Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical movement that arose in the second half of the 20th century as a critical response to assumptions allegedly present in modernist philosophical ideas regarding culture, identity, history, or language that were developed during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment. Postmodernist thinkers developed concepts like différance, repetition, trace, and hyperreality to subvert "grand narratives", univocity of being, and epistemic certainty. Postmodern philosophy questions the importance of power relationships, personalization, and discourse in the "construction" of truth and world views. Many postmodernists appear to deny that an objective reality exists, and appear to deny that there are objective moral values.
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist and philosopher with an interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed post-structuralism, and had distanced himself from postmodernism.
Hyperreality is a concept in post-structuralism that refers to the process of the evolution of notions of reality, leading to a cultural state of confusion between signs and symbols invented to stand in for reality, and direct perceptions of consensus reality. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which, because of the compression of perceptions of reality in culture and media, what is generally regarded as real and what is understood as fiction are seamlessly blended together in experiences so that there is no longer any clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.
The map–territory relation is the relationship between an object and a representation of that object, as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it. Mistaking the map for the territory is a logical fallacy that occurs when someone confuses the semantics of a term with what it represents. Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that "the map is not the territory" and that "the word is not the thing", encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, that is, confuse conceptual models of reality with reality itself. These ideas are crucial to general semantics, a system Korzybski originated.
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place is a collection of three short essays by Jean Baudrillard published in the French newspaper Libération and British paper The Guardian between January and March 1991.
Simulacra and Simulation is a 1981 philosophical treatise by the philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, in which he seeks to examine the relationships between reality, symbols, and society, in particular the significations and symbolism of culture and media involved in constructing an understanding of shared existence.
French philosophy, here taken to mean philosophy in the French language, has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by René Descartes, to 20th century philosophy of science, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, and postmodernism.
We Can Build You is a 1972 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. Written in 1962 as The First in Our Family, it remained unpublished until appearing in serial form as A. Lincoln, Simulacrum in the November 1969 and January 1970 issues of Amazing Stories magazine, re-titled by editor Ted White. The novel was issued as a mass market paperback original by DAW Books in 1972, its final title provided by publisher Donald A. Wollheim. Its first hardcover edition was published in Italy in 1976, and Vintage issued a trade paperback in 1994.
Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, and the famous character of Frankenstein's monster, have influenced popular culture for at least a century. The work has inspired numerous films, television programs, video games and derivative works. The character of the Monster remains one of the most recognized icons in horror fiction.
Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture resembling a high-resolution photograph. Hyperrealism is considered an advancement of photorealism by the methods used to create the resulting paintings or sculptures. The term is primarily applied to an independent art movement and art style in the United States and Europe that has developed since the early 1970s. Carole Feuerman is the forerunner in the hyperrealism movement along with Duane Hanson and John De Andrea.
Frankenstein's Monster is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character is based on the character in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The character has been adapted often in the comic book medium.
The simulation hypothesis proposes that what we experience as the world is actually a simulated reality, such as a computer simulation in which we ourselves are constructs. There has been much debate over this topic in the philosophical discourse, and regarding practical applications in computing.
Iain Hamilton Grant is a British philosopher. He is a senior lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol, United Kingdom. His research interests include ontology, European philosophy, German Idealism, and both contemporary and historical philosophy of nature. He is often associated with the recent philosophical current known as Speculative Realism.
Welcome to the Desert of the Real is a 2002 book by Slavoj Žižek. A Marxist and Lacanian analysis of the ideological and political responses to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Zizek's study incorporates various psychoanalytic, postmodernist, biopolitical, and (Christian) universalist influences into a Marxist dialectical framework.
Alan N. Shapiro is an American science fiction and media theorist. He is a lecturer and essayist in the fields of science fiction studies, media theory, posthumanism, French philosophy, creative coding, technological art, sociology of culture, software theory, robotics, artificial intelligence, and futuristic and transdisciplinary design. Shapiro's book and other published writings on Star Trek have contributed to a change in public perception about the importance of Star Trek for contemporary culture. His published essays on Jean Baudrillard - especially in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies - have contributed to a change in public perception about the importance of Baudrillard's work for culture, philosophy, sociology, and design.
Artificial life is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline was named by Christopher Langton, an American computer scientist, in 1986. In 1987, Langton organized the first conference on the field, in Los Alamos, New Mexico. There are three main kinds of alife, named for their approaches: soft, from software; hard, from hardware; and wet, from biochemistry. Artificial life researchers study traditional biology by trying to recreate aspects of biological phenomena.
Hyper-real religion is a sociological term to describe a new consumer trend in acquiring and enacting religion. The term was first described in the book Religion and Popular Culture: A Hyper-Real Testament by Adam Possamai. The term is used to explore the intersection between postmodernity and religion. The idea has been expanded and critiqued by a number of academics since its creation.
AI takeover—the idea that some kind of artificial intelligence may supplant humankind as the dominant intelligent species on the planet—is a common theme in science fiction. Famous cultural touchstones include Terminator and The Matrix.
Simulation theory or Simulation Theory may refer to:
Fuoco B. Fann is a post-structuralist and cultural theorist. He is noted for synthesizing Post-structuralism with American Literary Criticism, Intercultural Philosophy, and Material Culture Studies. He taught at Lanzhou Jiaotong University, China before moving in 1989 to the United States, where he guest-lectured at California State University, East Bay and UC Davis, and has since resided in California. Fann currently guest lectures at UC Berkeley. Fann's monograph on post-structuralism and intercultural philosophy, This Self We Deserve: A Quest after Modernity, was published in 2020.
