Of Times and Things. Technology and Durability

In the present paper, I will present a brief explanation of the parallel that Aristotle makes between nature creations and artificial creations, that is to say, I will explain in which sense Aristotle says that art (or technology) imitates nature. Nowadays, is common heard that the technological things are acting against the nature, that technology is a danger. What I will try to present in this paper is that artificial things have, in essence, the same aims of the nature. I consider that, despite the technological advances in our days have achieved levels of complexity that would be unbelievable in the past —cryonics, genetic engineering, cloning, to name some cases—, it is possible to discuss and analyze these advances under the light of what Aristotle said. Moreover, it is not a setback, but it can serve to give to us a new perspective, inside the actual technological debate. What I would like to argue here is the fact that technology can be a danger for nature is result of its bad use, that could be corrected, but per se, technology is not a danger at all (if we respect the essence of nature).

Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, 2010

Humans live in a world of things. They are surrounded by artefacts. Referred to as the social shaping of technology, this has been an interesting area of research in the recent past. The focus of this article is on the ‘material life’ of human beings, and the place of technology within it. The authors approach this topic from the discipline of archaeology, specifically behavioural archaeology, but also draw on research in other fields. This article, expands this framework to include the life histories of technologies and associated material practices. This article further contextualizes contemporary technology studies, primarily in archaeology, and considers how theoretical concepts from behavioural archaeology and social constructivist studies of technology might be combined. Archaeological studies of technology are explained in details in the following section with special emphasis on performance characteristics. This article also explains the life history of technology which helps us conceptualize material practices in relation to objects and technologies.

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),

Foundations of Science, 2021

This article has two general aims. It first of all critically reconsiders the empirical turn's dismissal of transcendentalism in the philosophy of technology, in particular through the work of Ihde and Verbeek, and defends the continuing relevance of the notion of the tran-scencental in thinking about technology today, illustrating this mainly through a reading of Stiegler's understanding of the human condition as a technical condition and his view of human (noetic) evolution as proceeding from a process of technical exteriorization. The crucial issue that is missed by postphenomenology and the empirical turn is that technology itself in its empiricity occupies the (periodically changing) place of the transcenden-tal. It thus fails to consider the transcendental operativity of technical artifacts within its own empiricist stance. Secondly, it argues for the continuing importance and usefulness of the idea of Technology with a capital T, equally discarded by the representatives of the empirical turn, in particular against the emerging backdrop of the Anthropocene as the age of decisive anthropogenic forcing of the planet and the growing dominance of what has recently been called the technosphere in Earth system science. With Stiegler I show that a proper, inherent dynamic of technology must be acknowledged historically, anthropologi-cally, techno-evolutionarily as well as (techno)phenomenologically. I conclude by demonstrating that our time of planetary crisis summons us to redirect our attention to technology from the empirical to the transcendental, and from the micro-level to the macro-level again.

Studia Gilsoniana, 2016

How and what does catastrophe complete, dissolve, or terminate in terms of philosophical thinking? In this paper I would like to argue that we can approach this question by addressing the Heideggerian call to abandon philosophy for a new kind of thinking—a call that, in the light of contemporary speculative developments, can also be seen as ‘catastrophic’ for its own part. This call for an end to philosophy itself opens up a problem of the transition from thinking of a radical break to thinking as a radical break. At the heart of my argument is Steven Shaviro’s idea that technologies are in a certain correlation with our concerns regarding reality and materiality.

The question concerning technology lies at the heart of human existence. As such it must take a central place in philosophy today. This importance, however, is veiled by a historical interpretation of technology as instrumental. This instrumentalism is the result of an ambiguity in the Aristotelian legacy that arises from an understanding of reality rooted in a theory of the categories, on the one hand, and a theory of causality on the other. This has left us with an ambiguous understanding of human making split by the twofold structure of artistic and representational thinking. The former is characteristic of empirical knowledge, the latter epistemological knowledge. This thesis follows Heidegger in arguing that an integral understanding of technology can only be achieved through a creative retrieval of Aristotle's ontology that interweaves the question of causality and the question of the categories, which we have outlined below as the interplay between potentiality and actuality, between being and non-being, and between truth and untruth. While indebted to Aristotle, this involves an important re-thinking of the nature of ontology, for it is made possible by exposing the limits of Aristotle’s theory of time, which understands time as a succession of present instants, and moving towards the Heideggerian understanding of presencing as the opening of a horizon in which things perdure. Consequently, this is an ontology in which technology is tied to our notion of time just as much as to our notion of being. After establishing this temporal ontology as the basis for an understanding of technology, in a unique way we apply it to the particular case of 3D printing and come to see that this technology is indeed more than an instrument; it is an interweaving of the epistemic and the poetic, the rational and the artistic. Thus I accept the consensus in contemporary philosophy of technology that questions of technology must be understood in terms of their political and social implications. However, unlike many thinkers in this field I also argue that they can be fruitfully understood in terms of a temporal ontology. I call this temporal ontology of technology, hyperology.

Historical Materialism, 2010

This review-essay examines the multi-author collection New Waves in Philosophy of Technology. Particular attention is given to the difference between Marx’s and Heidegger’s philosophies of technology. The differential impact of Marx and Heidegger on the essays in the collection is assessed, with some implications drawn about the theoretical background of the philosophy of technology as a whole.