Durkheim on MANA - The Original "Floating Signifier" // 179

Join for ad-free and more episodes https://www.patreon.com/plasticpillsHubert Dreyfus loved recounting how he was maligned for his AI skepticism, which was informed by applications of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and turned out to be correct as of 2007. Is he still correct in the age of LLMs and self-driving cars?Link to article:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370207001452

All episodes are ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpillsWhile many had hoped for a Butlerian Crusade against the thinking machines, the Pope has instead released a lukewarm encyclical asking the mean machine men making automated murder drones to please be nice to us. This episode we evaluate whether Christian Humanism has any juice left.https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

More where this came from at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpillsPeople have not always had a self, our selves were invented. According to Foucault, our concept of self emerged from religious technologies, genres of writing, and the institutions that perpetuated them. https://amzn.to/4uWyVAg  

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This week we inspect the latest form of anthropotechnics, its surrounding moral panic, and American Psycho comparisons (Baudrillard was right about everything).Get hundreds of hours more at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

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Find all episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpillsThis week we read Sloterdijk's 1999 "Rules for the Human Zoo" (https://web.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/docs/Elmauer.pdf) which was the source of immediate controversy and accusations of fascism and eugenics. We see what the hype was about. 

Find All Episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/c/plasticpills.We read the eminent The Gift (https://amzn.to/3NAenx3) by Marcel Mauss which is important to later theorists including Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida.(originally recorded 08/24)

Find All Episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/c/plasticpills.We read Durkheim's Elementary forms of Religious Life (https://amzn.to/4c1ubkB) and try to get a hold on a primordial concept, what for Claude Levi-Strauss exemplifies the floating signifier: it's MANA (originally recorded 08/24).