Wiley Humanities Festival 2018: Why Technology Matters: The Humanities in the 21st Century

The field of humanities is changing rapidly, along with the world, as new technologies alter centuries of tradition in various disciplines. In this, the third year of the Wiley Humanities Festival, we’ll focus on the digital humanities, and how technology has revolutionized the way the humanities will be taught, learned, and researched for years to come.

The festival will take place Thursday, September 13^th, and will conclude with our free webinar, which looks at why technology matters, especially within the humanities in the twenty-first century. Below you’ll find brief introductions for the participants of our webinar.

Register now for the webinar and join us on September 13^th to take part and learn more about the digital humanities.

Steve has a lifelong commitment to the fundamental mission of teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences.  After graduating in philosophy from McGill University in Montreal and Oxford University, Steve embarked upon a career in SSH publishing spanning over twenty-five years — first at Blackwell Publishers in Oxford UK, and then at Wiley in Boston MA.  Steve has served in various editorial capacities, including as editorial director of the social sciences and humanities books program during a period of transformational change.  Amongst other things, Steve helped lead and launch the creation of Blackwell Reference Online, the world’s largest and most authoritative digital reference resource, and Wiley’s ambitious portfolio of eMRWs.  In more recent years, Steve has been focusing on strategic development and the fast-growing open access program at Wiley.

Professor Kingsley Bolton joined Nanyang Technological University in 2013, as Professor of English Linguistics and Head of the Language and Communication Centre. Professor Kingsley Bolton has published sixteen books (edited and authored), and more than eighty journal articles and book chapters. He is Co-Editor of the Wiley journal, World Englishes. He is also a Member of the Editorial Boards of Applied Linguistics Review, Educational Studies, English Today, English World-Wide, Global Chinese, and the Journal of World Languages. Professor Bolton served as Elected President of the International Association for World Englishes from 2003-04, is a Founding Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy for the Humanities, and Professor Emeritus of Stockholm University, Sweden.

Miranda Richardson has been Editor of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, published for the Nautical Archaeology Society, for the past six years. A love of sailing, diving, and an archaeology education and career, followed by a stint in newspaper journalism, brought her to the role, of which she says: ‘How could I not love it? I get to sail both around the world and through time, at least in my imagination’. The constraints of working under water have made maritime archaeologists early adopters of new technologies and encouraged them to use digital means to present current research to both academic audiences and the general public.

Lizzie Brophy is currently a Senior Journals Publishing Manager at Wiley where she manages a list of Political Science, Archaeology, and Geography journals. Her background is in Classical Archaeology, and she completed her DPhil in Ptolemaic and Roman Royal Sculpture at Oxford in 2015. Since joining Wiley as a Journals Publishing Assistant in 2015, she has been putting those research skills to use, especially thinking about journal metrics and the role of social media in the research landscape.

We hope you’ll join us for a lively discussion of the evolution of the humanities!

Virtual Collection – Ethics in a Changing World

As a study of human action, ethics is particularly attuned to changes in the world around us. Our lives are profoundly shaped by new technology, globalization, climate change, and changing social roles – raising ethical questions about the choices we make in response to these far-reaching developments.

In order to celebrate the publication of The International Encyclopedia of Ethics,  we have curated a virtual collection of over 50 journal articles and book chapters on global ethics with a special focus on Chinese researchers and academics.

Click here to read the introduction in English or translated into Chinese, then read the articles for free!

Write for The Philosopher’s Eye!

Image: Gaetan Lee

Are you a philosophy graduate looking for a writing opportunity?

We want to hear from budding writers who are looking for a chance to write about philosophy for a popular blog, and who want to show how the ideas of philosophy can improve our understanding of current affairs.

Do you feel that philosophy has something important to say about the political beliefs of Sarah Palin? Or the slapstick of Charlie Chaplin? Do you think that new technology changes the limits of human potential? Do you want to show why aesthetics is relevant beyond the tedious ‘but-is-it-art‘ questions of the mainstream?

Sex! Drugs! Pop! Violence! Videogames! Hume! We want your take on it.

We can’t pay you per se; we’re looking for people who want to work for the sheer, electric joy of peeling back layers of ambiguity to expose the quivering, naked Truth of It All. As well as the opportunity to write for an international audience, we’ll also create a profile for you on our News Editors page.

Contact us at PHCOeditorial@wiley.com to tell us about your interests and background, and send a sample post of around 300 words. Nominations of others are welcome.

Do you really want to live forever?: The Science of Immortality

The immortality of the soul has been on the philosophical agenda arguably since day one. On the scientific agenda, however, it registers fairly low down. Until now, that is. In his new book, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death, political philosopher John Gray explores the history of scientific attempts to prove the existence of, and to even achieve, immortality. A history, it seems, that is more rich and contemporary than one might at first expect of the traditionally pragmatic and non-metaphysical subject.

In a lengthy article for the Guardian, Gray gives a summary of some of the more eyebrow raising events which go to make up this particular part of the history of science. The first is the reaction of post-Darwinian scientists, who for one reason or another felt compelled to respond to the anti-spiritualist worldview that Darwin’s work entailed. They did so by meticulously examining thousands of automatic-writing scripts – a popular phenomena in 19th century clairvoyance whereby the medium channels a spirit in such a way that a message from beyond can be written out – in search for evidence that might suggest their authenticity, such as information about the purportedly channeled spirit that would otherwise be unknown to the medium, or the occurrence of “cross-overs”, where separate mediums appear to be channelling the same thing independently of each other.

War is Reason Free From Passion

When we imagine robotic combatants, we naturally expect that they will be modelled on ourselves. Ancient Crete, for example, had the bronze, xenophobic robot Talos, who indiscriminately hurled missiles towards all foreign ships. Talos had autonomy, the power to reason (however dimly), and the power to determine his own behaviour. But most importantly, behind the face of Talos was a single agent, an agent modelled after a human subject.

But as the Economist reports, BAE systems, in conjunction with several UK universities, has put forward a vastly different intelligence model for our future robotic warriors. Eschewing full-fledged autonomy, the individual combatants are designed to pool information about the environment, potential targets, and available resources, and then arrive globally on a course of action; individual robots may also ‘bid’ to avail themselves of resources, but the allocation of resources

Decoding Plato

“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”

Philosopher and historian of science, Dr. Jay Kennedy – currently a visiting academic in Manchester – has recently put forward the provocative thesis that Plato’s texts are based around a secret cipher; a kind of Platonic Bible Code. Each book of Plato’s major texts, he contends, is structured in such a way as to represent relative musical harmonies according to the ancient Greek scales.

The twelve note musical scale is the foundation of Western music, and is rooted in the mathematical relationships between different soundwave frequencies, their inter-relation, and the effect they have upon the listener.   Music theory is based upon the observation that

Write for The Philosopher’s Eye

Image: Gaetan Lee

Are you a philosophy graduate looking for a writing opportunity?

We want to hear from budding writers who are looking for a chance to write about philosophy for a popular blog, and who want to show how the ideas of philosophy can improve our understanding of current affairs.

Do you feel that philosophy has something important to say about the political beliefs of Sarah Palin? Or the slapstick of Charlie Chaplin? Do you think that new technology changes the limits of human potential? Do you want to show why aesthetics is relevant beyond the tedious ‘but-is-it-art‘ questions of the mainstream?

Sex! Drugs! Pop! Violence! Videogames! Hume! We want your take on it.

We can’t pay you per se; we’re looking for people who want to work for the sheer, electric joy of peeling back layers of ambiguity to expose the quivering, naked Truth of It All. As well as the opportunity to write for an international audience, we’ll also create a profile for you on our News Editors page.

Contact us at PHCOeditorial@wiley.com to tell us about your interests and background, and send a sample post of around 300 words. Nominations of others are welcome.