A Festschrift in Honor of our colleague Rafael Capurro

Information Cultures in the Digital Age

Editors: Kelly, Matthew, Bielby, Jared (Eds.), Springer Verlag

This publication in honour of our colleague and master Rafael Capurro is for BITrum a remarkable opportunity to celebrate his patient work, dedication, inspiration and always ready friendship. The publication in itself represents a major contribution to the confrontation of problems in which BITrum is engaged since its origins.

For several decades Rafael Capurro has been at the forefront of defining the relationship between information and modernity through both phenomenological and ethical formulations -as we can see for instance in our glossariumBITrum-. In exploring both of these themes Capurro has re-vivified the transcultural and intercultural expressions of how we bring an understanding of information to bear on scientific knowledge production and intermediation. Capurro has long stressed the need to look deeply into how we contextualize the information problems that scientific society creates for us and to re-incorporate a pragmatic dimension into our response that provides a balance to the cognitive turn in information science.

With contributions from 35 scholars from 15 countries, Information Cultures in the Digital Age focuses on the culture and philosophy of information, information ethics, the relationship of information to message, the historic and semiotic understanding of information, the relationship of information to power and the future of information education. This Festschrift seeks to celebrate Rafael Capurro’s important contribution to a global dialogue on how information conceptualisation, use and technology impact human culture and the ethical questions that arise from this dynamic relationship.

The Editors

Matthew Kelly is a scholar at Curtin University’s Department of Information Studies and at the International Institute for Hermeneutics.

Jared Bielby currently serves as Co-Chair for the International Center for Information Ethics and Editor for the International Review of Information Ethics.

How to Purchase the Book

The E-Book will be available in July 2016 with print to follow shortly after.

Go to Springer’s site to purchase

http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783658146795

 

Space, Netwoks, Information, Systems: understanding Emergence

Rainer E. ZIMMERMANN

METAPHYSICS OF EMERGENCE

PART 1: ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF SYSTEMS

Published in 2015 by Xenomoi Verlag, 272 pp.

This constitute a first part of what our colleague Rainer Zimmermann has been teaching us regarding the understanding of complexity, networks, systems, space and, of course, information as key concept of the dynamics of emergence. Among his reflections we can find relevant conclusions to the interdisciplinary conceptual and theoretical elucidation we are striving for through our glossariumBITri. You can find in this work a further elaboration of seminars, articles and contributions to congress in which BITrum has been involved for the last 5 years.

In fact, the theory of (emergent complex) systems as a recently more forthcoming (and somewhat reformed) discipline in its own right has been object of acute and intensive discussion and of a rather dynamical evolution, respectively, for quite some while. Unfortunately, this still ongoing discussion has not been very successful so far as to clarifying the most elementary and fundamental issues of definition and the consequences derived there-from. This is mainly because the otherwise welcome interdisciplinary discourse has been dominated originally by protagonists from the fields of economics, management, and the social sciences, in the first place, rather than by those of the more formalized sciences such as physics. However, the degree of universality of a theory is likely to increase with its connectivity to mathematics. Hence, in order to obtain a self-consistent theory of systems that displays a sufficient coherence with a view to its respective lexicology, syntax, and semantics, it is necessary to perform an explicit embedding into available formalisms of mathematical type such that its specific contextuality can be immediately reflected within the given frame of what is already known about the structure and evolution of nature. This motivation underlies this present project which can be understood as a survey on systems in terms of a suitable metaphysics of emergence. The mathematically based explication of systems is the first step (and thus constitutes the first volume) of a panoramatic approach to what we euphemistically call the world. But we shall bear in mind what the important point is after all: To look for the possibilities of grasping experience whilst recognizing that experience is always more than what can be said about it.

In XenomoiX

 

Creativity and Form: The Odyssey of Knowledge

Rainer Zimmermann

KREATIVITÄT UND FORM

Berlin: Springer Verlag (129 pp., eBook: 23€, Hard-cover: 29€) in German

In his homonymic book, Herman Hesse sketches the idea of a Glass Bead game in which the “player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.” The authors develop for the first time the possibilities and limits of such universal game with and about knowledge. The accompanying computer program enables the player to experiment with knowledge. Thereby the book stretches through computing methods its application domain from logic to system theory, to scientific- and knowledge theory, to semiotic, to cognition and communication.

• The idea was presented and discussed in the ICT & Society Network Meeting, Bercelona, 2010, published in Triple C: Rainer E. Zimmermann, Simon M. Wiedenmann (2010) “3rd ICTs and Society Meeting; Paper Session – Theorizing the Internet; Paper 6: Reconstructing the Glass Bead Game. On the Philosophy of Information”, TripleC, 8(2).
• Download Content table of “Kreativität und Form” (pdf, 77 kB)
• Download page 1 (pdf, 127 kB)