Why must Luke Skywalker turn off his in computer at the climactic moment of George Lucas’s iconic film Star Wars (1977)? The film started a revolution in cinematic special-effects, but underlying its narrative logic is a deeply rooted anxiety about the right uses of technology. If man, as Hannah Arendt famously put it, is homo faber, the “creator,” the tool-making animal, then from at least Plato to the present, human beings have told stories about how dangerous tools can be. This course investigates philosophical writing, novels, plays, and films from a variety of world cultures to explore the vexed relationship between humans and the technologies they create. Why are human beings, perhaps more than ever at the start of the 21st century, so enamored with technological progress? Why is technophilia, the love of technology, so often accompanied by its opposite, technophobia, the fear of technology? What do the attitudes represented in the texts and films we examine tell us about human agency and about the relationship between science and religion?

Core: Cultural Exploration & Analysis (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 3 Weeks

Sections (Summer 2022)

CCEA-UH 1043-000 (6042)
06/13/2022 – 07/07/2022 Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu
1:00 PM – 3:00 PM (Early afternoon)
at Abu Dhabi
Instructed by Patell, Cyrus