PHITECO P.-P. Verbeek "Thinking Trough Technological Things: Instrumentality, Dialectics, Hybridity"

Intervention de Peter-Paul Verbeek "Thinking Trough Technological Things: Instrumentality, Dialectics, Hybridity" au séminaire annuel PHITECO (Philosophie Technologie Cognition) de l'Université de Technologie de Compiègne. Information : https://sites.google.com/site/mineurp...

In the history of philosophy of technology, technological artefacts have been conceptualised along various lines. In this paper, I will distinguish three basic interpretational frameworks: instrumentality, dialectics, and hybridity. In the instrumentalist approach, technological artefacts are sees as neutral carriers of human intentions, while the dialectical approach thematises a tension between the human and the technological - either in terms of a struggle between human autonomy and technological determinism or a relation between human beings and their technological externalisations. The hybrid approach thematises the blurring boundaries between the human and the technological, in order to understand how concepts that have been traditionally used to understand humans or things need to be expanded to understand how humans and technological artefacts have become interrelated. The paper will especially focus on technological mediation and the character of human-technology relations in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics: how do technologies help human beings to understand the world and to make moral decisions, and how do technologies challenge existing ideas about religion and metaphysical approaches.