Stephen L. Talbott: Miscellaneous Papers and Addresses

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Following are a few unclassifiable articles not likely listed elsewhere.

Goethean Science: A Book Review
Review of Goethe's Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature, edited by David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1998). Is a qualitative science possible?

Computers, the Internet, and the Abdication of Consciousness
Text of an interview conducted by Dr. Dolores Brien for the (now-defunct) "C. G. Jung" page on the web.

Meetings with a Snake
What is lost when we use video and computer technology in the classroom? This paper also discusses the relation between quantitative and qualitative educational research. (Paper published in the March, 1997 Research Bulletin of the Waldorf Education Research Institute.)

Help Me! I Can't Stop Shoveling Facts!
Why we cannot help ourselves when it comes to treating students as receptacles for facts. The problem has to do with the abstract habits of thought we have cultivated over the past few centuries. They leave us with almost no choice but to treat all knowledge as shovel-able facts. We call it "information" today.

On Being Determinedly Literate
A discussion of technological determinism with specific reference to Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy. (You may also want to look at my objections to the notion of "secondary orality." See "Surfing Ancient, Homeric Fields" in NetFuture.)

Media Ecology: Taking Account of the Knower
Technology does not determine cultural developments in a cause-and-effect sense. Rather, it plays the kind of role that powerful meanings play, and its meanings are always our own. (This paper has been published in the online journal, Media Ecology.)

Aversion to Risks -- Or Loss of Meaning?
A critical response to Henry J. Perkinson's No Safety in Numbers: How the Computer Quantified Everything and Made People Risk-Aversive. I argue that the loss of meaning is a more fundamental factor than risk-aversion in understanding the computerized society.

Between Discordant Eras
Reflections upon the nature of the human heart. When William Harvey began dissecting animals and observing the heart at the moment it ceased moving, what ancient knowledge of the human being was lost? Can we possibly retrieve any of that knowledge? Clearly it will not be easy. (Paper published in the September, 1998 issue of Archetype, Newsletter Articles Supplement of the Science Group of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain.)

Owen Barfield and Technological Society
The ultimate tendency of materialism, and of the technological drive that serves materialism so well, is to abandon the material world altogether in favor of abstractions. This abandonment was, in fact, the essential core of materialism from the very beginning. (Paper delivered at the Owen Barfield Centenary celebration, December 4-5, 1999, at Columbia and Drew Universities.)

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Last revision: August 20, 2011

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Steve Talbott :: Miscellaneous Papers and Addresses