RT Article
T1 A Hydra-Logical Approach: Acknowledging Complexity in the Study of Religion, Science, and Technology
JF Zygon
VO 55
IS 4
SP 948
OP 970
A1 Geraci, Robert M.
LA English
PB Wiley-Blackwell
YR 2020
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1737626942
AB Scholarship has grown increasingly nuanced in its grappling with the intersections of religion, science, and technology but requires a new paradigm. Contemporary approaches to specific technologies reveal a wide variety of perspectives but remain too often committed to typological classification. To be vigilant of our obligation to understand and reveal, scholars in the study of religion, science, and technology can adopt a hydra-logical stance: we can recognize that there are cultural monsters possessing scientific, technological, and religious heads. These heads may work with a common agenda or they might not. They might disagree, pulling their shared body back and forth in a public commotion that lays waste to their surroundings. They might see past one another or move in tandem—purposively or not. Evaluations of climate response and AI benefit from seeing how the various heads are inseparable: indeed, cutting one off simply promotes the growth of new heads. Methodological and analytical clarity, therefore, emerges in the transition from schemes of classification to the recognition of hydras.
K1 Ian Barbour
K1 Artificial Intelligence
K1 Classification
K1 climate science
K1 Method
K1 Religion and science
K1 Typology
DO 10.1111/zygo.12650