Human Being in an Inhuman Age

March 24, 2010

After 2,000 years in which human intelligence has increasingly fabricated and cultivated our world, that world is, for better or for worse, increasingly governed by inhuman rationality. The Arendt Center’s conference, “Human Being in an Inhuman Age”, to be held at Bard College, New York on October 22-23, will bring together artists, technologists, businessmen, academics, and public intellectuals to explore questions like:

  • Will Man Be Able to Control and Direct the Advance of Science?
  • Do Robots and Technology in War, Medicine, and Art Threaten Humanity?
  • What Do the Loss of the Humanities and Rise of On-Line Education Portend?
  • Is Man a Mechanism? An Animal? Or Something More?
  • What Higher Ends does Technology Free Human Beings to Pursue?
    Is Virtual Reality De-Humanizing?

The Arendt Center’s mission is to think through contemporary ethical and political questions in the spirit of Hannah Arendt. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, written in 1950, Arendt traced the rise of totalitarian government to what she called the “loss of the idea of humanity.”

Confirmed speakers include: Ray Kurzweil, Sherry Turkle (MIT), Ron Arkin (Georgia), Susan Silbey (MIT), William Connolly (Johns Hopkins), Thomas Dumm (Amherst College), Nicholson Baker (Novelist), David Rothenberg (Philosopher and Musician), Marianne Constable (UC Berkeley), and others. We expect the final conference to include about 20 speakers and participants.