Postphenomenology, Embodiment and Technics (original) (raw)
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Postphenomenological Method and Technological Things Themselves
Human Studies, 2021
We live in a world where it is impossible to exist without, and beyond, technologies. Despite this omnipresence, we tend to overlook their influence on us. The vigorously developing approach of postphenomenology, combining insights from phenomenology and pragmatism, focuses on the so-called technological mediation, i.e., on how technologies as mediators of human-world relations influence the appearing of both the world and the human beings in it. My analysis aims at demonstrating both the methodological weaknesses and open possibilities of postphenomenology. After summarizing its essentials, I will scrutinize, first, its ability to turn to the technological things themselves and, second, the so-called empirical turn as realized by postphenomenology. By assessing its conceptual framework from the phenomenological perspective, I hope to demonstrate that postphenomenology needs philosophical clarification and strengthening. In short, it needs a more phenomenological, and less pragmatic, approach to technology in its influence on human experience.
This paper provides a phenomenological analysis of postphenomenological philosophy of technology. While acknowledging that the results of its analyses are to be recognized as original, insightful, and valuable, we will argue that in its execution of the empirical turn, postphenomenology forfeits a phenomenological dimension of questioning. By contrasting the postphenomenological method with Heidegger's understanding of phenomenology as developed in his early Freiburg lectures and in Being and Time, we will show how the postphenomenological method must be understood as mediation theory, which adheres to what Heidegger calls the theoretical attitude. This leaves undiscussed how mediation theory about ontic beings (i.e.,technologies) involves a specific ontological mode of relating to beings, whereas consideration of this mode is precisely the concern of phenomenology. This ontological dimension is important to consider, since we will argue that postphenomenology is unwittingly technically mediated in an ontological way. The upshot of this is that in its dismissal of Heidegger's questioning of technology as belonging to Bclassical philosophy of technology,^ postphenomenology implicitly adheres to what Heidegger calls technology as Enframing. We argue that postphenomenology overlooks its own adherence to the theoretical attitude and ultimately to Enframing, and we will conclude with calling for a phenomenological questioning of the dimension that postphenomenology presently leaves unthought, meaning that we will develop a plea for a rehabilitation of the ontological dimension in the philosophy of technology.
Back to the technologies themselves: phenomenological turn within postphenomenology
Phenomenology and The Cognitive Sciences, 2023
This paper revives phenomenological elements to have a better framework for addressing the implications of technologies on society. For this reason, we introduce the motto "back to the technologies themselves" to show how some phenomenological elements, which have not been highlighted in the philosophy of technology so far, can be fruitfully integrated within the postphenomenological analysis. In particular, we introduce the notion of technological intentionality in relation to the passive synthesis in Husserl's phenomenology. Although the notion of technological intentionality has already been coined in postphenomenology, it is "in tension" with the notion of technological mediation since there are still no clear differences between these two concepts and studies on how they relate one to another. The tension between mediation and intentionality arises because it seems intuitively reasonable to suggest that intentionality differs from mediation in a number of ways; however, these elements have not been clearly clarified in postphenomenology so far. To highlight what technological intentionality is and how it differs from mediation, we turn the motto "back to the things themselves" into "back to the technologies themselves," showing how the technologies have to be taken into consideration by themselves. More specifically, we use the concept of passive synthesis developed by Husserl, and we apply it to technologies to show their inner passive activity. The notion of the passive synthesis enables to demonstrate how technologies are able to connect to a wider (technological) environment without the subjects' activity. Consequently, we claim that technologies have their pole of action, and they passively act by themselves.
Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology
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.
Philosophical Potencies of Postphenomenology
Philosophy & Technology, 2021
As a distinctive voice in the current philosophy of technology, postphenomenology elucidates various ways of how technologies "shape" both the world (or objectivity) and humans (or subjectivity) in it. Distancing itself from more speculative approaches, postphenomenology advocates the so-called empirical turn in philosophy of technology: It focuses on diverse effects of particular technologies instead of speculating on the essence of technology and its general impact. Critics of postphenomenology argue that by turning to particularities and emphasizing that technologies are always open to different uses and interpretations, postphenomenology becomes unable to realize how profoundly technology determines our being in the world. Seeking to evaluate the postphenomenological (in)ability to radically reflect on the human being conditioned by technology, I discuss the two most pertinent criticisms of postphenomenology: an "existential" one by Robert C. Scharff and an "ontological" one by Jochem Zwier, Vincent Blok, and Pieter Lemmens. Assessing the ontological alternative, I point to incapacity of Heidegger's concept of Enframing to do justice to material technologies. Simultaneously, I acknowledge the necessity of speculating on (the concept of) technology as transcending concrete technologies. Such speculating would be instrumental in reviving Ihde's idea of non-neutrality of technology in its full philosophical potency.
Philosophy of technology: An introduction
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,
New Waves in Philosophy of Technology
Historical Materialism, 2010
This review-essay examines the multi-author collection New Waves in Philosophy of Technology. Particular attention is given to the difference between Marx’s and Heidegger’s philosophies of technology. The differential impact of Marx and Heidegger on the essays in the collection is assessed, with some implications drawn about the theoretical background of the philosophy of technology as a whole.
THE ONTOLOGY OF TECHNOLOGY A Heideggerian Perspective
The question concerning technology lies at the heart of human existence. As such it must take a central place in philosophy today. This importance, however, is veiled by a historical interpretation of technology as instrumental. This instrumentalism is the result of an ambiguity in the Aristotelian legacy that arises from an understanding of reality rooted in a theory of the categories, on the one hand, and a theory of causality on the other. This has left us with an ambiguous understanding of human making split by the twofold structure of artistic and representational thinking. The former is characteristic of empirical knowledge, the latter epistemological knowledge. This thesis follows Heidegger in arguing that an integral understanding of technology can only be achieved through a creative retrieval of Aristotle's ontology that interweaves the question of causality and the question of the categories, which we have outlined below as the interplay between potentiality and actuality, between being and non-being, and between truth and untruth. While indebted to Aristotle, this involves an important re-thinking of the nature of ontology, for it is made possible by exposing the limits of Aristotle’s theory of time, which understands time as a succession of present instants, and moving towards the Heideggerian understanding of presencing as the opening of a horizon in which things perdure. Consequently, this is an ontology in which technology is tied to our notion of time just as much as to our notion of being. After establishing this temporal ontology as the basis for an understanding of technology, in a unique way we apply it to the particular case of 3D printing and come to see that this technology is indeed more than an instrument; it is an interweaving of the epistemic and the poetic, the rational and the artistic. Thus I accept the consensus in contemporary philosophy of technology that questions of technology must be understood in terms of their political and social implications. However, unlike many thinkers in this field I also argue that they can be fruitfully understood in terms of a temporal ontology. I call this temporal ontology of technology, hyperology.
Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2003
It might be useful to write a commentary on Don Ihde's newest book in terms of how it fits into three decades of work on the philosophy of technology [1], that is, in terms of how it advances, refines, or abandons earlier positions. It might also be useful to position Ihde's book with respect to other recent work in the philosophy of technology. It might be useful to have someone who is far more competent and invested in this area of philosophy to comment and perhaps criticise. But I think that the context does not call for an overview of Ihde's career and contribution to a field in which he has been a pioneer, nor am I a philosopher of technology. Yet, perhaps precisely because I am not an insider to Ihde's field my comments might be of some use. I will begin by deseribing some of the main topics that this book studies, then I will raise three sets of concerns, which may or may not be taken as criticisms.