Bøger af Paul Woodruff

Technology has been changing our lives from the beginning of human history. Now Artificial Intelligence threatens to accelerate and intensify this change. These changes will be of familiar kinds, but their range and pace is frightening to many people, with good reason. I have studied change and resistance to change in the realm of theater. The arts of theater call for people to pay attention to each other. Because paying attention is fundamental to human life, I have argued that theater itself is fundamental to being human (The Necessity of Theater, 2008). In this book I take on a set of challenges we face from technology, using theater as a microcosm for the larger issues. Our history provides models for dealing with Artificial Intelligence. Sometimes our ancestors caved in to new technologies, sometimes they resisted. The reasons behind their choices are important for us today. So are the strategies they used when they decided to resist. In successive chapters I deal with the necessity of paying attention to each other, and then the necessities of preserving truth, freedom, and the quest for wisdom. In the last chapter I show how we can rescue our heritage from innovations of technology by translating it into forms that are alive for us.

Poems and translations of poems about war, written over a period of more than thirty years. Woodruff, a veteran of the American War in Vietnam, could not help writing these poems once the US became embroiled in one war after another, and he felt that American leadership had learned nothing from our experience in Vietnam. These poems offer background to Woodruff's philosophical writing about the ethics of war, which is extensive. They also provide background for his work in ethics more generally.

Veterans' issues are front and center now, after Iraq and Afghanistan, as they were not after Vietnam. This is a good time to put before the public the texts of these two plays, which were started during the author's tour of duty in Vietnam and finished soon after. A soldier returns from a long war, expecting a welcome, and no one recognizes him. In his own house he is treated like a beggar. This is the ancient story of Ulysses, but it also expresses how many veterans feel today. How can any civilian understand what soldiers have seen and done? How can civilians take back into their arms veterans who have blood on their hands? In Ithaca in Black and White we see a modern Ulysses as he discovers that he has no place in the home he has dreamed about, but he finds promise in a fresh courtship of his former wife and a journey onward. The play won an award in Austin, Texas, as the best new script of 1983. Geoffroy's Jerusalem tells the tale of a crusade that began with a noble cause and ended with the tawdry sack of a great city, Byzantium. The chief of staff of the army tries to persuade God, in scene after scene, that the corruption of the war was not his fault. War easily gets out of hand, and the violence generals plan so easily goes beyond their intentions. We in the audience sympathize with Geoffroy, but, like him, we are horrified by what he had brought about.

Paul Woodruff's Living Toward Virtue gives ethics a new start that is practical and down to earth, while resting on a foundation of ancient wisdom. Woodruff draws on the ancient wisdom of Socrates to develop a new approach to an ethical life - one that shows how we can nurture our souls, enjoy a virtuous happiness, and avoid moral injury.