Potential Of Things Research Articles

Working knowledge or How to express things in works?

It is a basic assumption of classical modern epistemology that any genuine / true knowledge is factual knowledge (Tatsachenwissen). Moreover, separate facts correspond with the certain statements regarding how the things are presented to us. If these statements are true and genuine, then the corresponding facts are being present and visa versa. However, the philosophy of technology insists on the fact, that we, the people, carry out not only world contemplation so as to enunciate true statements. We all interact somehow with the material things when we either do something or build. For this very purpose we need some knowledge that is to be examined and further developed. There are suggestions to characterize this very knowledge as material knowledge (Dingwissen). However, this expression after all deceives the addressee. It is reasonable to suppose that there exist the working knowledge knowledge concerning the components operate within the scope of the clock mechanism or steelworks (Uhrwerk oder Stahlwerk). The most important thing is not the potential of things but the correlation between them this way or another.

Empathet(H)Ics: Intersubjectivity, Interobjectivity, and (Non)Human Storytellers in Colum Mccann’s Let The Great World Spin

Tracing some of the inflection points in our conceptualization of empathy, social cognition, intersubjective understanding, and social theories over time, this essay attempts to contextualize and give a possible explanation to the more radical changes determined by the so-called nonhuman turn. Drawing on the theories proposed by Steven Connor, Bill Brown, and Bruno Latour on the relations between human and nonhuman agents, the paper will argue for the inherent potential of things to both exceed the limits of human agency and cognitive capacities (specifically, memory and intersubjective understanding) and foster their expansion. A reading of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) will emphasize the importance of interobjectivity as a mechanism of augmenting empathy and intersubjective understanding. The polyphony of narrativized memories of loss, mourning, trauma – and even pre-trauma, in their construction of an alternative history to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, uses things to encode, store, and retrieve memories, as well as to facilitate (re)connections with others beyond boundaries of space, time, or death. Thus, the democratic force of storytelling returns to corroborate “a democracy extended to things” (Latour).

Martin Evans: joint winner of 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine

Martin Evans: joint winner of 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine