Prof. Aleksandar Petrovic – Проф. Александар Петровић

Professor Aleksandar Petrovic is a Full Professor of Cultural Anthropology, a corresponding member of the Académie internationale d’histoire des sciences in Paris, member of the Department of Social Sciences of Matica Srpska, Secretary of the Board of SANU (Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts) for the work of Milutin Milankovic, President of the Serbian Society for History of Science, Vice-President of Man and the Biosphere Committee of the National Commission for Cooperation with UNESCO, member of the Scientific Committee of the Central Institute for Conservation, a member of Council for the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at University of Belgrade. He has published over one hundred scientific papers in the country and abroad and a number of monographs, as well as the nine-volume collected works of Milutin Milankovic, awarded in 1997 as a publishing project of the year. He is also the author of the exhibition Canon of Milutin Milankovic, held in the SANU Gallery in 2009. Professor Petrovic explained the relationship between science and religion situating ethics into the core of comprehension. With regard to their attitude to ethics, religion forms into theology, and science into technology. There is no dissent in their relationship, but the multileveled relation that is formed according to the ethical question as the central issue. Technology is the reinterpretation of the ethical questions, rather than perfecting tools with some specific aims. He explained the relationship between science, religion, and technology from the point of history and philosophy of science and technology. Following that line, he mentioned a 1981 script Dictionary of Technology as a good example of re-consideration technological progress from the perspective of Orthodoxy. He referred to artificial intelligence as ascending to the throne of superiority and stressed Orthodoxy as one of the final defences of human existence against such impersonal mechanisation of human processes where there is no place for humans or for selfhood.