Cyberspace Odyssey

Towards a Virtual Ontology and Anthropology
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4438-2127-8
Verlag: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 355 Seiten

The emergence of the hominids, more than five million years ago, marked the start of the human odyssey through space and time. This book deals with the last stage of this fascinating journey: the exploration of cyberspace and cybertime. Through the rapid global implementation of information and communication technologies, a new realm for human experience and imagination has been disclosed. Reversely, these postgeographical and posthistorical technologies have started to colonize our bodies and minds. Taking Homer’s Odyssey and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as his starting point, the author investigates the ‘informatization of the worldview’, focusing on its implications for our culture–arts, religion, and science–and, ultimately, our form of life.

Moving across a wide range of disciplines, varying from philosophical anthropology and palaeontology to information theory, and from astrophysics to literary, film and new media studies, the author discusses our ‘cyberspace odyssey’ from a reflective position beyond euphoria and nostalgia. His analysis is as profound as nuanced and deals with issues that will be high on the agenda for many decades to come.

In 2003 a Dutch Edition of Cyberspace Odyssey received the Socrates Prize for the best philosophy book published in Dutch.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mul, Jos de

Über Autor(innen)

Mul, Jos de
Jos de Mul is Full Professor of Philosophical Anthropology at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He has also taught at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Fudan University (Shanghai). Since 2007 he is President of the International Association of Aesthetics (IAA) and since 2005 he is vice-president of the Helmuth Plessner Gesellschaft e.V.

He has published more than twenty books and more than hundred and eighty articles in various scientific journals in the fields of Philosophical Anthropology, the History of (Modern) Continental Philosophy, Philosophy of Art, Philosophy of Information and Communication Technology. His publications include Romantic Desire in (Post)Modern Art and Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 1999) and The Tragedy of Finitude. Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of Life (Yale University Press, 2004). His work has been translated to more than a dozen languages.