Word: barretts
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...what has this technology accomplished? In Barrett's dour view, it has enslaved us. William Blake's "dark Satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution have brought forth even more hellish inventions to refuel the Western world's "frantic dynamism." Solzhenitsyn's Gulag, B.F. Skinner's proposals for a "technology of behavior" and the threat of nuclear holocaust complete a disastrous legacy...
...ILLUSION OF TECHNIQUE by William Barrett...
Philosophy, William Barrett once confessed, is "a very dubious profession" in America. But in his new book, The Illusion of Technique, Barrett vigorously rehabilitates the profession. For better or worse, he writes, philosophers have made the modern world: "If there had not been those early Greek thinkers who created philosophy, there would be no atomic bombs." Barrett's narrative of the stages in between is highly speculative. But his hold on elusive ideas is so sure, his erudition so vast and effortless, that a coherent historical design gradually emerges: Aristotle's invention of logic culminated in the scientific...
These are familiar indictments, but Barrett enlists them in a new cause. In Irrational Man, his classic treatise on existentialism, the author warned that man's sheer cleverness could provoke his ruin. In The Illusion of Technique, Barrett argues that even if we survive, the familiar world may well recede from our grasp, supplanted by systems that aspire to control human destiny. Barrett contends that philosophy can recall us to that world. To support his claim he cites three modern figures: Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and William James. However divergent in their styles of thought, they shared Kant...
Will the President gain his lost ground? In the months to come, Barrett will be the man best placed to help us answer that question for TIME'S readers...