Third wave continental philosophy of technology
Chair(s): Pieter Lemmens (Radboud University, Netherlands, The), Vincent Blok (Wageningen University), Hub Zwart (Erasmus University), Yuk Hui (Erasmus University)
Since its first emergence in the late nineteenth century (starting with Marx, Ure, Reuleaux and Kapp and coming of age throughout the twentieth century via a wide variety of authors such as Dessauer, Spengler, Gehlen, Plessner, the Jünger brothers, Heidegger, Bense, Anders, Günther, Simondon, Ellul and Hottois), philosophy of technology has predominantly sought to think ‘Technology with a capital T’ in a more or less ‘metaphysical’ or ‘transcendentalist’ fashion or as part of a philosophical anthropology.
After its establishment as an academic discipline in its own right from the early 1970’s onwards, philosophy of technology divided itself roughly into two different approaches, the so-called ‘engineering’ approach on the one hand and the so-called ‘humanities’ or ‘hermeneutic’ approach on the other (Mitcham 1994).
Within this latter approach, the transcendentalist framework remained most influential until the early 1990’s, when American (Ihde) and Dutch philosophers of technology (Verbeek) initiated the so-called ‘empirical turn’, which basically criticized all macro-scale or high-altitude and more ontological theorizations of technology such as Heidegger’s Enframing and Ellul’s Technological Imperative as inadequate and obsolete and instead proposed an explicit move toward micro-scale and low-altitude, i.e., empirical analyses of specific technical artefacts in concrete use contexts (Achterhuis 2001).
From the 2010’s onwards, this empirical approach has been reproached for obfuscating the broader politico-economic and ontological ambiance. Particularly European philosophers of technology expressed renewed interest in the older continentalist approaches and argued for a rehabilitation of the transcendental or ontological (as well as systemic) question of technology (Zwier, Blok & Lemmens 2016, Zwart 2021), for instance in the sense of the technosphere as planetary technical system responsible for ushering in the Anthropocene or Technocene (Cera 2023), forcing philosophy of technology to think technology big again (Lemmens 2021) and calling not only for a ‘political turn’ (Romele 2021) but also for a ‘terrestrial turn’ in the philosophy of technology (Lemmens, Blok & Zwier 2017).
Under the influence of, among others, Stiegler’s approach to the question of technics (Stiegler 2001), Hui’s concepts of cosmotechnics and technodiversity (Hui 2016) and Blok’s concept of ‘world-constitutive technics’ (Blok 2023), we are currently witnessing the emergence of what may be called a ‘third wave’ in philosophy of technology which intends, in dialectical fashion, to surpass the opposition between transcendental and empirical, and instead engages in combining more fundamental approaches to technology and its transformative, disruptive and world-shaping power with analyses of its more concrete (symptomatic) manifestations.
This symposium aims to open a debate among authors exemplifying this third wave, with a view to the contemporary intimate technological revolution, specifically focusing on the themes technology and human identity, human nature, agency and autonomy, artificial intelligence, robots and social media, and the environment and sustainability.
Presentations of the Symposium
The ‘third wave’ of philosophical questioning: on concepts coming into action (Technology and being there)
Hub Zwart
Erasmus University
In an entry entitled “The Tyrants of the Spirit” (Daybreak, § 547) Friedrich Nietzsche confronted the “tyrannical” philosophical thinker, who aspires to capture the condition of the world in a single word, and considers asking small questions as something contemptible, with the modus operandi of modern scientific research, conducted in a selfless, hands-on and collaborative fashion. Perhaps the empirical turn in philosophy of technology, which aimed to move away from “high-altitude” theorizations of technology towards micro-scale empirical analyses of specific technical artefacts, was an effort to make philosophy of technology less “tyrannical” and more collaborative, thereby losing something along the way, however, obfuscating the global political ambiance of technoscientific change and the entanglement of technological innovations with practices of power.
I will explore whether this opposition can be superseded. On the one hand, for philosophers, proximity is important: being there, entering the scenes and sites where technoscientific change becomes tangible and concrete, probing the philosophical dimension of decisive developments in dialogue. At the same time, it is the vocation of philosophers to zoom out, coming to terms with technoscience by seeing concrete technoscientific applications as exemplifications of global disruptive processes of change, as concrete universals, and as the realisation / actualisation of fundamental concepts (fundamental answers to the question what is being, e.g., ‘everything is information’) which are brought into action and called into question. Thus, coming to terms with technology requires us to supersede the divide between theoretical and practical dimensions of philosophical enquiry.
«Die Frage nach der Technik» as «Die Frage nach der Philosophie»
Agostino Cera
University of Ferrara
Behind/within every interpretation of technology lies a Weltanschauung, which is simultaneously a Menschenanschauung, and thus a vision of philosophy itself: an interpretation of it as a form of knowledge (or even a form of life).
Starting from this premise, I would like to highlight what I consider the current epistemic crisis in the philosophy of technology, a concern that justifies my staunch defense of a continental/transcendental approach. In my view the ultimate price (the true legacy) of the “empirical turn” might be the self-suppression of the philosophy of technology as philosophy, in the sense of a negation of the epistemic difference of philosophy as a form of knowledge.
Often, what is superficially called inter- or trans-disciplinarity hides a more or less explicit process of epistemic colonization (or submission), whereby a philosophy in a state of minority – no longer believing in itself – seeks its own legitimacy in the realm of the hard sciences, adopting (imitating) their methods and paradigms, primarily the solutionist one. This self-suppression of philosophy’s epistemic difference, this covert cupio dissolvi, manifests in the current metamorphosis of the philosophy of technology into a “problem-solving activity”.
For several years, I have sought to give a coherent shape to this concern through a critical historicization of the newest philosophy of technology, that is, from the empirical turn to postphenomenology. This work culminates in what I have called the ontophobic turn: the current panic-stricken reluctance, on the part of much of the philosophy of technology, to name “Technology” (in the singular and with a capital T); its growing intolerance of anything that cannot be reduced to the problem-solution schema. This kind of critique was already formulated by Franco Volpi in the early 2000s, when discussing the difference between “philosophies in the nominative and genitive cases”.
By analogy, one could draw a parallel with the cyclical patterns in the history of philosophy. My impression is that postphenomenology relates to the philosophy of technology in a way similar to how Neo-Kantianism related to classical German philosophy (Kantianism and Idealism). At the beginning of the 20th century, the Baden and Marburg schools expressed the conviction that the era of philosophy’s epistemic difference and autonomy had ended, and that philosophy could find a new legitimacy only as epistemology, that is, as an ancilla scientiae: a theoretical guarantor for the empirical activities of the sciences and their successes. Mutatis mutandis, postphenomenology in its fully developed form (i.e. in its second- and third generation) resembles, in its own way, a declaration of distrust in philosophy itself, accompanied by an attempt to rebrand itself as an ancilla technologiae, serving technological progress as its theoretical and especially rhetorical-ideological support. Reduced to their essence, many examples of contemporary philosophy of technology are exercises in apologetics and justificationism, aimed at reassuring and placating public opinion to perpetuate the status quo with a clear conscience. Hence its present balsamic function, its lubricating vocation.
In my view, the solutionism/ontophobic turn as the benchmark of this epistemic crisis in philosophy is not the direct and intended product of the work of first-generation postphenomenology, but a subsequent outcome of it. A kind of collateral damage, stemming from its own success. Like some of his fellow peers (Borgmann, Feenberg, Winner ...), Don Ihde claimed the legitimate right of a new generation of scholars to tread their own path, escaping the shadow cone of the “founding fathers.” To this end, he engaged in a consciously sharp critique of figures like Heidegger and Husserl, while acknowledging the importance of their work. Over time, however, with the advent of second-generation (Verbeek) and now third-generation postphenomenologists (Rosenberger), Ihde’s work has been transformed into a damnatio memoriae, a rejection of that burdensome past. The implicit message has become: “The classical philosophy of technology is a metaphysical ballast we can finally shed by ignoring it”. Indeed, this “historical ignorance” – this lack of awareness in complete good conscience – represents one of the distinguishing features of the latest generation of scholars in the philosophy of technology.
From this observation arises a call for the recovery of a “Philosophy of Technology in the Nominative Case” – a “countermovement” to the current inertia, whose first step involves reclaiming the historical dimension of the philosophy of technology on multiple levels. This entails not only knowledge of its roots (authors and currents that initiated this line of inquiry) but increasingly a historicization of its own experience: the necessity for the philosophy of technology to reconstruct its history and become conscious of its path.
In a context like the Anthropocene, where “human activities [i.e., our technological agency] have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the Earth into planetary terra incognita” (Steffen & Crutzen), technology stands out as the current subject of both “history” (according to Anders) and nature itself, thus becoming an “integral epochal phenomenon”. It follows that today philosophy of technology is philosophy of history, the current form of philosophy of history. This makes it the most exposed and most advanced line in the entire philosophical field, which is to say that what is happening today to the philosophy of technology is something that is happening – or will happen shortly – to philosophy tout court.
Based on these assumptions, I think that what the philosophy of technology needs here and now is not yet another “turn” (terrestrial, political, ethical…) but rather a “return”, understood as the pride of: reclaiming, cultivating, and defending its epistemic difference. That is to say, do stop being ashamed of what authentically is. This is obviously a huge issue, which if I had to reduce into a formula I could not express any better than Heidegger, who circumscribes an enclave impregnable from any problem-solving when he states that “Fragen ist die Frömmigkeit des Denkens (questioning is the piety of thought)”. Exactly this enclave philosophy is called upon to defend today.
Heidegger and the limits of the empirical turn
Matheus Ferreira de Barros
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
The philosophy of technology, as a relevant theoretical field in contemporary philosophy, has a history that dates back to the classic philosophers of technology, as well as to the subsequent movement known as the empirical turn. However, as discussed in the field’s specialized literature, several impasses currently challenge the objectives of the empirical turn, like its political-economical underlying premises, and the question of the Anthropocene. These impasses are particularly evident when considering technological phenomena from a planetary perspective, making it difficult nowadays to conceive a philosophical inquiry exclusively focused on analyzing technical objects and their local usage contexts.
These perspectives, therefore, raise some questions related to the history of the philosophy of technology itself, such as: How can we face these challenges? Do we need another kind of “turn” in the philosophy of technology to confront them? Would it be left to us to “overcome” the empirical turn, just as it sought to overcome the classical philosophy of technology? We will then critically engage with this internal movement of linear progression that lies implicitly in the empirical turn. Consequently, the confrontation with “tradition” and its “destruction” to pave the way for new philosophical perspectives on technology is a central question for us. The metaphysical assumptions of the empirical turn as a non-foundationalist perspective lead us to interpret it through the conceptual framework of a philosopher acknowledged for his original and insightful reading of the history of metaphysics—Martin Heidegger.
Therefore, this paper aims to explore this historical-philosophical trajectory, beginning with the mapping of the actual debate about the limits of the empirical turn. Then, we will use the own perspective of Heidegger’s philosophy to analyse what a “turn” would mean, taking mainly the concept of overcoming of metaphysics (Überwindung der Metaphysik). With this development, we will provide a series of reflections - which takes a Heideggerian background - about the opposition between transcendental and empirical that lies in the history of the philosophy of technology.
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