Lecturer
Peter Galison
Joseph Pellegrino University Professor, Department of Physics and Philosophy of Science, Harvard University
How can we track the history of the self from the 1920s through the early 2000s by following quite material technologies? What, for example, did Hermann Rorschach's famous ink blot tests presuppose about the self, and once these images came into play millions of times, how did they reshape our broad conception of the self? How do cybernetic-feedback machines press on our notion of intention? How do massive technological failures reshape our understanding of the shifting relation between human and machine causation--even what counts as the boundary between people and nature?