"The Subway Series" A Joint Colloquium Between Harvard History of Science and MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society
The Adventures of Mr. Machine, with Morals Jessica Riskin, Stanford University Abstract: The Enlightenment man-machine expressed a moral impulse: to tame the rational self unleashed by Descartes and his contemporaries. Reacting against the disembodiment of the human self, Enlightenment materialists snatched the soul from the heavens and drove it into the earth, making it a "soul of mud." Thrusting the arrogant human "I" into the material continuum of nature, the man-machine opened a conversation about just where and how it fitted in. Embarking on this conversation, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, author of the definitive man-machine, produced some of the first glimmers of a modern (but deeply contingent, non-progressive) theory of evolution. Monday, October 26, 2009 4pm Located at MIT Building E51-095
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