|
|
|
Email
|
|
|
Andrew Pickering is internationally known as a leader in the field of science and technology studies. He is the author of Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (1984), The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (1995) and contributor to Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality (with Don Ihde, Evan Selinger, Donna Jeanne Haraway, and Bruno Latour, 2003). He has written on topics as diverse as post-World War II particle physics; mathematics, science and industry in the 19th-century; and science, technology and warfare in and since WWII. His most recent book, Sketches of Another Future: Cybernetics in Britain, 1940-2000 (forthcoming), analyzes cybernetics as a distinctive form of life—spanning brain science, psychiatry, robotics, the theory of complex systems, management, politics, the arts, education and spirituality. Pickering has held fellowships at MIT, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He is professor of sociology and philosophy at the University of Exeter, where he moved in 2007 after serving as professor of sociology and director of an interdisciplinary STS graduate program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. |
|
Brains, Selves and Spirituality in the History of Cybernetics
All of the practices and states that I talk about in my paper are already marginalized in contemporary society—it feels vaguely embarrassing to talk about them in public. But at least the margins exist, and one can go there if one likes. The transhumanists would like to engineer them out of existence entirely and forever. Yes, I’m starting not to like transhumanism.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|