Turning Toward Technology: A Glimpse into the Asian Paradigm / Edition 1

by Alessandro Tomasi

Overview

We live in an age when the dominant technologically utilitarian worldview is undergoing a transformation. To increase our awareness of this change, Turning Toward Technology introduces readers to the possibility of an alternative technological worldview by examining foundational concepts to Asian thought.

The early Eastern philosophical treatment of technology was not ethical, but ontological, exhibiting sensitivity to how human existence was defined and determined in its relation to technology and to reality as a whole. Within the Eastern cultural orientation, technological development was guided by a singular aesthetic sensibility to the useful, the good, the beautiful, the true, and the holy. Instead of controlling the shape of future technology by systems of rational management, George Teschner and Alessandro Tomasi recommend a view of technology that arises from questioning fundamental assumptions within Western culture about knowledge, reality, and human nature.

Turning Toward Technology aims to stimulate awareness of an alternative technological paradigm, and thus a different mode of social action that can establish an optimistic future for global civilization.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412863148
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	09/30/2016
Pages:	210
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.70(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

George Teschner has taught in the philosophy departments of the City University of New York, The New School, and Christopher Newport University in Virginia.

Alessandro Tomasi has taught at the University of Rhode Island and at Rhode Island College.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: Turning Toward

Paradigmatic Thinking

The Technological Paradigm and the Turning

Two Different Methodologies

Turning Toward: The Asian Paradigm

1 The Western Technological Paradigm
The Paradigmatic Critic
Useful and Efficient Above All
/Nostalgia for a Lost Agency
The Vanishing Telos
/A Technological Middle Path

2 Cook Ting Uses a Bladeless Knife
/Cook Ting's Knife
The Simplicity of the Technological Mind
The Use of the Useless
The Technological The
Intimacy and Embodiment
The Hinge of the Technological Way

3 Bow and Arrow without the Archer
/Arjuna's Technological Crisis
The Karma Yoga of Technology
/Technological Action and Its Eternal Witness
/Sacrificial Action
/Agent-less Technology
/Lost the Archer: Found the Warrior

4 The Lucky Leader
/Political Fortuna
The Rule of the Technocrat
/Confucianism: The Value of Natural Ease
/Taoism: Walking without Touching the Ground
The Lucky Natural Intimate Leader

5 nyat as Technological Intimacy
The Standpoint of nyat
The Epistemological Way
The Ontological Way
The Mystical Way
/Technological Power

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index