Students today are habitual users of digital technology. However, they do not examine the nature of their relationship with technology. Even though we are all enduring severe environmental crises including the COVID-19 pandemic, our students do not appear to see the interrelated connections between the environmental crisis and themselves. A case in point is that they have difficulty drawing a connection between environmental crises and their participation in industrial civilization. This is why it is necessary to consider technological literacy seriously (...) for our environmental education. This study seeks to investigate an alternative way to set up the relation of technology for the current environmental education by comparing the views of Heidegger and Latour on technology. Even though the question of the two thinkers starts from the same critics of the instrumentality of technology, their strategies to overcome it are quite different. While Heidegger suggests a human-centered relationship between humans and technology, Latour criticizes the limitation of this approach and maintains that more symmetrical relations with technology are needed as a form of a network between human and nonhuman actors. In this paper, I argue for the urgency of cultivating a sense of connection for our students’ technological literacy in this environmental crisis. For that purpose, I insist Latour’s advice for teachers and researchers to be considered more seriously to encourage students to take symmetrical relationship with technology in these aggravating environmental crises. (shrink)

The purpose of the present article is to contribute to the postphenomenological theory of technological mediation by introducing a new type of ‘human-technology’ relation named ‘transcending mediation’. Previously postphenomenology didn’t pay much attention to the role technology plays in mediating human relation to Transcendence. This was because of empirical turn and pragmatism that are anti-metaphysical in their nature. In the present paper, however, I will show that the empirical element of technology can be balanced by some metaphysical findings. Keeping this (...) in mind, I will rely on Karl Jaspers’s metaphysics of ciphers in order to demonstrate how technology mediates not only our relation to the world but also shapes human’s relation to Transcendence. As I am going to show in the present paper, this sort of mediation becomes possible because technologies are actively participating in so-called self-transcending practices. The latter, according to Karl Jaspers, are practices through which humans can elucidate one’s true self (e.g., become an Existenz). In this article, I will take a case of Smart education as a particular type of self-transcending practice and will show how contemporary AI educational systems enable and disable particular forms of becoming true self (Existenz). (shrink)

This paper aims to highlight the life of computer technologies to understand what kind of ‘technological intentionality’ is present in computers based upon the phenomenological elements constituting the objects in general. Such a study can better explain the effects of new digital technologies on our society and highlight the role of digital technologies by focusing on their activities. Even if Husserlian phenomenology rarely talks about technologies, some of its aspects can be used to address the actions performed by the digital (...) technologies by focusing on the objects’ inner ‘life’ thanks to the analysis of passive synthesis and phenomenological horizons in the objects. These elements can be used in computer technologies to show how digital objects are ‘alive.’ This paper focuses on programs developed through high-order languages like C++ and unsupervised learning techniques like ‘Generative Adversarial Model.’ The phenomenological analysis reveals the computer’s autonomy within the programming stages. At the same time, the conceptual inquiry into the digital system’s learning ability shows the alive and changeable nature of the technological object itself. (shrink)