The transcendental of technology is said in many ways

According to Max Weber, the “fate of our times” is characterized by a “dis- enchantment of the world.” The scienti c ambition of rationalization and intellectual- ization, as well as the attempt to master nature through technology, will greatly limit experiences of and openness for the transcendent, i.e., that which is beyond our control. Insofar as transcendence is a central aspect of virtually every religion and all religious experiences, the development of science and technology will, according to the Weberian assertion, also limit the scope of religion. In this paper, we will re ect on the relations between technology and transcendence from the perspective of technological mediation theory. We will show that the fact that we are able to technologically intervene in the world and ourselves does not imply that we can completely control the rules of life. Technological interference in nature is only possible if the structures and laws that enable us to do that are recognized and to a certain extent obeyed, which indicates that technological power cannot exist without accepting a transcendent order in which one operates. Rather than excluding transcendence, technology mediates our relation to it.

Foundations of Science, 2021

This article has two general aims. It first of all critically reconsiders the empirical turn's dismissal of transcendentalism in the philosophy of technology, in particular through the work of Ihde and Verbeek, and defends the continuing relevance of the notion of the tran-scencental in thinking about technology today, illustrating this mainly through a reading of Stiegler's understanding of the human condition as a technical condition and his view of human (noetic) evolution as proceeding from a process of technical exteriorization. The crucial issue that is missed by postphenomenology and the empirical turn is that technology itself in its empiricity occupies the (periodically changing) place of the transcenden-tal. It thus fails to consider the transcendental operativity of technical artifacts within its own empiricist stance. Secondly, it argues for the continuing importance and usefulness of the idea of Technology with a capital T, equally discarded by the representatives of the empirical turn, in particular against the emerging backdrop of the Anthropocene as the age of decisive anthropogenic forcing of the planet and the growing dominance of what has recently been called the technosphere in Earth system science. With Stiegler I show that a proper, inherent dynamic of technology must be acknowledged historically, anthropologi-cally, techno-evolutionarily as well as (techno)phenomenologically. I conclude by demonstrating that our time of planetary crisis summons us to redirect our attention to technology from the empirical to the transcendental, and from the micro-level to the macro-level again.

Foundations of Science, 2021

In this reply I further defend my claim that the transcendental should always remain a primary concern for philosophy of technology as a philosophical enterprise, contra the empirical turn's rejection of it. Yet, instead of emphasizing the non-technological conditions of technology, as 'classic' thinkers of technology such as Heidegger did, it should recognize technology itself as the transcendental operator par excellence. Starting from Heidegger's ontological understanding of transcendence I show that while technical arti-facts may indeed always conform to a certain horizon of understanding, they also constitute this horizon in specific ways. Following Stiegler I show that concrete technologies (technology with a small 't') are not just empirical effects of an overarching movement of transcendence (Technology with a capital 'T') but are originally constitutive of it. In response to Romele's critique that the social, language, images, imaginaries, symbols, etc. are also transcendentals, I argue that all these phenomena are always already conditioned by technical milieus. As for Besmer's contention that I offer a reductive interpretation of postphenomenology's notion of multistability, I argue that there are decisive systemic and organological limits to multistability offered by technical artefacts and that all variation in use and implementation is always constrained by inherent technical tendencies and processes of concretization. Agreeing with Besmer that the transcendental and the empirical should be understood not oppositional but compositional I argue that technology may be that which constantly 'mediates' between the two. Keywords Transcendental · Transcendence · Empirical turn · Postphenomenology · Heidegger · Stiegler First of all, I would like to thank both Kirk Besmer and Alberto Romele for their thoughtful and useful comments on my article, which were very much appreciated. In what follows I will try to further clarify the core intention of that article by responding to the remarks they've put forward, Besmer being somewhat more critical than Romele, who is mostly in agreement with the views I present and starts off admitting this straightforwardly yet then This reply refers to the comment available online at https:// doi.

Human Studies, 2021

Technopolitics – Charting the Unknown, 2024

Thinking about technology entails the creation of concepts. Technicity itself is such a concept – it addresses technology neither from the perspective of the machinery nor from the ways people interact with technical devices, but instead sees it as a principle of thought and/or being. This elevation of something that for a long time was seen to be a mere addition to the human life-world (an accidental quality, or an imitation of nature) to the level of the fundamental is a clear indicator that something has shifted in philosophy itself. In my article, I will start with a recapitulation of how Bernard Stiegler’s “originary technicity” set a new mark for rethinking the relation of humanity to technology. For Stiegler, humanity and technology are inseparably bound together in a co-evolutionary process that started in prehistoric times with the usage of tools that constituted a third kind of memory (next to genetic and individual memory). By varying on Stiegler’s term, I will propose a way to chart the fundamental shifts in how the Western philosophical tradition has thought about technicity altogether. Following Hans Blumenberg’s reading of the early modern era, I will introduce the term “reflexive technicity” in order to better grasp the scientific telos of inventing new ways of technically altering matter and reality. After dealing with “oppressive technicity”, I will briefly go over the first hot phase of proper philosophy of technology of the early 20th century, which saw with growing alarmism the deleterious effects of technologies unbound. This will then be followed by going into “ubiquitous technicity” which is a shorthand for recent ways of acknowledging that technology is now pervading every aspect of our lives. Charting philosophy of technology by creating and varying the concept of “technicity” will hopefully pave the way for opening up the question of technopolitics, since addressing technology’s ubiquity necessitates a thorough discussion of how the technical is understood in the first place – including the search for alternative ways of doing technology in the centuries to come.

2013

Click here if your download doesn"t start automatically Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition-An Anthology Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition-An Anthology This anthology brings together, for the first time, a collection of both seminal historical and contemporary essays on the nature of technology and its relation to humanity. Its selections not only situate technology in the familiar context of ethical, political, aesthetic, and engineering concerns, but also thoroughly examine historical, metaphysical, and epistemological issues.The volume begins with historical readings on knowledge and its applications that have laid the foundation for contemporary writings on the philosophy of technology. Contemporary essays then critically assess previous assumptions about science and discuss the relation between science and technology and philosophy's treatment of both. The second half of the volume focuses on Heidegger's writings on technology, on the relationship between technology and the natural world, and on the issues that arise as technology becomes an integral part of our society. Philosophy of Technology includes, beyond the commonly anthologized figures, selections from European writers often not available in English-language collections. It is a valuable resource for anyone who wishes to explore the technological condition.

2006

As philosophy goes, philosophy of technology is a relatively young field. Courses called "History of Modern Philosophy" cover philosophers of the Renaissance and the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Philosophy of the early twentieth century is covered in "Contemporary Philosophy." The main branches of philosophy go back over 2200 years. Philosophy of science was pursued, in fact if not in name, by most of the early modern philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the midnineteenth century several physicists and philosophers were producing works that focused solely on the philosophy of science. Only sporadically were there major philosophers who had much to say about technology, such as Bacon around 1600 and Marx in the mid-nineteenth century. Most of the "great philosophers" of this period, although they had a great deal to say about science, said little about technology. On the assumption that technology is the simple application of science, and that technology is all for the good, most philosophers thought that there was little of interest. The "action" in early modern philosophy was around the issue of scientific knowledge, not technology. The romantic tradition from the late eighteenth century was pessimistic about science and technology. Romantics emphasized their problematic and harmful aspects, and only a handful of academic philosophers concerned themselves with evaluation and critique of technology itself. Particularly in Germany, there was a pessimistic literature on the evils of modern society in general and technological society in particular. We shall examine at length several of the twentieth-century inheritors of this tradition. In the English-speaking countries, with the exception of romantic poets such as Wordsworth and mid-nineteenth-century culture critics such as Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and Ruskin, or the socialist artist William rationality, and dialectical rationality, among others. Risk/benefit analysis, a form of formal rationality, closely related to mathematical economics, and often used to evaluate technological projects, is presented and evaluated. Next, approaches to philosophy of technology very different from the logical, formal economic, and analytical approaches are examined. Phenomenology, involving qualitative description of concrete experience, and hermeneutics, involving interpretation of texts in general, are presented in chapter 5. Several philosophers of technology who have applied phenomenology and hermeneutics to fields such as technical instrumentation and computers are discussed. A complex of issues involving the influence of technology on society and culture are treated in chapters 6 and 7. Technological determinism, the view that technological changes cause changes in the rest of society and culture, and autonomous technology, the view that technology grows with a logic of its own out of human control, are discussed and evaluated. Chapter 8 describes the debates concerning whether technology is what distinguishes humans from other animals, and whether language or technology is most characteristic of humans. Chapters 9 and 10 discuss groups of people who have often been excluded from mainstream accounts of the nature and development of technology. Women, despite their use of household technology and their widespread employment in factories and in the telecommunications industry, were often omitted from general accounts of technology. These accounts often focus on the male inventors and builders of large technological projects. This is true even of some of the best and most dramatic contemporary accounts (Thompson, 2004). Women inventors, women in manufacturing, and the burden of household work are often downplayed. Similarly, non-Western technology is often shunted aside in mainstream Western surveys of technology. The contributions of the Arabs, Chinese, South Asians, and Native Americans to the development of Western technology are often ignored. The power and value of the local knowledge of non-literate, indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, and the South Pacific is also often ignored. However, ethno-science and technology raise issues about the role of rationality in technology and the nature of technology itself. There is also a powerful traditional critical of technology, at least since the romantic era of the late 1700s. In contrast to the dominant beliefs about progress and the unalloyed benefits of technology, the Romantic Movement celebrated wild nature and criticized the ugliness and pollution of the industrial cities. With the growth of scientific ecology in the late nineteenth and is shown by the stimulating but often hopelessly muddled prose of the Canadian theorist of the media, Marshall McLuhan. Lewis Mumford, the American freelance architecture and city planning critic and theorist of technology, is readable, but at times long-winded. Not only are major European figures (such as Heidegger, Arendt, and Ellul), whom Don Ihde has called the "grandfathers" of the field, difficult to read, there is a further complication in that many other schools of twentiethcentury philosophy have contributed to the philosophy of technology. Anglo-American linguistic and analytic philosophy of science has contributed. Besides the various European schools of philosophy (neo-Marxism,

Foundations of Science

This paper is a contribution to a discussion in philosophy of technology by focusing on the epistemological status of the example. Of the various developments in the emerging, inchoate field of philosophy of technology, the “empirical turn” stands out as having left the most enduring mark on the trajectory contemporary research takes. From a historical point of view, the empirical turn can best be understood as a corrective to the overly “transcendentalizing” tendencies of “classical” philosophers of technology, such as Heidegger. Empirically oriented philosophy of technology emphasizes actual technologies through case-study research into the formation of technical objects and systems (constructivist studies) and how they, for example, transform our perceptions and conceptions (the phenomenological tradition) or pass on and propagate relations of power (critical theory). This paper explores the point of convergence of classical and contemporary approaches by means of the notion of t...

Foundations of Science, 2021

This essay develops three key claims made in my 2018 book, Exceptional Technologies. Part one argues for ‘trivialising the transcendental’, to remove stigmas attached to the word ‘transcendental’ in philosophy in general and philosophy of technology in particular. Part two outlines the concept of ‘exceptional technologies’. These are artefacts and practices that show up as limit cases for our received pictures of what constitutes a ‘technology’ (what I refer to as our ‘pictures of method’) and that force us to reassess the conditions for the possibility of these pictures. I focus on the case of autonomous vehicles here, arguing that Google Street View provides a relatively better picture for approaching philosophical issues at stake than the famous ‘Trolley Problem’. Part three then concludes with a focus on Heidegger’s ‘Question Concerning Technology’ essay. Heidegger asserts that philosophical questioning ‘builds a way’ (1977: 3). I argue that philosophical approaches to technolog...

Argumentos De Razón Técninca, 2023

In this paper I present an interpretation of Ernst Cassirer's diagnosis that modern culture is in need of an 'ethicization' (Ethisierung) of technology. The conclusion of the 1930 essay Form and Technology has not merely met with incomprehension among researchers. From the side of the Frankfurt School, Cassirer, presumably because of this choice of term, even earned ridicule. In its peculiarity, the concept of ethicization was not even attempted to be translated in the latest English translation (2013) of Cassirer's essay on technology, which is why it can be assumed that it is still not understood, even among experts. I thus present a close reading of Form and Technology that is in line with Cassirer's system of symbolic forms from his main work and also with relevant posthumous writings. Cassirer's position turns out as a defense of an autonomy principle that is at the base of any expression of the human mind, including technology. The downside of technology for modern culture lies in its entanglement with science and economy in the historical shape of capitalism. For none of those symbolic forms is essentially normative, philosophy's task is to reflect on and state those cultural resources that can help to break up this ligation.