Would Plato’s Cyborg be male?

I do this philosophy course at the university of Utrecht. Fascinating (and not in Spock’s connotation). The professors make us compare texts and write no more than approximately three hundred words about it. That is a challenge. Have a look of what I cooked up from the texts of
1. Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Phaedrus (1)
2. Jos de Mul’s chapter 1, part four of Filosofie in Cyberspace (2)  (in Dutch) and
3. Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (3) .
Is there any coomunality in the texts and if so, what is it. If not what is the common difference? Etc. So, after a couple of work-through-the-nights, I came up with my common denominator: would Plato’s Cyborg be male? Make up your own mind!

Tagged with: social construtivism, rhetoric, plato, donnan haraway, de mul, cyborg manifesto, benjamin jowett, technological determinism, philosophy,

“Sokal’s Hoax”

One of the unanswerable questions in life is whether philosophy is a science or not. To me it is not. Philosophy is like a fitness center. The activities are absolutely pointless but it looks cool and it might help you doing a proper sport (science). The relation between philosophy and science has not always been the same. In ancient times it was believed that philosophy began where science stopped. But that held no water for science only progresses over time and it would put philosophy in the same perilous position as religion. Useless rearguard fights with the inevitable result of unconditional surrender. It has also been said that philosophy was a mother and her three children were the natural sciences, language sciences and psychology.
The post-modernists claimed that those children had grown up and had become too specialized for mother to understand. As every good mother knows, you should leave their children alone when they are grown up. But post-modernist mommy didn’t do that. In stead she started ‘parroting’ her daughters. She used the vocabulary of her offspring in order to disguise her erratic thoughts and by doing so created a verbal diarrhea that is unparalleled until now. Let me give you an example:

Tagged with: social context, sokal, post modernism, philosophy,