Anamnesis presents:
The Modern World and Philosophy
Now accepting submissions for Spring 2025 Issue XI
As winter gives way to spring, we're reflecting on how our modern world has changed and will continue to evolve. Technology is emerging in ways we have yet to fully see, guiding the progress of humanity — in classrooms, doctor’s offices, our homes, and beyond.
Below is a list of questions designed to spark your thinking surrounding this matter. Feel free to take what resonates with you. We hope you enjoy it.
Guiding Questions:
Does this situate our world in a morally gray area or have these questions always existed?
What is the role of morals today? How are they impacted by modern technology?
How can we apply philosophical inquiry through a modern lens to assess new situations created by modern technology, such as how to evaluate the impact of AI?
How does our changing political landscape overlap with technological advancements?
Philosophy is in an infinite battle to say something true about the world, is modern technology pushing us closer to a “truth,” whatever that may constitute? Or have we moved further and further away from reality (again, whatever that may be)?
How has technology affected our beliefs? How have they challenged beliefs? How has it aided in the spread of personal beliefs?
Has modern technology reified, i.e., made us more staunch in creating a ground that exists outside of that?
Does technology provide a ground, origin, foundation, or “truth”? What does modern technology constitute? Progress with no end? What is its teleology? What is technology’s driver? Does it have an arbiter?
How has religion (thinking about the First Amendment right) been implicitly imposed on our belief systems? How have powerful figures in the government used their platform to impose personal beliefs through dissimulation?
Guiding works:
The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays – Martin Heidegger
The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections – Walter Benjamin
Elements of the Philosophy of Right – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Social Contract – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Federalist Papers – Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy – Byung-Chul Han
Leviathan – Thomas Hobbes
The Second Treatise of Government – John Locke
The Wretched of the Earth – Frantz Fanon
The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir
On the Genealogy of Morality – Friedrich Nietzsche
Conversations with Eckermann – Johann Peter Eckermann (about Goethe)
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Critique of the Power of Judgment – Immanuel Kant
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius – Niccolò Machiavelli