Want to meet Freud? Here’s an interesting historical science fiction novel focusing on Freud:
“After being astounded by how holographic technology’s resurrected scores of celebrities and historical figures, Professor Alex Carson gets swept up in a struggle between Red Chinese and neo-Nazi forces who both want Sigmund Freud’s early journals, journals stolen by a young Gestapo agent in March 1938 during the second Nazi raid on Freud’s apartment—a raid ending with Anna Freud’s terrifying abduction and interrogation at Gestapo headquarters. …
Periodically, readers are treated to excerpts from the Lost Journals, which accurately depict the evolution of Freud’s revolutionary methods and theories. Freud’s Lost Journals is a thinking person’s thriller.”
Check it out here: Freud’s Lost Journals
Daniel Pick, author of Psychoanalysis: A Very Short Introduction, introduces psychoanalysis, discusses its role within history and culture and tells us how psychoanalysis is used today. How has psychoanalysis developed from the late nineteenth century?
The post Introducing psychoanalysis appeared first on OUPblog.
By Luciano Floridi
When we use a computer, its performance seems to degrade progressively. This is not a mere impression. An old version of Firefox, the free Web browser, was infamous for its “memory leaks”: it would consume increasing amounts of memory to the detriment of other programs. Bugs in the software actually do slow down the system. We all know what the solution is: reboot. We restart the computer, the memory is reset, and the performance is restored, until the bugs slow it down again.
Philosophy is a bit like a computer with a memory leak. It starts well, dealing with significant and serious issues that matter to anyone. Yet, in time, its very success slows it down. Philosophy begins to care more about philosophers’ questions than philosophical ones, consuming increasing amount of intellectual attention. Scholasticism is the ultimate freezing of the system, the equivalent of Windows’ “blue screen of death”; so many resources are devoted to internal issues that no external input can be processed anymore, and the system stops. The world may be undergoing a revolution, but the philosophical discourse remains detached and utterly oblivious. Time to reboot the system.
Philosophical “rebooting” moments are rare. They are usually prompted by major transformations in the surrounding reality. Since the nineties, I have been arguing that we are witnessing one of those moments. It now seems obvious, even to the most conservative person, that we are experiencing a turning point in our history. The information revolution is profoundly changing every aspect of our lives, quickly and relentlessly. The list is known but worth recalling: education and entertainment, communication and commerce, love and hate, politics and conflicts, culture and health, … feel free to add your preferred topics; they are all transformed by technologies that have the recording and processing of information as their core functions. Meanwhile, philosophy is degrading into self-referential discussions on irrelevancies.
The result of a philosophical rebooting today can only be beneficial. Digital technologies are not just tools merely modifying how we deal with the world, like the wheel or the engine. They are above all formatting systems, which increasingly affect how we understand the world, how we relate to it, how we see ourselves, and how we interact with each other.
The ‘Fourth Revolution’ betrays what I believe to be one of the topics that deserves our full intellectual attention today. The idea is quite simple. Three scientific revolutions have had great impact on how we see ourselves. In changing our understanding of the external world they also modified our self-understanding. After the Copernican revolution, the heliocentric cosmology displaced the Earth and hence humanity from the centre of the universe. The Darwinian revolution showed that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through natural selection, thus displacing humanity from the centre of the biological kingdom. And following Freud, we acknowledge nowadays that the mind is also unconscious. So we are not immobile, at the centre of the universe, we are not unnaturally separate and diverse from the rest of the animal kingdom, and we are very far from being minds entirely transparent to ourselves. One may easily question the value of this classic picture. After all, Freud was the first to interpret these three revolutions as part of a single process of reassessment of human nature and his perspective was blatantly self-serving. But replace Freud with cognitive science or neuroscience, and we can still find the framework useful to explain our strong impression that something very significant and profound has recently happened to our self-understanding.
Since the fifties, computer science and digital technologies have been changing our conception of who we are. In many respects, we are discovering that we are not standalone entities, but rather interconnected informational agents, sharing with other biological agents and engineered artefacts a global environment ultimately made of information, the infosphere. If we need a champion for the fourth revolution this should definitely be Alan Turing.
The fourth revolution offers a historical opportunity to rethink our exceptionalism in at least two ways. Our intelligent behaviour is confronted by the smart behaviour of engineered artefacts, which can be adaptively more successful in the infosphere. Our free behaviour is confronted by the predictability and manipulability of our choices, and by the development of artificial autonomy. Digital technologies sometimes seem to know more about our wishes than we do. We need philosophy to make sense of the radical changes brought about by the information revolution. And we need it to be at its best, for the difficulties we are facing are challenging. Clearly, we need to reboot philosophy now.
Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. He was recently appointed as ethics advisor to Google. His most recent book is The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only philosophy articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Alan Turing Statue at Bletchley Park. By Ian Petticrew. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The post Rebooting Philosophy appeared first on OUPblog.
Renowned psychologist, author, and filmmaker David Cohen returns next week with the release of The Escape of Sigmund Freud, a new book exploring Freud's final years in Vienna and his flight from the Nazi rise.As Hitler seized power in Germany throughout the early 1930s, the Nazis passed a series of decrees intended to limit the personal and financial freedom of Jews throughout the country. Agents
Below is another reflection on the life of a publicist from Michelle Rafferty. Rafferty has been a Publicity Assistant at Oxford University Press since September 2008. Prior to Oxford she interned at Norton Publishing for a summer and taught 9th & 10th grade Literature. She is chronicling her adventures in publishing every Friday so be sure to visit again next week.
When I found out Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick died this past Sunday, I went home and opened my copy of Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. It looks a lot liked Richard Kim’s copy of Epistemology of the Closet, which he described in his own tribute to Sedgwick in The Nation this week: “text underlined in four different colors of pencil, emblazoned with streaks of yellow and green neon highlighter. Little enigmatic notes crawl up and down the margins of dog-eared pages, and decomposing Post-it notes…”
I read and re-read Between Men as I wrote my thesis during my Senior year of college (I titled it Entourage: On the Performance of Masculinity, and yes that is Entourage the HBO series). My inscriptions in the book are now hard to make out, but I can tell when I really got something by the amount of exclamation marks I wrote on the page. As I tried to decipher my annotations two years later, I started reading…
The subject of Between Men is the “erotic triangle”—and notably not synonymous with menage a trois. In the second chapter, “Swan in Love: The Example of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Sedgwick uses Shakespeare’s sonnets to explain the “erotic triangle” configuration of one female and two male subjects, a running motif in English literature, and consequently the topic of Between Men. If you ever took an English literature class, most likely the question of characters’ sexuality came up in discussion. We love finding homoerotic undertones. These discussions can be endless because of the nature of subtext: it’s intangible and subjective. Between Men helps readers manage the discussion of relations between men without pointing to biology or love. Rather, Sedgwick explains how gender implicates the “erotic triangle” and what this means in more concrete terms: power. She uses Shakespeare’s Sonnets to lay out the tenets for understanding the role women play in the continuum of male bonding.
The Sonnets are the perfect example of the “erotic triangle” because of their characters: the poet (Shakespeare), the fair youth, and the dark lady. Throughout the Sonnets, the female is the “vehicle” which brings men closer together. She is “evil” while the fair youth is an “angel.” She is reduced to her “will” (Elizabethan for “sex drive”) and men take turns sleeping with her, only building their solidarity. And while the bonds between men are virilizing, the relationship between a man and a woman is a “radical degeneration of substance.” Ouch.
Were the relationships between men perceived as strange? Not at all. According to Sedgwick, Elizabethan England was not unlike the erotically charged mentorship role that men took on with young boys in classical Greece. Sedgwick notes: “There were no perceived discontinuity between the male bonds at the Continental Baths and the male bonds at the Bohemian Grove or in the board room or Senate cloakroom.” Women were still on the same level of slaves (part of the mentor’s job was teaching young boys how to command women and slaves), proving that while heterosexuality maintained patriarchy in both societies, homophobia did not. Sedgwick compares this to the era of Shakespeare in which “male-male love…was built into the system. A wife wasn’t seen as an opposition, a hurdle, something to get jealous about because it was an institution.” In modern times this might equate to: “it is what it is” (shrug).
When people ask what I wrote my thesis on, I say, “It’s about guys wanting guys.” They assume I mean that I’m talking about homosexuality, but it wasn’t at all. I’ve never seriously studied biology, nor do I dig Freud. Sedgwick gave me a framework for making sense of power, and it’s one I continue to refer to as I try to make sense of artistic mediums and life, and their significant overlap. Everyday women—both fictional and non—choose whether they want to be docile or not; but as we know, it’s not always that simple. I was unfortunate enough to work in an environment not so long ago that had a long standing tradition of “boy’s club.” As a result, men could get away with lackluster performance and lewd remarks, and not much was done about it because their “establishment” had been around for so long, and the community supported them. At the same time, many women have taken advantage of both their role as the objectified sex object and men’s group perverseness, commodifying themselves to make a living—we see rather untalented celebrities do this all the time. These women are either seen as business savvy and autonomous, or pandering to and reinforcing what Sedgwick called an “unsymmetrical erotic triangle.”
How should women assert their power? There are a lot of opinions today about how this should be done; authors, leaders, and the media have their own ideas of what’s too feminine and what’s not enough, which actions are transformative and which perpetuate patriarchy. Admittedly, it’s difficult at times to not feel some “feminist guilt”—can watching The Hills and getting hair highlights be the assertions of a confident woman? Or are these actions damning all womankind in tiny increments?
