirically. The book features a discussion of how scholars can navigate ontological challenges such as order and change, micro and macro, bodies and objects, and power and critique. Interpreting practice theory as a methodological orientation, it also provides an essential guide for the design, execution and drafting of a praxiographic study.

Chronopoetics

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Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1783485728
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (834 download)

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Book Synopsis Chronopoetics by : Wolfgang Ernst

Download or read book Chronopoetics written by Wolfgang Ernst and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wolfgang Ernst has demonstrated that the knowledge of time-giving (‘chrono-poetical’) media and their temporal essence enriches the tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of ‘time’. This book, a translated and abridged edition of Ernst’s two major volumes, Chronopoetik and Gleichursprünglichkeit, undertakes this on three levels: a close analysis of time-critical moments within media technologies; descriptions of how media temporalities affect and disrupt the traditional human sense of time; and questioning the traditional position of media time within cultural history. The book brings together two fields of inquiry: the technological analysis of media time processes and the venerable tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of time. Ernst argues that the scientific inquiry into the nature of time is enriched by the media-technological context. The book exposes a media theoretical approach to contemporary media culture that derives from the combination of philosophical reflection on the essence of technology and a close analysis of technological devices themselves. Ultimately Ernst addresses a fundamental concern of past, contemporary and future media culture: the position of technology in culture under the focused perspective of its tempor(e)alities.

Morphing Intelligence

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231547234
Total Pages : 137 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Morphing Intelligence by : Catherine Malabou

Download or read book Morphing Intelligence written by Catherine Malabou and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is intelligence? The concept crosses and blurs the boundaries between natural and artificial, bridging the human brain and the cybernetic world of AI. In this book, the acclaimed philosopher Catherine Malabou ventures a new approach that emphasizes the intertwined, networked relationships among the biological, the technological, and the symbolic. Malabou traces the modern metamorphoses of intelligence, seeking to understand how neurobiological and neurotechnological advances have transformed our view. She considers three crucial developments: the notion of intelligence as an empirical, genetically based quality measurable by standardized tests; the shift to the epigenetic paradigm, with its emphasis on neural plasticity; and the dawn of artificial intelligence, with its potential to simulate, replicate, and ultimately surpass the workings of the brain. Malabou concludes that a dialogue between human and cybernetic intelligence offers the best if not the only means to build a democratic future. A strikingly original exploration of our changing notions of intelligence and the human and their far-reaching philosophical and political implications, Morphing Intelligence is an essential analysis of the porous border between symbolic and biological life at a time when once-clear distinctions between mind and machine have become uncertain.

Being Up for Grabs

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781785420283
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (22 download)

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Book Synopsis Being Up for Grabs by : Hilan Bensusan

Download or read book Being Up for Grabs written by Hilan Bensusan and published by . This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book on contingency. More than claiming that chaos reigns, it spells out the details of its governance in a metaphysics of accident. It looks at what is up for grabs in terms of fragments, doubts and rhythms, engaging with Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Quentin Meillassoux among others in the process.

Genesis and Validity

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Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 081229999X
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Genesis and Validity by : Martin Jay

Download or read book Genesis and Validity written by Martin Jay and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-11-12 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is no more contentious and perennial issue in the history of modern Western thought than the vexed relationship between the genesis of an idea and its claim to validity beyond it. Can ideas or values transcend their temporal origins and overcome the sin of their original context, and in so doing earn abiding respect for their intrinsic merit? Or do they inevitably reflect them in ways that undermine their universal aspirations? Are discrete contexts so incommensurable and unique that the smooth passage of ideas from one to the other is impossible? Are we always trapped by the limits of our own cultural standpoints and partial perspectives, or can we somehow escape their constraints and enter into a fruitful dialogue with others? These persistent questions are at the heart of the discipline known as intellectual history, which deals not only with ideas, but also with the men and women who generate, disseminate, and criticize them. The essays in this collection, by one of the most recognized figures in the field, address them through engagement with leading intellectual historians—Hans Blumenberg, Quentin Skinner, Hayden White, Isaiah Berlin, Frank Ankersmit—as well other giants of modern thought—Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Georg Lukács. They touch on a wide variety of related topics, ranging from the heroism of modern life to the ability of photographs to lie. In addition, they explore the fraught connections between philosophy and theory, the truth of history and the truthfulness of historians, and the weaponization of free speech for other purposes.