Latin pages: Essays

 Latin Pages:  ESSAYS
 
Although the articles and essays included here are not always precisely Latin, or about Latin, they do address things a thoughtful person might well consider interesting, or--dare I say it?--important.
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"As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum  observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock."

    - excerpt from "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (below):   Compare our day to a Roman's day.

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Doherty Foreign Language,
Jan 5, 2010 10:23 AM
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Doherty Foreign Language,
Jan 5, 2010 10:23 AM
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Doherty Foreign Language,
Jan 5, 2010 10:47 AM