The Great Reversal: How We Let Technology Take Control of the Planet - Softcover

David Edward Tabachnick

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9780802094698: The Great Reversal: How We Let Technology Take Control of the Planet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802094694 ISBN 13: 9780802094698

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2013

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Every day, we are presented with new technologies that can influence human thought and action, such as psychopharmaceuticals, new generation performance enhancing drugs, elective biotechnology, and gastric bypass surgery. Have we let technology go too far in this respect? In The Great Reversal, David Edward Tabachnick contends that this question may not be unique to contemporary society. Through an assessment of the great works of philosophy and politics, Tabachnick explores the largely unrecognized history of technology as an idea.

The Great Reversal takes the reader back to Aristotle’s ancient warning that humanity should never allow technical thinking to cloud our judgment about what makes for a good life. It then charts the path of how we began to relinquish our deeply rooted intellectual and practical capacities that used to allow us to understand and regulate the role of technologies in our lives. As the rise of technology threatens our very humanity, Tabachnick emphasizes that we still may have time to recover and develop these capacities – but we must first decide how far we want to allow technology to determine our existence and our future.

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From the Back Cover:

The Great Reversal seeks to provoke a heightened, critical awareness of just how deep our collective relationship with technology goes, and what is at stake in it. In so doing, it speaks to the cruel irony at the centre of the technological condition: that in our efforts to exercise control over the contingencies that define our existence in the world, we have relinquished our capacity to exert control over the place of technology in our public and private lives ... This, we might say, is the broken heart at the core of David Tabachnick's prescient and insightful book, a broken heart he seeks to mend.

From the Foreword by Darin Barney

If we think of technology as our form of life, then surely technology needs to be reformed. But how? David Edward Tabachnick poses the question in great historical perspective and just the right way, giving technology its due as cultural force and giving our agency its due as a traditional and yet resourceful capacity. There is clarity and hope in his answer.

Albert Borgmann, Regents Professor of Philosophy, University of Montana
Author of Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry

About the Author:

David Edward Tabachnick is a professor in the Department of Political Science, Philosophy and Economics at Nipissing University.

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