DOCSLIB.ORG

Philosophy of Technology: an Introduction

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Philosophy of Technology: an Introduction Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction Val Dusek Blackwell Publishing Philosophy of Technology To my daughter Lela Dusek PHILOSOPHY TECHNOLOGYOF AN INTRODUCTION VAL DUSEK © 2006 by Val Dusek BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Val Dusek to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2006 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dusek, Val, 1941– Philosophy of technology : an introduction / Val Dusek. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1162-1 (hc. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1163-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4051-1162-3 (hc. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4051-1163-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Technology—Philosophy. I. Title. T14 D86 2006 601—dc22 2005025431 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10.5/13pt Dante by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd. The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com Contents Introduction 1 1 Philosophy of Science and Technology 6 2 What Is Technology? Defining or Characterizing Technology 26 3 Technocracy 38 4 Rationality, Technological Rationality, and Reason 53 5 Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Technology 70 6 Technological Determinism 84 7 Autonomous Technology 105 8 Human Nature: Tool-making or Language? 112 9 Women, Feminism, and Technology 136 10 Non-Western Technology and Local Knowledge 156 11 Anti-technology: Romanticism, Luddism, and the Ecology Movement 176 12 Social Constructionism and Actor-network Theory 198 Bibliography 211 Index 234 v Allie INTRODUCTION Introduction 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 mid- nineteenth 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 tech- nology 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 phi- losophers 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 1 INTRODUCTION Morris, few had much to say about the evaluation of technology. Only with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the realization that atom and hydrogen bombs could literally cause humanity to go extinct, did widespread, popular, critical evaluation of technology occur in the English-speaking world. With the widespread popular awareness that industrial pollution and its degradation of the environment was a major problem, perhaps dated from the publica- tion of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, or from Earth Day of 1970, a further wave of concern for the understanding of the negative side-effects of technology arose. With the advent of genetic engineering and the specter of human cloning in the late 1970s, with the possibility of technologically ma- nipulating human heredity and even human nature, there was yet another set of issues and impulses for the critical evaluation of technology. The Society for the Philosophy of Technology was founded in 1976, thousands of years after the birth of philosophy, over three centuries after the beginning of intensive examination of the nature of scientific knowl- edge, and about a century after the beginnings of systematic philosophy of science. Not only was the philosophy of technology late in coming of age, but the field itself is hardly consolidated even now. One of the problems is that the philosophy of technology involves the intimate interaction of a number of different fields of knowledge: philosophy of science, political and social philosophy, ethics, and some aesthetics and philosophy of religion. Specialists in ethics and political philosophy have rarely been deeply involved in the philosophy of science and vice versa. Furthermore, the philosophy of tech- nology ideally involves knowledge of science, technology, society, politics, history, and anthropology. One philosopher of technology, Jacques Ellul, even claims that since no one can master all of the relevant fields, no one can direct or deflect technology (see chapter 6). The topics of the philosophy of technology are varied. In this book there is discussion of the relation of philosophy of science and its recent develop- ments to the philosophy of technology (chapter 1). There is a brief discus- sion of the nature of definition and various proposed definitions of technology (chapter 2). The theme of technocracy, or rule by an elite of scientists and technologists, is presented in chapter 3, and also used as a means to discuss some of the historical philosophies of technology (such as those of Plato, Bacon, Marx, St Simon, and Comte). The issue of technological rationality and rationality in general is discussed in chapter 4. A variety of characteriza- tions of and approaches to rationality are considered: formal rationality, instrumental (or means–end) rationality, economic rationality, transcendental 2 INTRODUCTION 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. Phenom- enology, 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 phenom- enology 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 techno- logy 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 techno- logy. 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
Load more

Recommended publications
  • What Is That Thing Called Philosophy of Technology? - R
    HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY – Vol. IV - What Is That Thing Called Philosophy of Technology? - R. J. Gómez WHAT IS THAT THING CALLED PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY? R. J. Gómez Department of Philosophy. California State University (LA). USA Keywords: Adorno, Aristotle, Bunge, Ellul, Feenberg, Habermas, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Jonas, Latour, Marcuse, Mumford, Naess, Shrader-Frechette, artifact, assessment, determinism, ecosophy, ends, enlightenment, efficiency, epistemology, enframing, ideology, life-form, megamachine, metaphysics, method, naturalistic, fallacy, new, ethics, progress, rationality, rule, science, techno-philosophy Contents 1. Introduction 2. Locating technology with respect to science 2.1. Structure and Content 2.2. Method 2.3. Aim 2.4. Pattern of Change 3. Locating philosophy of technology 4. Early philosophies of technology 4.1. Aristotelianism 4.2. Technological Pessimism 4.3. Technological Optimism 4.4. Heidegger’s Existentialism and the Essence of Technology 4.5. Mumford’s Megamachinism 4.6. Neomarxism 4.6.1. Adorno-Horkheimer 4.6.2. Marcuse 4.6.3. Habermas 5. Recent philosophies of technology 5.1. L. Winner 5.2. A. Feenberg 5.3. EcosophyUNESCO – EOLSS 6. Technology and values 6.1. Shrader-Frechette Claims 6.2. H Jonas 7. Conclusions SAMPLE CHAPTERS Glossary Bibliography Biographical Sketch Summary A philosophy of technology is mainly a critical reflection on technology from the point of view of the main chapters of philosophy, e.g., metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Technology has had a fast development since the middle of the 20th century , especially ©Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY – Vol. IV - What Is That Thing Called Philosophy of Technology? - R.
    [Show full text]
  • Design Without Causality: Heidegger's Impossible
    DESIGN WITHOUT CAUSALITY: HEIDEGGER’S IMPOSSIBLE CHALLENGE FOR ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE GLEN HILL Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning University of Sydney NSW 2006, Australia [email protected] Abstract Deploying Martin Heidegger’s thinking on technology, this paper attempts to show an internal contradiction inherent in our technologically oriented approach to sustainable design. Heidegger’s thinking on technology, which has had an influence both on the ecological movement and on architecture, situates the problematic shift toward modern technology at the beginning of the enlightenment with the emergence of new understandings of both the subject and the object. Each of these revolutionary understandings contribute to the reframing of nature as knowable and (therefore) controllable. Nature thus moves from a position of mystery and wonder to that of a disenchanted, predictable system, allowing the appearance of a technological orientation in which nature is framed in advance as something simply manipulable for our benefit. Unlike the Classical Realist account of nature that emerged from the enlightenment separation of subject and object, Heidegger’s formulation of the real, of nature, does not allow the same confidence in causality and control. However, design, as the engine of technological innovation in modernity, appears inseparable from the modern technological understanding of causality and control and the framing of nature as a mere resource. This problematises the possibility that design, as it is currently conceived, can contribute to achieving an ecological sustainable relation to nature. Keywords: technology, Heidegger, ecological, sustainable, design. 1 Introduction Any discussion of technology would be incomplete without consideration of the thinking of Martin Heidegger.
    [Show full text]
  • Ihde's Encounter with “Technological Determinism”
    Ihde’s Encounter with “Technological Determinism” in Technology and the Lifeworld Hossein Kaji 1. An Overview: Ihde’s Contribution in the Philosophy of Technology The philosophy of technology is an emerging discipline whose roots date back to Martin Heidegger’s tools analysis in Being and Time (Heidegger, 1927). In this book, Heidegger originally and creatively establishes a kind of hermeneutics of “human-tool relations” in which a clear distinction between two modes of being, two distinct relations of human-tool, are explored. For Heidegger, Zuhandenheit (ready to hand) and Vorhandenheit (present at hand) are two distinct modes of being in the world with their own specific features. According to Heidegger, Zuhandenheit is a “mode of being in the world" that shows itself in practice. For example, when one utilizes a hammer to hit a nail, the Zuhandenheit is constituted; the hammer is used to (in order to) do something. Regarding Heidegger’s phenomenology in this example, the resulting function is pushing a nail; the hammer is not a “thing”, rather it is a mode of being in the world used in order to do something. The Zuhandenheit is defined as the function of a tool which is designed in order to do something (Heidegger, 1927/2010, pp. 69-71). At this level, a thing appears as “equipment” (tool). Further, let us consider the outcome of a situation where there is an issue during the process of hammering (i.e. the handle breaking). In this situation, the relation of Vorhandenheit is formed. For Heidegger, the first relation with tools is an authentic one that is practice-oriented and context-oriented.
    [Show full text]
  • Classical Ethics in A/IS
    The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems Classical Ethics in A/IS We applied classical ethics methodologies to considerations of algorithmic design in autonomous and intelligent systems (A/IS) where machine learning may or may not reflect ethical outcomes that mimic human decision-making. To meet this goal, we drew from classical ethics theories and the disciplines of machine ethics, information ethics, and technology ethics. As direct control over tools becomes further removed, creators of autonomous systems must ask themselves how cultural and ethical presumptions bias artificially intelligent creations. Such introspection is more necessary than ever because the precise and deliberate design of algorithms in self-sustained digital systems will result in responses based on such design. By drawing from over two thousand years’ worth of classical ethics traditions, we explore established ethics systems, including both philosophical traditions (utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and deontological ethics) and religious and culture-based ethical systems (Buddhism, Confucianism, African Ubuntu traditions, and Japanese Shinto) and their stance on human morality in the digital age.1 In doing so, we critique assumptions around concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, and we attempt to carry these inquiries into artificial systems’ decision-making processes. Through reviewing the philosophical foundations that define autonomy and ontology, we address the potential for autonomous capacity of artificially intelligent systems, posing questions of morality in amoral systems and asking whether decisions made by amoral systems can have moral consequences. Ultimately, we address notions of responsibility and accountability for the decisions made by autonomous systems and other artificially intelligent technologies.
    [Show full text]
  • Phenomenological Perspectives on Technological Posthumanism
    Master thesis Phenomenological perspectives on technological posthumanism Supervisors: prof. dr. Paul Ziche, dr. Iris van der Tuin Date: 10. 8. 2017 Name: Tomáš Čech Student number: 5656664 Number of Words: 24 678 i Content 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 2. Posthumanism/transhumanism – how to make sense of it all ......................................................... 4 2.1. What is transhumanism and transhuman? ............................................................................... 7 2.2. Transhumanist perception of technology and science ........................................................... 11 2.3. Comparison between transhumanism and religion ................................................................ 13 2.4. In Summary ........................................................................................................................... 15 3. Debate about transhumanism ........................................................................................................ 15 3.1. Transhumanism as an ideology ............................................................................................. 17 3.2. Reaction to transhumanism - bioconservatism ...................................................................... 21 3.3. Bioconservative arguments – why transhumanism is not such a great idea .......................... 26 3.4. Human dignity and the transhumanism debate.....................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Husserl's Position Between Dilthey and the Windelband-Rickert School of Neo-Kantianism John E
    Sacred Heart University DigitalCommons@SHU Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Publications 4-1988 Husserl's Position Between Dilthey and the Windelband-Rickert School of Neo-Kantianism John E. Jalbert Sacred Heart University Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/rel_fac Part of the Philosophy of Mind Commons, and the Philosophy of Science Commons Recommended Citation Jalbert, John E. "Husserl's Position Between Dilthey and the Windelband-Rickert School of Neo-Kantianism." Journal of the History of Philosophy 26.2 (1988): 279-296. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies at DigitalCommons@SHU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@SHU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. +XVVHUO V3RVLWLRQ%HWZHHQ'LOWKH\DQGWKH:LQGHOEDQG5LFNHUW 6FKRRORI1HR.DQWLDQLVP John E. Jalbert Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 26, Number 2, April 1988, pp. 279-296 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/hph.1988.0045 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hph/summary/v026/26.2jalbert.html Access provided by Sacred Heart University (5 Dec 2014 12:35 GMT) Husserl's Position Between Dilthey and the Windelband- Rickert School of Neo- Kanuamsm JOHN E. JALBERT THE CONTROVERSY AND DEBATE over the character of the relationship between the natural and human sciences (Natur- und Geisteswissenschaflen) became a central theme for philosophical reflection largely through the efforts of theo- rists such as Wilhelm Dilthey and the two principal representatives of the Baden School of Neo-Kantians, Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert.~ These turn of the century theorists are major figures in this philosophical arena, but they are by no means the only participants in the effort to grapple with this issue.
    [Show full text]
  • Why We Need a Philosophy of Engineering: a Work in Progress
    Why we need a philosophy of engineering: a work in progress STEVEN L. GOLDMAN Departments of Philosophy and History, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015, USA Engineering problem solving employs a contingency based form of reasoning that stands in sharp contrast to the necessity based model of rationality that has dominated Western philosophy since Plato and that underlies modern science. The concept ‘necessity’ is cognate with the concepts ‘certainty’, ‘universality’, ‘abstractness’ and ‘theory’. Engineering by contrast is characterised by wilfulness, particularity, probability, concreteness and prac- tice. The identification of rationality with necessity has impoverished our ability to apply reason effectively to action. This article locates the contingency based reasoning of engineer- ing in a philosophical tradition extending from pre-Socratic philosophers to American pragmatism, and suggests how a contingency based philosophy of engineering might enable more effective technological action. For reasons that have been at the heart of Western culture from its beginnings in ancient Greece, engineering has been treated dismissively by intellectuals and in particular by philosophers.1 The reasons reflect deeply rooted prejudices that have been sustained for well over two thousand years. Of special relevance to the persistent underestimation of engineering is the low value historically placed by intellectuals on the contingent, the probable, the particular, the contextual and the temporal. Conversely, philosophers especially have placed a high value on the necessary, the certain, the universal, the context independent and the timeless. This hierarchisation subordinates practice, values, emotion and will to theory, value neutral principles and deductive logic in ways that leave us ill equipped to deal rationally with life.
    [Show full text]
  • Toward a Philosophy of Technology Author(S): Hans Jonas Source: the Hastings Center Report, Vol
    Toward a Philosophy of Technology Author(s): Hans Jonas Source: The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Feb., 1979), pp. 34-43 Published by: The Hastings Center Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3561700 . Accessed: 26/10/2011 18:53 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Hastings Center is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Hastings Center Report. http://www.jstor.org KNOWLEDGE,POWER & THE BIOLOGICALREVOLUTION Toward a Philosophy of Technology by HANS JONAS the world furnishedwith them looks. A third, overarching themeis the moralside of technologyas a burdenon human A re there philosophicalaspects to technology?Of responsibility,especially its long-termeffects on the global course there are, as there are to all things of importancein conditionof man and environment.This-my own mainpre- humanendeavor and destiny.Modern technology touches on occupation over the past years-will only be touched upon. almost everythingvital to man's existence-material, men- tal, and spiritual.Indeed, what of man is not involved?The I. The FormalDynamics of Technology way he lives his life and looks at objects,his intercoursewith the worldand with his peers,his powersand modes of action, First some observationsabout technology'sform as an kinds of goals, states and changesof society, objectivesand abstractwhole of movement.We are concernedwith char- forms of politics (includingwarfare no less than welfare), acteristicsof moderntechnology and thereforeask firstwhat the sense and qualityof life, even man'sfate and that of his distinguishesit formallyfrom all previoustechnology.
    [Show full text]
  • Heidegger, Marcuse and the Philosophy of Technology
    [Text of a lecture based on the Preface to Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (Routledge, 2005)] Heidegger, Marcuse and the Philosophy of Technology Andrew Feenberg Heidegger is often considered to be the most important continental philosopher of the 20th Century. He is certainly one of the most controversial. Despite his politics, Heidegger had four Jewish students who went on to brilliant careers as social philosophers, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, and Herbert Marcuse. I had the good fortune to study with Marcuse and have been influenced by his thought, although I am by no means a "Marcusean." Several years ago I decided to investigate the links between Heidegger and Marcuse more closely and discovered to my surprise that they share a common interpretation of Aristotle, an interpretation that seems to originate in Heidegger's early courses which Marcuse attended. I have followed up this connection in a book entitled Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History. This lecture will review some of the main themes of this book. *** I arrived in La Jolla, California in the fall of 1965 as a graduate student in philosophy. One of my reasons for coming was what I had heard of Herbert Marcuse. He was not yet famous but he was well known and what was known about him intrigued me. I was interested in phenomenology, but a philosopher wild enough to synthesize Marx and Freud was wild enough for a young graduate student looking for an alternative to the positivism then dominating American philosophy. At the first opportunity I asked Professor Marcuse to help me study Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time.
    [Show full text]
  • A Response to Don Ihde's Charge
    Center for Open Access in Science ▪ https://www.centerprode.com/ojsp.html Open Journal for Studies in Philosophy, 2020, 4(1), 1-10. ISSN (Online) 2560-5380 ▪ https://doi.org/10.32591/coas.ojsp.0401.01001z _________________________________________________________________________ Thinking Essence, Thinking Technology: A Response to Don Ihde’s Charge Bowen Zha Kyushu University, Faculty of Humanities, Fukuoka, JAPAN Received: 6 April 2020 ▪ Accepted: 25 May 2020 ▪ Published Online: 2 June 2020 Abstract Heidegger’s seminal lecture, The Question Concerning Technology, has greatly influenced the contemporary philosophy of technology. However, scholars have different views regarding whether Heidegger’s concept of technology is essentialist. On the one hand, Andrew Feenberg and Don Ihde have argued for this description, while on the other, Iain Thomson has claimed that, though Heidegger appears to be a technological essentialist, but does little to discredit his profound ontological understanding of the historical impact of technology. In this essay, I will focus on Ihde’s critique and argue that his charge of essentialism is itself a misinterpretation of Heidegger’s understanding of technology. I conclude that the meaning of essence in Heidegger’s technology should be interpreted as that of “enduring,” and in that way, describing Heidegger’s concept of technology as essentialism is a metaphysical misinterpretation. Keywords: Martin Heidegger, Don Ihde, the essence of technology, romanticism, essentialism. 1. Introduction Martin Heidegger’s 1953 lecture The Questions Concerning Technology remains one of the most influential textbooks in the philosophy of English technology. Although widely celebrated, Heidegger’s dissertation is still regarded as an essentialist explanation of technology. Recently, technical philosophers such as Andrew Feenberg and Peter-Paul Verbeek reiterated this allegation of essentialism.
    [Show full text]
  • Information and Causality Phyllis Illari and Federica Russo 1 Philosophy
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by UCL Discovery Information and causality Phyllis Illari and Federica Russo 1 Philosophy of causality meets information Philosophical theorizing has been concerned at least since ancient Greek thinkers with the problem of connecting events as causes and effects. For Aristotle causes are first principles that explain the ‘why of things’, but they are also ‘efficient’ in that they are the ‘source of change or rest’. In this sense Aristotelian efficient causation is very close to the attempts made by contemporary philosophy of science to give an account of how something gives rise to something else. Recent debates in philosophy of causality have highlighted that it is one thing to establish that C causes E and another thing to establish how C causes E. This derives from the work of Hall (2004), who distinguishes two concepts of causation – dependence (that) and production (how) – and is followed up by philosophers interested in analyzing the different evidential components (dependence or association (that) and production or mechanisms (how)) which enter into causal assessment (Russo and Williamson, 2007, Illari, 2011a, Clarke et al., 2014). Recent philosophical literature exploring how C causes E has focused on examining the ways in which mechanisms explain such connections. Here, we will focus on understanding production, which is broader in scope, as will become clear. Concerning how C and E are connected, so far we have two dominant accounts. One is in terms of physical processes, characterized using concepts from physics such as conserved quantities.
    [Show full text]
  • A Postphenomenological Perspective
    Aesthetic Experience in Virtual Museums: A Postphenomenological Perspective BART G. MOENS, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium This article explores the impact of the digitization of traditional works of art on the aesthetic experience from a philosophical point of view. Presenting and making use of a recent approach in the philosophy of technology, initiated by the American philosopher Don Ihde, called postphenomenology. This hybrid form of phenomenology builds on traditional phenomenology and combines it with a pragmatic approach in order to focus on the mediating roles of technology. Concrete technologies and applications such as screens and virtual museums are the starting point for our examination of the specific character of these digital media, which are then compared with their physical referents. Following Ihde’s arguments, we show that digital image technologies, and digital images themselves, are not merely functional, but shape perceptions and experiences. Although currently the positive effects and opportunities of these new applications are emphasized in the field – for collection management, the democratization and accessibility of art, possibilities to interact and intervene in the image, efficient marketing, etc. – they do have a significant impact on the way in which art is experienced. Key words: Digitization of art, Virtual museums, Aesthetic experience, Postphenomenology. SDH Reference: Bart Moens. 2018. Aesthetic Experience in Virtual Museums: A Postphenomenological Perspective. SDH, 2, 1, 68-79. DOI: 10.14434/sdh.v2i1.24468 1. INTRODUCTION: ANALOG ART GOES DIGITAL Over the past decades human society has gone through far-reaching transformations by means of so-called disruptive digital technologies such as the Internet, computers, smartphones, etc. [World economic Forum 2015].
    [Show full text]