On sense: Romanticism for a technological age
Abstract
This research is a philosophical investigation of the digital revolution taking place in our contemporary Western culture and beyond. It traces the increase of human relations through various screens and our gradual alienation from the living world, from nature, or Husserl's Lebenswelt. In the context of this revolution I contemplate the loss of a sense of corporeality, that is, an estrangement from our body and more precisely from our senses. The first chapter is a play on sense, a confounding of codes, on the example of the “foole” in Hobbes' Leviathan. The second chapter unveils a sensuous dimension of multiple meanings underlying our languages. The third chapter scrutinizes our treatment of the life-world in a technological world. The fourth chapter interrogates a strategy of contemporary business that is modeled on the human nervous system, as perhaps a Foucaultian next step in the disciplinization of man; the fifth chapter speculates on practices and approaches to recuperate the threatened world of sense and the senses, it seeks to counterbalance the technological obsession that interpellates us as the machines of our inventions; and the sixth chapter considers images and metaphors with which scientists explain the workings of nature and their implications for philosophy. Each chapter provides a perspective on sense and the senses in our contemporary world.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Weinstein, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Political science|Philosophy
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