Sublime Dreams of Living Machines

by Kang, Minsoo

• ISBN13: 9780674049352
• ISBN10: 0674049357
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-02-28
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton-better known today as the robot-has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity.Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes with a reflection on the destructive confrontation between humanity and machinery in the modern era and the reverberations of the humanity-machinery theme today.Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is an ambitious historical exploration and, at heart, an attempt to fully elucidate the rich and varied ways we have utilized our most uncanny creations to explore essential questions about ourselves.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
The Power of the Automaton	p. 14
Between Magic and Mechanics: The Automaton in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance	p. 55
The Man-machine in the World-machine, 1637-1748	p. 103
From the Man-machine to the Automaton-man, 1748-1793	p. 146
The Uncanny Automaton, 1789-1833	p. 185
The Living Machines of the Industrial Age, 1833-1914	p. 223
The Revolt of the Robots, 1914-1935	p. 264
Conclusion	p. 297
Notes	p. 311
Acknowledgments	p. 363
Index	p. 365
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