Prof. Jessica Riskin (Stanford), The Restless Clock
Monday, 7/5/2012, 18:00
Giman Building, room 449
This paper comes out of a book-in-progress on the history of the notion of the human-machine: the use of machines as models to understand living creatures, particularly human beings, since the 17th century. The chronicle follows an escalating struggle over the role of agency, or purposeful action, in nature’s machinery generally, and in the machinery of life in particular. At the heart of the struggle lay a difference of opinion about what form a natural science should take. Did naturalism require that the sciences, including those that studied the phenomena of living beings, ban all appeals to agency, leaving purposeful action, as the 17th-century authors of the New Science mandated, to the province of a supernatural God? Or, on the contrary, must a rigorously naturalist science of life confront the ubiquitously apparent phenomenon of purpose and naturalize it: seek it out within the very architecture of nature and build it into that of naturalist explanation? The book argues that the latter active-mechanist tradition, though eclipsed by the former brute-mechanist one, acted in continual dialectic with it, and that recognizing the history of this dialectic can shed light on current debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. The title comes from a passage in Leibniz’s New Essays, and is meant to suggest that in the organizing mechanist analogies of the 17th century, clockwork did not necessarily signify what it later came to mean – passive, rigid, regular, constrained – but could instead imply quite a different set of qualities: responsive, forceful, purposeful, sentient, restless.
Chair: Prof. Yossi Schwartz