Not Even a God Can Save Us Now: Reading Machiavelli after Heidegger

Can technology save us?

Asks the reader to: assume there is incredible technological progress in endeavours to solve problems of energy scarcity, pollution and congestion; imagine a super Super Car powered by a pollution-free perpetual motion engine; imagine a super Internet which provides free and efficient access to all the databases and libraries in the world. The result would be a social and environmental disaster...

Reading Brandom Reading Heidegger

While brilliance and originality surely top the list of qualities shared by Brandom and Heidegger, another commonality is a tendency to treat their predecessors as partial and sometimes confused versions of themselves. Heidegger, therefore, could hardly be indignant on principle if Brandom finds a fair bit of Making it Explicit in the first division of Being and Time. Nevertheless, some details...

How nontraditional model systems can save us

In this essay I would like to highlight how work in nontraditional model systems is an imperative for our society to prepare for problems we do not even know exist. I present examples of how discovery in nontraditional systems has been critical for fundamental advancement in cell biology. I also discuss how as a collective we might harvest both new questions and new solutions to old problems fr...

"If not us, who? If not now, when?".

Save Can

This article discusses the possibilities that a deeper engagement with the work of Gabriel Tarde opens for Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It argues that the combination of ANT’s methodological and analytical orientation and Tarde’s neo-monadology offers an appropriate framework for the study of new forms of political activism. Findings from an ethnographic research on the conflict surrounding the ...