The Role of Human Creativity in Human-Technology Relations

This thesis conceptually investigates the relationship between human existence and the technical object, and thereby relates questions faced within the philosophy of technology to the field of philosophical anthropology. This conceptual work will be taken up in a twofold manner. Firstly, I detail how the Western philosophical tradition has tended to distance its own practice and thinking from the technical, and how it, relatedly, has hierarchically subjugated technics from what essentially defines us as human beings. This will involve a genealogical investigation of the figure of the philosopher and the technician, which will detail how and why these figures have been antagonistic and oppositional from the start. The argument being that this relationship constitutes a genuine hindrance for thinking of existence as originarily technical within the confines of traditional philosophical inquiry and its various schools of thought. Secondly, I conceptually investigate and phenomenologically describe the relationship between human existence and technics by way of an engagement with, first and foremost, the early and late thought of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the work of the French palaeoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan and the thought of the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. The thesis sets out to question, in this regard, whether or not tool-user and tool, the human and the technical object are originarily prosthetically coupled, and hence if, so to speak, the inventor is also invented with what it invents. Its argument being, in this connection, that the invention of the human is technics. The central thesis of Heidegger’s later philosophy of technology that the essence of technics is by no means anything technical will thus be called into question.

Studia Gilsoniana, 2016

19-31, in: Essays in Post-Critical Philosophy of Technology. Eds.: M. Héder and E. Nádasi, Vernon Press, Wilmington, Delaware, 2019

This paper proposes a specific approach to understanding the nature of technology that encompasses the entire field of technological praxis, from the making of primitive tools to using the Internet. In that approach, technology is a specific form of human agency that yields to (an imperfect) realization of human control over a technological situation—that is, a situation not governed to an end by natural constraints but by specific human aims. The components of such technological situations are a given collection of natural or artificial beings, humans, human aims, and situation-bound tools. By performing technological situation analysis, the essential form of tool making, the complex system of relationships between science and technology, technological practices with and without machines, the finiteness or imperfectness of any technology, and engineering (i.e., the possibility of the creation of technological situations) can be considered. For a better characterization of the approach to technology, the paper also presents a comparison of other philosophies of technology. Following Feenberg’s comparative analysis, the so-called fundamental question of the philosophy of technology is formulated, its two sides are identified, and it is applied for clarification of our position within philosophy of technology. In our approach, all human praxis can be considered to be technological; more precisely, every human activity has a technological aspect or dimension

The aim of this article is to argue for an interdisciplinary social theoretical approach to the technicity of human agency. This approach covers the spectrum of individual and social action from a perspective that logically precedes techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, and is intended to be both descriptively and normatively plausible. The study is anchored in a critical reading of Aristotle’s thought on techné and phronésis, as his work is the precursor of action theory and phenomenological hermeneutics, the central methodological orientations of this study. The importance of the “disposition formed under the guidance of reason” as the unifying trait of agency is affirmed with, and against, Aristotle. The article advocates reactivating and developing this trait of agency for a descriptive and critical discourse on the technicity of action, providing an outline of how to accomplish this task. The technicity of the individual agent is examined, reflecting on rule-following, the relation between technicity and creativity, and the interpretative moment of technicity. Next, the interwovenness of the skilful body with biological, social and symbolic aspects of human existence and with systems of technical artefacts is clarified. Finally, a case is made for the critical potential of this “technology”, reverting to Aristotelian means of normative thought.

Culture should be seen as the first nature of human beings. However, the rich diversity of cultural objects present within the life world of humans presupposes the all-embracing role of tools en technology. What appears to be unique and distinctive in human tool-making is the innovation to use tools in the production of other tools. Simpson even discerns in this ability a defining trait: humans are " the only living animal that uses tools to make tools. " Against this background attention is given to prominent scholars and their views on technology and its development. It starts with the philosophy of Descartes and Hobbes and proceeds by considering the views of Dijksterhuis, von Bertalanffy, Heidegger, Weber, Habermas and Ellul – with special attention given to the rise of machine technology. The Enlightenment ideal of progress is related to an over-estimation of technology present in what Schuurman calls technicism, which ought to be understood in terms of the dialectic between nature and freedom in modern philosophy. The technocrats assume universal cultural laws while the revolutionary utopians accept an open future for human freedom. In the final part of the article an assessment is given of some implications entailed in the preceding analysis. It is noted that technology is not " applied science " and that technology and tools should be understood in term of both subject-subject relations and subject-object relations. Since subjects and objects are determined and delimited by applicable cultural norms and principles attention is also given to such principles, intimately connected to an account of the mening of technology. In conclusion it is pointed out that the nature of technology and the all-pervasive use of tools confirm the opening remark regarding culture as the first nature of human beings. Sometimes culture is seen as the second nature of human beings, whereas in fact it should be appreciated as the first nature of humankind. This remark is confirmed by the fact that the general history of human civilizations is assessed in terms of the artefacts they produced. However such artefacts could not have been produced without the development of multiple tools. And with the advent of tool-making technology irrevocably entered the scene. The life-world of humankind is unthinkable without the presence of a cultural environment, including cultural objects such as clothes, cutlery, furniture, houses, roads and so on. Just contemplate the diversity of cultural designs evinced in functionally differentiated cultural objects: analytical artefacts (test tubes) lingual artefacts (books), social artefacts (homes),

Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International …, 2002

The argument presented in this article is that the premises governing human-technology interaction partly derive from the distinctive ways by which each technology defines a domain of reference, and organizes and codifies knowledge and experience within it. While social in ...

Encyclopedia of Technology and Innovation Management, 2010

Since creativity and technology are considered as the cores of development and innovation in our age. Therefor it is important to have a better understands of the role and impacts of digital technologies on human’s creativity and its end product. In order to do so, I tried to answer the following questions; A) Do technology really expands, aids, and creates creativity? B) Do they both have contradicting conceptions? In short, I am trying to examine the impact of the usage of digital technologies on the creativity of humans in design. In trying to do so, I have implemented a qualitative method based mainly on logical interpretation and review of literature. As a conclusion, I found that creativity in the first place relays on the creative person, not on the technology. And that technology may help only in expressing creativity, but not creating it. Also there are conceptual contradictions between them. Finally, I can say that: considering technological thought as the primer thought mode of our age as peters argued (Peters, 2000) is crucial enough to threat peoples’ creativity.

Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 2012

Can we conceive of a philosophy of technology that is not technophobic, yet takes seriously the problem of alienation and human meaning-giving? This paper retrieves the concern with alienation, but brings it into dialogue with more recent philosophy of technology. It defines and responds to the problem of alienation in a way that avoids both old-style human-centered approaches and contemporary thingcentered or hybridity approaches. In contrast to the latter, it proposes to reconcile subject and object not at the ontic level but at the ontological, transcendental level and at the level of skilled activity. Taking inspiration from Dreyfus's reading of Heidegger and engaging critically with the work of Borgmann and Arendt, it explores a phenomenology and ethics of skill. It is concluded that new and emerging technologies must be evaluated not only as artifacts and their consequences, but also in terms of the skills and activities they involve and require. Do they promote engagement with the world and with others, thus making us into better persons?

AI & SOCIETY, 2017

understand technological innovation as a poetic, participative, and performative process, then bringing together technological innovation and artistic practices should not be seen as a marginal or luxury project but instead as one that is central, necessary, and vital for cultural-technological change. This conceptualization supports not only a different approach to innovation but has also social-transformative potential and has implications for ethics of technology and responsible innovation.