Experimenting The Human

Download or read book Experimenting the Human written by G Douglas Barrett and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-01-13 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human. In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements. Rather than pursuing the human's beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human.

Download or read book The Human Experiment written by Jane Poynter and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2006-08-18 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's a story that has never been told … until now. Imagine being sealed into a closed environment for two years — cut off from the outside world with only seven other people — enduring never-ending hunger, severely low levels of oxygen, and extremely difficult relationships. Crew members struggled to survive in Biosphere 2, where they swore nothing would go in or out — no food or water, not even air — all in the name of science. For the first time, biospherian Jane Poynter — who lived and loved in the Biosphere — is ready to share what really happened in there. She takes readers on a riveting, fast-paced trip through shattered lives, scientific discovery, cults, love, fears of insanity, and inspiring human endurance. The eight biospherians who closed themselves into the Biosphere emerged 730 days later… much wiser, thinner, and having done what many had said was impossible.

Download or read book Experimenting with Humans and Animals written by Anita Guerrini and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-07-02 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethical questions about the use of animals and humans in research remain among the most vexing within both the scientific community and society at large. These often rancorous arguments have gone on, however, with little awareness of their historical antecedents. Experimentation on animals and particularly humans is often assumed to be a uniquely modern phenomenon, but the ideas and attitudes that encourage the biological and medical sciences to experiment on living creatures date from the earliest expression of Western thought. Here, Anita Guerrini looks at the history of these practices from vivisection in ancient Alexandria to present-day battles over animal rights and medical research employing human subjects. Guerrini discusses key historical episodes, including the discovery of blood circulation, the development of smallpox and polio vaccines, and recent AIDS research. She also explores the rise of the antivivisection movement in Victorian England, the modern animal rights movement, and current debates over gene therapy.--From publisher description.

Download or read book Designing Human Practices written by Paul Rabinow and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-05-21 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2006 anthropologists Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett set out to rethink the role that human sciences play in biological research, creating the Human Practices division of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center—a facility established to create design standards for the engineering of new enzymes, genetic circuits, cells, and other biological entities—to formulate a new approach to the ethical, security, and philosophical considerations of controversial biological work. They sought not simply to act as watchdogs but to integrate the biosciences with their own discipline in a more fundamentally interdependent way, inventing a new, dynamic, and experimental anthropology that they could bring to bear on the center’s biological research. Designing Human Practices is a detailed account of this anthropological experiment and, ultimately, its rejection. It provides new insights into the possibilities and limitations of collaboration, and diagnoses the micro-politics which effectively constrained the potential for mutual scientific flourishing. Synthesizing multiple disciplines, including biology, genetics, anthropology, and philosophy, alongside a thorough examination of funding entities such as the National Science Foundation, Designing Human Practices pushes the social study of science into new and provocative territory, utilizing a real-world experience as a springboard for timely reflections on how the human and life sciences can and should transform each other.

Download or read book The Uses of Humans in Experiment written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-03-11 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific experimentation with humans has a long history. Combining elements of history of science with history of medicine, The Uses of Humans in Experiment illustrates how humans have grappled with issues of consent, and how scientists have balanced experience with empiricism to achieve insights for scientific as well as clinical progress. The modern incarnation of ethics has often been considered a product of the second half of the twentieth century, as enshrined in international laws and codes, but these authors remind us that this territory has long been debated, considered, and revisited as a fundamental part of the scientific enterprise that privileges humans as ideal subjects for advancing research.

Download or read book Biomedical Ethics and the Law written by James M. Humber and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past few years an increasing number of colleges and universities have added courses in biomedical ethics to their curricula. To some extent, these additions serve to satisfy student demands for "relevance. " But it is also true that such changes reflect a deepening desire on the part of the academic community to deal effectively with a host of problems which must be solved if we are to have a health-care delivery system which is efficient, humane, and just. To a large degree, these problems are the unique result of both rapidly changing moral values and dramatic advances in biomedical technology. The past decade has witnessed sudden and conspicuous controversy over the morality and legality of new practices relating to abortion, therapy for the mentally ill, experimentation using human subjects, forms of genetic interven tion, suicide, and euthanasia. Malpractice suits abound and astronomical fees for malpractice insurance threaten the very possibility of medical and health-care practice. Without the backing of a clear moral consensus, the law is frequently forced into resolving these conflicts only to see the moral issues involved still hotly debated and the validity of existing law further questioned. In the case of abortion, for example, the laws have changed radically, and the widely pub licized recent conviction of Dr. Edelin in Boston has done little to foster a moral consensus or even render the exact status of the law beyond reasonable question.

Download or read book Experiment and the Making of Meaning written by D.C. Gooding and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: . . . the topic of 'meaning' is the one topic discussed in philosophy in which there is literally nothing but 'theory' - literally nothing that can be labelled or even ridiculed as the 'common sense view'. Putnam, 'The Meaning of Meaning' This book explores some truths behind the truism that experimentation is a hallmark of scientific activity. Scientists' descriptions of nature result from two sorts of encounter: they interact with each other and with nature. Philosophy of science has, by and large, failed to give an account of either sort of interaction. Philosophers typically imagine that scientists observe, theorize and experiment in order to produce general knowledge of natural laws, knowledge which can be applied to generate new theories and technologies. This view bifurcates the scientist's world into an empirical world of pre-articulate experience and know how and another world of talk, thought and argument. Most received philosophies of science focus so exclusively on the literary world of representations that they cannot begin to address the philosophical problems arising from the interaction of these worlds: empirical access as a source of knowledge, meaning and reference, and of course, realism. This has placed the epistemological burden entirely on the predictive role of experiment because, it is argued, testing predictions is all that could show that scientists' theorizing is constrained by nature. Here a purely literary approach contributes to its own demise. The epistemological significance of experiment turns out to be a theoretical matter: cruciality depends on argument, not experiment.