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  1. Speculation

    London : Whitechapel Gallery ; Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, 2022

    "This volume engages in a wide-ranging investigation of what speculation can mean and how, and what is at stake for artistic, curatorial critical and institutional practices in relating to their own speculative character"--

  2. Speculation : a cultural history from Aristotle to AI

    Rogers, Gayle, 1978-
    New York : Columbia University Press, [2021]

    "Few activities or concepts are as maligned or as celebrated as speculation. Speculators cast implausible, seemingly contagious money-making schemes into the future, and their unsubstantiated risks leave untold amounts of collateral damage. At the same time, speculation mediates between the seen and unseen, the natural and the supernatural, and the material present and the abstract, hypothetical future. It builds the worlds that we inhabit now and will inhabit tomorrow, just as it builds worlds that will never come into being. In short, speculation, as it has been identified and defined, is at the center of Western thought, finance, and politics, revealing the limits, possibilities, and excesses of our attempts to create knowledge about and shape our future. In Speculation, Gayle Rogers offers a cultural, literary, and intellectual history of the concept and practices of speculation from antiquity to the present. He traces its origins from its exalted position in Greek, Roman, and medieval philosophy to its denigration by John Calvin who viewed it as sinful. As the concept became increasingly associated with the modern economy in the eighteenth century in the works of Jonathan Swift, Adam Smith, and others, the concept was also seized upon by the Romanticists and Transcendentalists for other intellectual reasons as well as female authors such as Jane Austen and George Eliot, who expanded the concept to debates about "women speculators" of the nineteenth century. With the advent of the stock ticker tape and continuing through today, new technologies have shaped ideas about speculation and how machines might take over a previous human activity"--In the modern world, why do we still resort to speculation? Advances in scientific and statistical reasoning are supposed to have provided greater certainty in making claims about the future. Yet we constantly spin out scenarios about tomorrow, for ourselves or for entire societies, with flimsy or no evidence. Insubstantial speculations-from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles-often provoke fierce backlash, even when they prove prophetic for the world we come to inhabit. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy? In this cultural, literary, and intellectual history, Gayle Rogers traces debates over speculation from antiquity to the present. Celebrated by Boethius as the height of humanity's mental powers but denigrated as sinful by John Calvin, speculation eventually became central to the scientific revolution's new methods of seeing the natural world. In the nineteenth century, writers such as Jane Austen used the concept to diagnose the marriage market, redefining speculation for the purpose of social critique. Speculation fueled the development of modern capitalism, spurring booms, busts, and bubbles, and recently artificial intelligence has automated the speculation previously done by humans, with uncertain and troubling consequences. Unraveling these histories and many other disputes, Rogers argues that what has always been at stake in arguments over speculation, and why it so often appears so threatening, is the authority to produce and control knowledge about the future. Recasting centuries of contests over the power to anticipate tomorrow, this book reveals the crucial role speculation has played in how we create-and potentially destroy-the future.

  3. Speculation

    Cambridge, MA : Boston Review, 2023

    At a world-historical moment of global upheaval, speculative writing is enjoying a renaissance. This collection of poetry, stories, and essays engages speculation as both a ubiquitous feature of financial capitalism and a radical tool of collective imagination. By rejecting dominant ideas about what is possible, speculation empowers us to plot new paths to a more just world. Creative works range over violence and healing, memory and erasure, and alternative worlds, while essays span the meaning of land and community in the African diaspora, Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction, and the ethics of the far future. Taken together, these works suggest that speculation is ultimately about our relationships with each other—as one contributor puts it, “what they have been, what they are, and most important, what they could be.” Featuring work by Andy Battle, Junot Díaz, Christina Drill, Kristin Emanuel, Alexis V. Jackson, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Parashar Kulkarni, Ian Maxton, Kelly McCorkendale, Kenda Mutongi, Njoku Nonso, Swati Prasad, Evaristo Rivera, Amanda Rizkalla, Abu Bakr Sadiq, Kieran Setiya, Sandra Simonds, and Ashley Warner

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  1. Germany

    United States Army
    1945

    Map showing Hitler's Berghof residence and surrounding area, including buildings, various woods, roads, tunnels, drainage, lanterns, telephones, tr...

  2. Geology: Drakes Bay and Vicinity, California, 2009

    Manson, Michael W., Greene, H. G., Golden, Nadine E., and Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center
    2014

    This polygon shapefile represents geologic features of Drakes Bay and the surrounding vicinity of California. Marine geology and geomorphology were...

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