Andres Vaccari
Andrés Vaccari has a PhD from the Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University. He is presently teaching online at Macquarie University, where he also holds a position as a Research Associate.
His main research interests are in the areas of posthumanism, transhumanism, biophilosophy, and the philosophy of technology. He is interested in the interactions between the living and the technological in the history of western philosophy and science, in particular the way technological analogies and models have been applied to living things, with the cultural, ontological and historical consequences that this has brought about.
He is also interested in new ontologies and conceptual models that attempt to think through traditional oppositions beteen artificial/natural, culture/ nature, machine/organism, etc. This includes the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Manuel DeLanda, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, Gilbert Simondon, Mark Hansen, Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturama, etc. He is also interested in how some of these theories end up reinscribing these old oppositions in new forms.
Also, there is a range of other research interests that issue from this: the role of technology and material culture in human evolution, phenomenological approaches to the philosophy of technology, recent approaches to materiality and technology in the cognitive sciences (embedded, distributed, extended cognition, etc.), the question of non-human agency (Malafouris, Latour, Pickering, Callon, Law, etc.), and the curious myths around technology developed in the Information Age (transhumanism, techno-mysticism, millenarianism, ideologies around biotechnology and genetic engineering, etc.)
His main research interests are in the areas of posthumanism, transhumanism, biophilosophy, and the philosophy of technology. He is interested in the interactions between the living and the technological in the history of western philosophy and science, in particular the way technological analogies and models have been applied to living things, with the cultural, ontological and historical consequences that this has brought about.
He is also interested in new ontologies and conceptual models that attempt to think through traditional oppositions beteen artificial/natural, culture/ nature, machine/organism, etc. This includes the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Manuel DeLanda, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, Gilbert Simondon, Mark Hansen, Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturama, etc. He is also interested in how some of these theories end up reinscribing these old oppositions in new forms.
Also, there is a range of other research interests that issue from this: the role of technology and material culture in human evolution, phenomenological approaches to the philosophy of technology, recent approaches to materiality and technology in the cognitive sciences (embedded, distributed, extended cognition, etc.), the question of non-human agency (Malafouris, Latour, Pickering, Callon, Law, etc.), and the curious myths around technology developed in the Information Age (transhumanism, techno-mysticism, millenarianism, ideologies around biotechnology and genetic engineering, etc.)
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En La técnica y el tiempo, Bernard Stiegler busca revitalizar la filosofía de la técnica en su dimensión antropológica y política, estableciendo a la técnica como el hilo conductor entre las problemáticas de la conciencia, el tiempo, la materialidad, y lo humano. Por otro lado, Stiegler restaura una metafísica de neto corte tradicional que demarca firmes divisiones entre naturaleza y artificialidad, humano y animal, y viviente y no-viviente. En este artículo me propongo examinar cómo esta ontología conservadora se establece como la condición necesaria de la visión tradicional de la técnica (reduccionista, determinista y esencialista) que Stiegler propone.
ENGLISH
In Technics and Time, Bernard Stiegler seeks to revitalize the philosophy of technology in its anthropological and political dimensions, establishing technics as the guiding thread between the problems of consciousness, time, materiality, and the human. On the other hand, though, Stiegler restores a metaphysics of a traditional and conservative character that re-establishes fi rm divisions between nature and artificiality, human and animal, and living and non-living. In this article, I propose to examine how this conservative ontology is established as the necessary condition of the traditional (reductionist, deterministic, and essentialist) views of technics that Stiegler proposes.
Palabras clave: Filosofía de la tecnología, agencia material, enfoques ecológicos de la cognición
Abstract. In this paper we evaluate the strengths and limitations of two approaches that privilege material dimensions of technology in their respective accounts of technical practice: the ecological account of Tim Ingold and the material agency theory of Lambros Malafouris. Both these authors eschew the centralized intentionality of classical approaches in favor of epistemic externalism: the view that ecological and material affordances are the key drivers of agency in action, and determinant of artifactual form. We argue that these approaches have significant difficulties accounting for some amply recognized, key features of technical agency at the center of debates in the philosophy of technology—namely, its normative and teleological aspects.
Keywords: Philosophy of technology, material agency, ecological approaches to cognition
Abstract: The figure of posthumanity is invoked in a wide range of arguments that advertise the appeal or even the moral imperative of human enhancement through means of genetic engineering. Posthumanity is presented in these arguments as a highly beneficial state, the end point of a process of directed evolution to which we must devote our efforts. Focusing on the writings of transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom, in this article I question this normative role of posthumanity as a legitimation for liberal eugenics. For a start, I argue that the costs and benefits of a posthuman state are impossible to calculate. On the other hand, I identify certain problems concerning the positionality and instrumentality of augmented capacities. These capacities can be considered valuable inasmuch as they (1) provide an advantage relative to a context and (2) they are instrumental to the future benefit of persons. I argue that we cannot establish a necessary connection between capacities and wellbeing, thus the promise of posthumanity as a beneficial state is difficult to take seriously.
Abstract: In this paper I examine some philosophical aspects of transhumanism, in particular its assumptions about human nature (“philosophical anthropology”) and the philosophy of technology implicated in them. I focus on genetic engineering and “directed evolution”, a central narrative in the promotion of a “posthuman” future that (according to the transhumanists) will bring wide-ranging benefits to humanity. I argue that transhumanism advances a deliberative theory of value in the context of a market model for the commercialization and distribution of the goods promised by reprogenetics. This deliberative theory, in turn, is supported on an anthropological vision heavily anchored on the humanist tradition. I argue that this strategy leads us to profound contradictions, since the individualist-mercantilist model cannot lead to any global benefit for human “nature”.
Mientras críticos bioconservadores como Fukuyama hablan de un misterioso “Factor X”, el cual se encuentra en riesgo a causa del programa de bio-perfeccionamiento, los transhumanos hablan de una continuación del humanismo racionalista basado en una noción de lo humano como ente transcendente a la naturaleza. En el lado transhumano, la situación se complica considerablemente cuando introducimos la posibilidad de alterar esta naturaleza humana por medios tecnológicos.
La ideología transhumanista plantea un modelo de lo humano basado en un dualismo cartesiano, combinado con una perspectiva cientificista de corte naturalista. De acuerdo a este modelo, la razón, por medio de la voluntad, tiene el poder de abstraerse de sus propias condiciones biológicas y materiales, e idearse fines auto-determinados, tales como la modificación de su propia naturaleza. Ahora, al intervenir en su propio cuerpo y alterar las condiciones materiales que determinan su racionalidad, se alteran las mismas propiedades que son las condiciones de posibilidad de dicho proyecto. O sea que cualquier modificación que pretenda perfeccionar lo humano debe dejar intactas las propiedades (racionalidad, poder de abstracción, etc.) que hacen posible la continuación de dicho proceso por medio de sucesivas modificaciones. Es justamente este “nodo” de propiedades o fenómenos los que los transhumanos consideran el corazón de la naturaleza humana. Sin embargo, esta tensión (entre una retórica que busca afianzarse en la naturaleza y a la vez ir en contra de ella) lleva a los transhumanistas a una serie de paradojas y absurdos que debilitan su argumento. Son estas paradojas las que me propongo examinar en este artículo.
ABSTRACT (Spanish): El presente trabajo aborda un análisis comparativo entre la noción de función, tal como ha sido desarrollada en la filosofía analítica, y la noción de función en la filosofía de Simondon. Se examina la relación entre agencia, intencionalidad, y el uso y producción de artefactos en ambos enfoques. Una característica llamativa es que en la filosofía de Simondon no se establece la distinción entre función y estructura, la cual es central en el dualismo artefactual. Finalmente se examina la noción sistémica de la función desarrollada por Cummins en el lado analítico, la cual se considera complementaria o afín a la de Simondon."
Descartes’ contribution was to ground the machine on an ontological and epistemological basis, exploring, among other things, the poetic and conceptual possibilities of a mechanical theory of life. The machine is, on one hand, a true expression of how the world really is, as well as the conceptual foundation for our understanding of this same world. I focus, then, on these two main aspects: how technical artifacts and processes enter Descartes’ philosophy of nature, and the role of analogy in his scientific method.
I begin by situating Descartes in his historical, conceptual and technological milieu, pinpointing the material and cultural sources of natural-philosophical explanation. I move on to a broad outline of Descartes’ physics, which has a markedly metaphysical character. Then, to the heuristic machinery of epistemology: the apparatus of perception and how mechanics serves as the basis for clear and distinct knowledge. I argue that, for Descartes, science is about the creation of intermediary hypotheses, and situate this approach in the context of the Cartesian view of human knowledge in the larger scheme of things (i.e., the theological framework for Descartes’ philosophy of science and technology). In turn, Descartes’ perspective is informed by a ‘semiotics’ of non-resemblance (in which our impressions do not ‘resemble’ their referent or source). I then examine how the machine becomes the ‘master’ metaphor, constitutive and productive of knowledge.
I hope this paper is a contribution to the historical understanding of the scientific revolution—in particular, as establishing one of the most influential paths through which technology and science entered in dialogue, and became productive of each other. More generally, it is a historical case study on the role of metaphors in scientific knowledge.
""
Stiegler’s understanding of technology makes more sense if we consider it as an accomplished metaphysical conceptualization of mnenotechnics, a limited aspect of technology, the elucidation of which (as Stiegler rightly argues) carries a certain political urgency. Stiegler reduces all technology to mnemotechnics in its epiphylogenetic character, subsuming the technical universe to the sign of the text, the gramme and the inscription (with its “human” correlatives: memory, anticipation and death). This becomes apparent when we consider the general telos of Technics and Time, which remains concerned with writing, photography, cinema, the archive, and the industrialization of consciousness: technological phenomena more amenable to be subsumed under the textual paradigm.
I also examine Stiegler's reliance on concepts of "program" and the radical break he assumes between "life" and "technics", which buttress his views on culture and individuation. I argue that they depart from rather shaky notions of "program" that are being seriously questioned in their respective fields (genetics, molecular biology, anthropology, etc.). This leads Stiegler into an ontology that continues the history of metaphysics that he sets out to challenge. "
En La técnica y el tiempo, Bernard Stiegler busca revitalizar la filosofía de la técnica en su dimensión antropológica y política, estableciendo a la técnica como el hilo conductor entre las problemáticas de la conciencia, el tiempo, la materialidad, y lo humano. Por otro lado, Stiegler restaura una metafísica de neto corte tradicional que demarca firmes divisiones entre naturaleza y artificialidad, humano y animal, y viviente y no-viviente. En este artículo me propongo examinar cómo esta ontología conservadora se establece como la condición necesaria de la visión tradicional de la técnica (reduccionista, determinista y esencialista) que Stiegler propone.
ENGLISH
In Technics and Time, Bernard Stiegler seeks to revitalize the philosophy of technology in its anthropological and political dimensions, establishing technics as the guiding thread between the problems of consciousness, time, materiality, and the human. On the other hand, though, Stiegler restores a metaphysics of a traditional and conservative character that re-establishes fi rm divisions between nature and artificiality, human and animal, and living and non-living. In this article, I propose to examine how this conservative ontology is established as the necessary condition of the traditional (reductionist, deterministic, and essentialist) views of technics that Stiegler proposes.
Palabras clave: Filosofía de la tecnología, agencia material, enfoques ecológicos de la cognición
Abstract. In this paper we evaluate the strengths and limitations of two approaches that privilege material dimensions of technology in their respective accounts of technical practice: the ecological account of Tim Ingold and the material agency theory of Lambros Malafouris. Both these authors eschew the centralized intentionality of classical approaches in favor of epistemic externalism: the view that ecological and material affordances are the key drivers of agency in action, and determinant of artifactual form. We argue that these approaches have significant difficulties accounting for some amply recognized, key features of technical agency at the center of debates in the philosophy of technology—namely, its normative and teleological aspects.
Keywords: Philosophy of technology, material agency, ecological approaches to cognition
Abstract: The figure of posthumanity is invoked in a wide range of arguments that advertise the appeal or even the moral imperative of human enhancement through means of genetic engineering. Posthumanity is presented in these arguments as a highly beneficial state, the end point of a process of directed evolution to which we must devote our efforts. Focusing on the writings of transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom, in this article I question this normative role of posthumanity as a legitimation for liberal eugenics. For a start, I argue that the costs and benefits of a posthuman state are impossible to calculate. On the other hand, I identify certain problems concerning the positionality and instrumentality of augmented capacities. These capacities can be considered valuable inasmuch as they (1) provide an advantage relative to a context and (2) they are instrumental to the future benefit of persons. I argue that we cannot establish a necessary connection between capacities and wellbeing, thus the promise of posthumanity as a beneficial state is difficult to take seriously.
Abstract: In this paper I examine some philosophical aspects of transhumanism, in particular its assumptions about human nature (“philosophical anthropology”) and the philosophy of technology implicated in them. I focus on genetic engineering and “directed evolution”, a central narrative in the promotion of a “posthuman” future that (according to the transhumanists) will bring wide-ranging benefits to humanity. I argue that transhumanism advances a deliberative theory of value in the context of a market model for the commercialization and distribution of the goods promised by reprogenetics. This deliberative theory, in turn, is supported on an anthropological vision heavily anchored on the humanist tradition. I argue that this strategy leads us to profound contradictions, since the individualist-mercantilist model cannot lead to any global benefit for human “nature”.
Mientras críticos bioconservadores como Fukuyama hablan de un misterioso “Factor X”, el cual se encuentra en riesgo a causa del programa de bio-perfeccionamiento, los transhumanos hablan de una continuación del humanismo racionalista basado en una noción de lo humano como ente transcendente a la naturaleza. En el lado transhumano, la situación se complica considerablemente cuando introducimos la posibilidad de alterar esta naturaleza humana por medios tecnológicos.
La ideología transhumanista plantea un modelo de lo humano basado en un dualismo cartesiano, combinado con una perspectiva cientificista de corte naturalista. De acuerdo a este modelo, la razón, por medio de la voluntad, tiene el poder de abstraerse de sus propias condiciones biológicas y materiales, e idearse fines auto-determinados, tales como la modificación de su propia naturaleza. Ahora, al intervenir en su propio cuerpo y alterar las condiciones materiales que determinan su racionalidad, se alteran las mismas propiedades que son las condiciones de posibilidad de dicho proyecto. O sea que cualquier modificación que pretenda perfeccionar lo humano debe dejar intactas las propiedades (racionalidad, poder de abstracción, etc.) que hacen posible la continuación de dicho proceso por medio de sucesivas modificaciones. Es justamente este “nodo” de propiedades o fenómenos los que los transhumanos consideran el corazón de la naturaleza humana. Sin embargo, esta tensión (entre una retórica que busca afianzarse en la naturaleza y a la vez ir en contra de ella) lleva a los transhumanistas a una serie de paradojas y absurdos que debilitan su argumento. Son estas paradojas las que me propongo examinar en este artículo.
ABSTRACT (Spanish): El presente trabajo aborda un análisis comparativo entre la noción de función, tal como ha sido desarrollada en la filosofía analítica, y la noción de función en la filosofía de Simondon. Se examina la relación entre agencia, intencionalidad, y el uso y producción de artefactos en ambos enfoques. Una característica llamativa es que en la filosofía de Simondon no se establece la distinción entre función y estructura, la cual es central en el dualismo artefactual. Finalmente se examina la noción sistémica de la función desarrollada por Cummins en el lado analítico, la cual se considera complementaria o afín a la de Simondon."
Descartes’ contribution was to ground the machine on an ontological and epistemological basis, exploring, among other things, the poetic and conceptual possibilities of a mechanical theory of life. The machine is, on one hand, a true expression of how the world really is, as well as the conceptual foundation for our understanding of this same world. I focus, then, on these two main aspects: how technical artifacts and processes enter Descartes’ philosophy of nature, and the role of analogy in his scientific method.
I begin by situating Descartes in his historical, conceptual and technological milieu, pinpointing the material and cultural sources of natural-philosophical explanation. I move on to a broad outline of Descartes’ physics, which has a markedly metaphysical character. Then, to the heuristic machinery of epistemology: the apparatus of perception and how mechanics serves as the basis for clear and distinct knowledge. I argue that, for Descartes, science is about the creation of intermediary hypotheses, and situate this approach in the context of the Cartesian view of human knowledge in the larger scheme of things (i.e., the theological framework for Descartes’ philosophy of science and technology). In turn, Descartes’ perspective is informed by a ‘semiotics’ of non-resemblance (in which our impressions do not ‘resemble’ their referent or source). I then examine how the machine becomes the ‘master’ metaphor, constitutive and productive of knowledge.
I hope this paper is a contribution to the historical understanding of the scientific revolution—in particular, as establishing one of the most influential paths through which technology and science entered in dialogue, and became productive of each other. More generally, it is a historical case study on the role of metaphors in scientific knowledge.
""
Stiegler’s understanding of technology makes more sense if we consider it as an accomplished metaphysical conceptualization of mnenotechnics, a limited aspect of technology, the elucidation of which (as Stiegler rightly argues) carries a certain political urgency. Stiegler reduces all technology to mnemotechnics in its epiphylogenetic character, subsuming the technical universe to the sign of the text, the gramme and the inscription (with its “human” correlatives: memory, anticipation and death). This becomes apparent when we consider the general telos of Technics and Time, which remains concerned with writing, photography, cinema, the archive, and the industrialization of consciousness: technological phenomena more amenable to be subsumed under the textual paradigm.
I also examine Stiegler's reliance on concepts of "program" and the radical break he assumes between "life" and "technics", which buttress his views on culture and individuation. I argue that they depart from rather shaky notions of "program" that are being seriously questioned in their respective fields (genetics, molecular biology, anthropology, etc.). This leads Stiegler into an ontology that continues the history of metaphysics that he sets out to challenge. "
(Im)possible futures: Tecnocene and Civilizational Crossroads
For the last eleven consecutive years, the International Colloquia on the Philosophy of Technology have become a space for the development of this subdiscipline of philosophy and a global forum for the discussion of its debates and central problems. This year, we take the Anthropocene as our departure point. The Anthropocene names a critical point in the history of the planet in which nature exhibits the deep traces of human action. However, the notion of Technocene has been suggested as a better name for the Anthropocene. More than the action of an anthropos, a human being considered as subject of history, the notion of Technocene suggests a global system that is autonomous and out of control. Technology is the true subject of history, a pervasive second nature, a global system with its own inertial paths of development or entropy. In this way, nature fades from view within the horizon of technology and technology itself becomes an immanent entity, a “kingdom” of nature. The logic of the technological system does not obey human goals. Indeed, its result could be the disappearance of humanity itself. Recent debates in the philosophy of technology have articulated the problem of technology with debates around the civilizational crisis represented by the Anthropocene, and now the Technocene. Among other things, this has motivated an “ontophilic” turn in which technology is approached as a planetary system or hyperobject. Another consequence of the technocentric turn is the closing off of the future or futures. Futurities mark sites of dispute. As we try to peer beyond capitalist realism, which has excluded imaginary alternatives to its monolithic paths, we need to the recover a future-oriented thought, a thought that dares to imagine again. The future is a battleground between alternative visions of the human, the technological, and its relations.
As a subdiscipline of philosophy, the philosophy of technology encompasses a wide variety of problems transversal to ontology, epistemology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, political philosophy, philosophical anthropology and gender studies. As is our custom, the International Colloquia on the Philosophy of Technology is open to a broad agenda of topics and any work within the field will be considered.
We call for 30-minute presentations on the following topics, although any proposal within the field will be considered.
§ Anthropocene / Technocene / Cthulhucene / Neguentropocene.
§ Ontological and metaphysical aspects of technology
§ Technology and politics
§ Techno-aesthetics
§ Algorithmic dystopias
§ Technology and subjectivation / subjectivity
§ Posthumanism, transhumanism and metahumanism
§ Philosophical problems of technical entities: digital objects, cyborgs, hybrids, autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, etc.
§ Analytical approaches to technology
§ Ethics and policy of algorithms
During the seventeenth century, in the formative period of modern science, technology offered the rational study of nature not only new tools for measuring and observation, but also a source of analogies and metaphysical inspiration. Certain perceived features of machines (e.g., their physical structure, their internal processes) became the metaphorical basis for a new mechanical model of the world. The machine image neatly encapsulated a new ontology of matter, centered on the interaction of inert mechanisms acting according to laws of motion, force and figure (i.e., the spatial structure of the constituent elements of the universe).
The machine was also an object of interest for the emerging class of merchant capitalists in early modern Europe. Descartes is the first philosopher to argue persuasively that the body is a machine, but the notion is also suggested by the ancient atomists. In particular, some strong continuities exist between the representation of machines in technological treatises and the representation of the human body in the works of Vesalius and Descartes. Later this tradition re-emerges with peculiar strength during the late industrial revolution, where the taming and control of bodies became an industrial prerogative.
So, there has been a fruitful conceptual interaction between bodies and machines, organisms and technology. In medicine and physiology, the machine image has been central in the conceptualization of organic life as the concerted interaction of mechanical processes subject to physical laws. The nineteenth century sees the rise of models of industrial and managerial application, such as human-machine interaction, and the numerous successors of “efficiency engineering”. These reach a most sophisticated expression in the twentieth century, with the development of cybernetics and bionics, both of which depart from very close machine-organism analogies, and problematise the difference between organism and machine. Engineering systems can be made compatible with human characteristics and limitations only when the behavior of both man and machine can be described in comparable terms. The mechanistic paradigm has profoundly affected the attitudes and methods of the physical and life sciences, and has nowadays become a “dead metaphor” of wide-ranging reach. "
El IV Coloquio Internacional de Filosofía de la Técnica, realizado en Buenos Aires entre el 26 y el 28 de septiembre de 2013, se dedicó al tema Naturaleza y artificialidad, examinando especialmente las tensiones, continuidades y rupturas de este par conceptual.
La filosofía de la técnica abarca un complejo de objetos y problemas que atraviesan la metafísica, la epistemología, la ética y la antropología filosófica, así como la cultura y la sociedad. Algunos debates recientes en filosofía de la técnica se han concentrado en indagar las cuestiones ontológicas y epistemológicas relacionadas con la dicotomía entre naturaleza y artificialidad. ¿Tiene lo artificial una epistemología propia? ¿Qué clase de cosas son las cosas artificiales? ¿Son diferentes de las clases naturales? ¿Es legítimo utilizar analogías biológicas para comprender el despliegue del mundo técnico y sus cambios? ¿Qué diferencias existen entre el tipo de evolución biológica y el de linajes de artefactos? ¿Cuándo una novedad artificial es una novedad genuina? ¿Cómo conocemos el mundo artificial? ¿Es distinto al modo de acceso al mundo natural?
Los trabajos que aquí se presentan abordan éstas y otras cuestiones, y lo hacen de una manera refrescante y original. La mayoría de ellos son resultados de programas de investigación maduros que se presentan para su debate abierto y completo. Provienen de la tradición tanto analítica como continental. Vistos como una totalidad son una muestra de la riqueza de las investigaciones que se realizan en Iberoamérica, así como de los beneficios mutuos que las tradiciones filosóficas pueden obtener cuando dialogan entre sí.
Detrás de la realización de estos coloquios hay muchos esfuerzos colectivos. El coloquio no sería posible sin la contribución que realizan diferentes grupos reunidos en distintos programas y proyectos de investigación; por ejemplo, el grupo del proyecto “Epistemología de los Artefactos. Affordances, conocimiento práctico y artefactos epistémicos”, de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, dirigido por Jesús Vega Encabo; el grupo del proyecto “Los objetos técnicos y los organismos tecnificados. Reflexiones filosóficas, estéticas y políticas sobre la técnica”, del CiFFyH (Centro de Investigaciones de la Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades) y de FAMAF (Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física), dirigido por Javier Blanco; el programa de Filosofía de la Tecnología, del Departamento de Filosofía, Fundación Bariloche, dirigido por Andrés Vaccari; y finalmente, el grupo de filosofía de la tecnología, del Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, de la Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico, dirigido por Diego Lawler.