Willem H Vanderburg
Biographic Data
| ID | 319134 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Willem H Vanderburg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Willem H |
| FAMILY NAME | Vanderburg |
| SIGNATURE | VANDERBURG W H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 64 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 63 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Our War on Ourselves
Secular Nations under New Gods
Ever since Max Weber's study of the role Protestantism played in our civilization, the role of Christianity in our world has been much debated. This work is addressed to those interested in a return to the Biblical message as opposed to what institutionalized Christianity has made of it.
Our Battle for the Human Spirit
Our Battle for the Human Spirit is a comprehensive probe into what is happening to human life in the beginning of the 21 st century. It explores how culture, experience, and symbolization have been replaced by scientific, discipline-based, approaches
On Freedom, Love, and Power
This expanded edition of Ellul’s talks features additional material, previously unavailable, that focuses on Christianity’s potential service to humanity as a community that exemplifies a society where people are reconciled with one another and with God.
Technical power and human impotence
The article presents an overview of a five-volume study of the transition of our civilization from a primary reliance on approaches to human knowing and doing based on symbolization and culture to a primary reliance on approaches organizing this knowing and doing by means of disciplines, which has taken us well beyond rationality and technique as a result of desymbolization. It is undermining our being a symbolic species by reifying human lives a…
Can We Save Industry From Itself
The Desymbolization of Human Life in Contemporary Mass Societies
Judaism and Christianity, the religious traditions most influential on Western civilization, taught that the universe was created by the Word and that human beings were distinguished from all other animals by their use of words. What characterizes our age is a growing reliance on images as our words are being desymbolized. This desymbolization of experience, language, and culture results primarily from what Jacques Ellul has called technique, whi…
The Reifying and Commoditizing Effects of Disciplines
The present analysis revisits the economics of inattention and the resulting commoditization and creation of privileged goods. These act as a significant force that pushes human history toward a future that will be less livable and sustainable. The analysis traces the roots of these developments to the reorganization of human knowing and doing by putting them on a discipline-based footing. It is part of a larger analysis that shows the need to cr…
The Life and Work of Jacques Ellul
Placing Engineering and Other Professions Under Public Oversight
The strengths and weaknesses of the discipline-based organization of our professions can help us understand both the enormous successes of our civilization and its equally spectacular failures. Placing engineering and other professions under greater public scrutiny is recommended as a first step toward addressing our deep structural economic, social, and environmental crises. Doing so can facilitate university reforms to adjust the discipline-bas…
The Autonomy of Technique as a Social and Historical Description
This article explores the social and historical conditions under which “people changing technology” overshadows that of “technology changing people” through its influence on human life, society, and the biosphere. Social construction and determinism are thus two sides of the same coin. However, both ignore the inseparability of thoughts and action from lives, lives from communities, and communities from their historical journeys. This hides from …
Assessing Our Ability to Design and Plan Green Energy Technologies
How the Science Versus Religion Debate Has Missed the Point of Genesis 1 and 2
From a social and historical perspective, the conflict between science and religion regarding the opening chapters of Genesis in the Jewish and Christian Bibles may have more to do with uncritically reading these texts through our “cultural glasses” than with what these texts actually say. Within the context of his work, Jacques Ellul read these texts as having nothing to do with creation or evolution, but instead with the relations between God, …
A Precautionary Approach to City Building
The literature on the impact of urban form design on travel behavior reveals mixed results. Instead of interpreting this finding as an insufficient basis for warranting action, this article suggests that a precautionary approach be introduced. This approach should be based on two interdependent modes of knowing and doing to establish and evolve design exemplars in conjunction with discipline-based analytical exemplars. Even if trends, including t…
The Antieconomy Hypothesis (Part 1)
This article attempts to make some sense of what is happening to the role of money and the economy in our lives and in our communities. It shows that the picture provided by the discipline of economics makes no sense at all. Corporations and national economies have become wealth extractors as opposed to wealth creators. Only about 3% of daily financial flows around the globe have any meaningful connection to the production and distribution of goo…
Rethinking Engineering Design and Decision Making in Response to Economic, Social, and Environmental Crises
High levels of specialization have created knowledge with little or no “peripheral vision,” and the resulting “blind spots” are causing many “collisions” with human life, society, and the biosphere. Each discipline and specialty must be equipped with a “map” showing its connections to everything else, but especially the negative consequences that tend to be associated with its practices. Preventively oriented practices can improve the ratio of de…
The Antieconomy Hypothesis (Part 2)
The hypothesis of an antieconomy developed in part 1 is incommensurate with mainstream economics. This article explores three reasons for this situation: the limits of discipline-based scholarship in general and of mainstream economics in particular, the status of economists in contemporary societies, and the failure of economists to accept any responsibility for the consequences flowing from the application of their theories. Politicians are una…
Inconvenient Truths About the Economic Crisis
The Antieconomy Hypothesis (Part 3)
Parts 1 and 2 explore the hypothesis that the application of mainstream economics has led to economies becoming uneconomic, which is as close as a social science can get to experimentally disproving its theories. One of the primary reasons for this failure is traced to the characteristics of the knowledge infrastructures of contemporary societies, which began to act as the most influential factor of production during the second half of the 20th c…
Alternative Energy as the Ultimate No-Regrets Principle
The Most Economic, Socially Viable, and Environmentally Sustainable Alternative Energy
The strengths and weaknesses of current energy planning can be attributed to the limited economic, social, and environmental contexts taken into account as a result of the current intellectual and professional division of labor. A preventive approach is developed by which the ratio of desired to undesired effects can be substantially improved. It takes into account supply-and demand-side options, renewable and nonrenewable sources, and net energy…
General Article
What is the likelihood of controlling technology by means of the law? In traditional societies, the law was deeply embedded in, and dependent on, culture (the totality of human creations for making sense of and living in the world). Industrialization required a complete restructuring of both technology and society, thus engulfing all traditions in a flood of new situations for which there were no precedents. This necessitated a growing reliance o…
Technique and the Illusion of Health Care
The Knowledge Bluff
Our knowledge “system” is built up from disciplines and specialties as its components, which are “wired” by patterns of collaboration that constitute its organization. The intellectual autonomy of these components prevents this knowledge system from adequately accounting for what we have gradually discovered during the past 50 years: In human life, society, and the biosphere, everything is related to everything else. It has also created a dual mo…
Can the University Escape From the Labyrinth of Technology? Part 4
This fourth part outlines a strategy for overcoming the limitations of the knowledge system for engineering by combining intellectual maps, preventive approaches, umbrella concepts, and round tables as described in the earlier parts. A discussion of the issues faced by modern medicine illustrates the paradigmatic nature of the diagnosis and prescription made for engineering. The social sciences face mirror-image problems. One response has been th…
Technology, society, and culture
The Growth of Minds and Cultures
Engineering Technology, and the University
The historically unprecedented interpenetration of the human, societal, and technological spheres has created a theoretical and intellectual challenge for engineering and the university as a whole. A greater interdependence between the social sciences and humanities on the one hand, and the professional, applied science, and engineering on the other, continues to be an urgent problem. Engineering education can make a decisive contribution by deve…
Macro-STS
Macro-sts
The Growth of Minds and Cultures
Technology, Peace and War
Preparing for a Sustainable Society
A Materials Life Cycle Framework for Preventive Engineering
Education for sustainability
The results of a study undertaken to determine how much engineering students learn about the way technology influences human life, society, and nature and to what extent the knowledge is used to adjust engineering methods and approaches to achieve a greater compatibility with these contexts are presented. The results suggest that the next generation of engineers is not in a good position to make a significant contribution to the development of a …
Jacques Ellul Symposium
Can a Technical Civilization Sustain Human Life
Rethinking End-of-Pipe Engineering and Business Ethics
STS in Engineering
The conceptual framework and core courses of the certificate program in Preventive Engineering and Social Development of the Centre for Technology and Social Development at the University of Toronto are briefly described. Preventive approaches for the engi neering, management, and regulation of technology examine how technology fits into, interacts with, and depends on human life, society, and the biosphere in order to apply this understanding in…
The Iconoclasm of Jacques Ellul
The iconoclasm of Jacques Ellul toward our modern technique-based civilization forces us out of the comfortable intellectual homes of our specialties that insulate us from ourselves and our world. It tends to provoke strong reactions that either confirm or negate our deepest intuitions. This is further explored by first examining the structure of Ellul's writings as reflecting an iconoclasm toward the way we know the world through science and, se…
Is a Second Negawatt Revolution Within Reach
It is argued that contemporary civilization may be distinguished by the fact that its technology-based connectedness is fast displacing its culture-based connectedness. This article examines the ramifications of this phenomenon from the perspective of sustainability in general and its implications for our “energy systems” in particular. The diagnosis is followed by policy suggestions that would make energy use not only more sustainable but also b…
The Contemporary University and the Poverty of Nations
Most aspects of the current crisis regarding society-biosphere interactions can be attributed to the knowledge strategy adopted by contemporary universites. The artificial separation of science, technology, and society in separate faculties makes it very difficult for teaching staff and students to cross their boundaries. It is argued that STS, with its emphasis on transdisciplinarity, can help to ameliorate this crisis by providing an integrated…
The Human Skill-Acquisition Model of Stuart Dreyfus
Unhealthy Work and its Consequences
The Autonomy of Technique Revisited
Jacques Ellul’s claim that technique became an autonomous phenomenon during the middle of the 20th century, and subsequently a system, means that the influence people have on technique is much less decisive than the influence technique has on people. As a sociohistorical description of the relationship between technique and society, it can be empirically investigated. This article begins by clarifying the concept of an autonomous technique and re…
Karasek’s Prescription for Healthier Work
Skill Acquisition and the Loss of Appropriate Technology
The five-stage skill-acquisition model developed by Stuart Dreyfus is revisited as an integral part of culture acquisition. This examination sheds light on the role intuitive knowledge plays during the 4th and 5th stages. When modern technology becomes universal and detaches itself from culture, this intuitive knowledge changes. This accounts for the loss of technologies that were socially appropriate and environmentally sustainable
Some Reflections on Teaching Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, and Information Technology
Celebrating the Intellectual Gifts and Insights of Jacques Ellul
The Essential Connection Between the Two Parts of the Work of Jacques Ellul
Almost without exception, interpretations of Jacques Ellul’s work focus either on his sociopolitical thought or on his Christian reflections. However, each one drives the other, thereby exposing how we collectively journey through time and reality on amagic carpet of myths (in the sense of cultural anthropology). Ellul challenges us to give up these myths and face the relational character of our being in the world, which leads to an iconoclasm an…
Sociology (31 works) · Engineering (28 works) · Political science (28 works) · Computer Science (22 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Epistemology (19 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Economics (18 works) · Engineering ethics (17 works) · Diverse Academic Research Areas (16 works)