Given the contemporary ambivalent standpoints toward the future of artificial intelligence, recently denoted as the phenomenon of Singularitarianism, Gregory Bateson’s core theories of ecology of mind, schismogenesis, and double bind, are hereby revisited, taken out of their respective sociological, anthropological, and psychotherapeutic contexts and recontextualized in the field of Roboethics as to a twofold aim: (a) the proposal of a rigid ethical standpoint toward both artificial and non-artificial agents, and (b) an explanatory analysis of the reasons bringing about such a (...) polarized outcome of contradictory views in regard to the future of robots. Firstly, the paper applies the Batesonian ecology of mind for constructing a unified roboethical framework which endorses a flat ontology embracing multiple forms of agency, borrowing elements from Floridi’s information ethics, classic virtue ethics, Felix Guattari’s ecosophy, Braidotti’s posthumanism, and the Japanese animist doctrine of Rinri. The proposed framework wishes to act as a pragmatic solution to the endless dispute regarding the nature of consciousness or the natural/artificial dichotomy and as a further argumentation against the recognition of future artificial agency as a potential existential threat. Secondly, schismogenic analysis is employed to describe the emergence of the hostile human–robot cultural contact, tracing its origins in the early scientific discourse of man–machine symbiosis up to the contemporary countermeasures against superintelligent agents. Thirdly, Bateson’s double bind theory is utilized as an analytic methodological tool of humanity’s collective agency, leading to the hypothesis of collective schizophrenic symptomatology, due to the constancy and intensity of confronting messages emitted by either proponents or opponents of artificial intelligence. The double bind’s treatment is the mirroring “therapeutic double bind,” and the article concludes in proposing the conceptual pragmatic imperative necessary for such a condition to follow: humanity’s conscience of habitualizing danger and familiarization with its possible future extinction, as the result of a progressive blurrification between natural and artificial agency, succeeded by a totally non-organic intelligent form of agency. (shrink)

A natural resource is not given, but depends on human knowledge for its exploitation. Thus a ‘unit of resource’ is, to a significant degree, a ‘unit of meaning’, and education is potentially important not only for the use of resources but also for their creation. The paper draws on poststructuralism to confirm the intuition that it would be misleading to conceive of ‘units’ of meaning. However, it is commonly acceptable to conceive of ‘units’ of resource, as in much discussion around (...) sustainability; but, if the latter concept is suspect, then so is the former. The error seems to arise from the assumption of identifiable points in space-time, already problematised by quantum mechanics and poststructuralism. Conceiving of ‘now’ as a moving in and with time, rather than as a point in time, human survival is construed as an ongoing process of meaning-making constrained though not determined by the carrying capacity of the planet. The Second Nature conception of John McDowell is critiqued with respect to this. (shrink)

Modern technology has enabled the use of new forms of information in the care of critically ill patients. In intensive care units (ICUs), technology can simultaneously reduce the lived experience of illness and magnify the objective dimensions of patient care. The aim of this study, based upon two empirical studies, is to find from a philosophical point of view a more comprehensive understanding for the dominance of technology within intensive care. Along with caring for critically ill patients, technology is part (...) of the ICU staff's everyday life. Both technology and caring relationships are of indispensable value. Tools are useful, but technology can never replace the closeness and empathy of the human touch. It is a question of harmonizing the demands of subjectivity with objective signs. The challenge for caregivers in ICU is to know when to heighten the importance of the objective and measurable dimensions provided by technology and when to magnify the patients’ lived experiences, and to live and deal with the ambiguity of the technical dimension of care and the human side of nursing. (shrink)

Through this contribution I aim to explore the horizons and limits of digital medicine in light of an embodied approach to the issue of care. I will sketch the historical background of digital medicine and show the contemporary status of this interdisciplinary field, as well as its applications and outcomes. Then, I will address a critique of the computational theory of mind (CTM) upon which many contemporary mental health apps are designed. This approach to the mind is inscribed into the (...) modern trend of neuromania, which conceives the embodied, living human being as a mere series of data analyses and algorithms, with the brain as the seat of the person. Drawing on continental philosophy and classical phenomenology I will develop a notion of health conceived as a moral enterprise, showing how wellbeing and vitality are not reducible to a product made by technologies or doctors, but rather they are the results of an embodied encounter. As such, empathy and person-centered care cannot be achieved by digital medicine. They are the result of a journey into the regions of recognition, embodied presence and the aliveness constituting the person. Finally, I will show how the issue of care cannot be separated from an embodied encounter between people, especially in case of dementia. (shrink)

This thesis studies the enabling properties of ICT and their effects and potential for social change, and prepares the ground for a sustainability-oriented ethico-political assessment of this technology. It primarily builds on interdisciplinary scholarship to describe and explain the multifaceted co-evolution between the global deployment of ICTs and the emergence of the Information Society, understood as a socioeconomic restructuring of capitalism. Beyond the role of ICTs in this regime transition, the thesis delivers other philosophical insights about crucial aspects of ICT (...) development, applications and management. These include arguments about how we should conceptualize ICTs on the basis of their different roles in extending human communication and in performing or facilitating the remote control of humans and animals, machines and systems operations; about the entanglement between telecommunications, transport networks, urban development and work and organization; and about the relations between ICTs, culture and human values. Examples are offered to illustrate the potential that these empirical and philosophical lessons may hold for the construction of a framework for the ethico-political assessment of ICTs. (shrink)

In his postapocalyptic novel, Those Who Remain, G. Michael Hopf (2016) makes an important observation about the effect crises can have on human psychology by noting that "hard times create strong [humans]" (loc. 200). While the catastrophic effects of the recent COVID-19 outbreak are incontestable, there are arguments to be made that the situation itself could be materia prima of a more grounded, and authentic generation of humanity, at least in theory. In this article I draw on Heidegger's early, implicit (...) ethic of finitude as well as his later work surrounding the nature of technology, and place them into dialogue with a global milieu contextualized by worldwide pandemic. I approach this discussion from two different angles: in the first part, I explicate the ethic of finitude, and use it as a framework to describe the observable behavior of communities worldwide in order to better understand how global crises impact the psychical welfare of individual human beings. In the second part, I apply lessons given to us by the later Heidegger, specifically those oriented around the movement away from calculative thinking, in an effort to define a loose, albeit fundamentally ennobling prescriptive aimed at easing the existential strain of the situation we have found ourselves in. *This is a pre-print of an article published in Human Arenas. The final authenticated version is available at DOI: 10.1007/s42087-020-00142-6. (shrink)

Critically engages the work of American philosopher Richard J. Bernstein.

This paper responds to five critics (Eva Buddeberg, Scott Marratto, Michael Naas, Janna Thompson, and Jason Wirth) and their commentaries on my Taking Turns with the Earth. Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and Intergenerational Justice (Stanford University Press, 2018). In relation to the book’s argument, my response seeks to clarify and elaborate the role of indigenous philosophies; the meaning and value of the concept of earth; the ontology-ethics interface and the emergence of normativity with birth and death; the practical feasibility and motivational force (...) of the book’s proposals for conceptualizing justice for future generations, namely asymmetrical reciprocity and taking turns; and the role of democratic institutions for justice between generations in view of the global capitalist economy. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Richard Rorty’s views on intercultural hermeneutics as presented in his essay “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens” and in his correspondence with the Indian philosopher Anindita Niyogi Balslev. In doing so, I focus primarily on Rorty’s presumption that instead of providing an “authentic” picture of another culture, the goal of intercultural studies or hermeneutics should be to look if there is anything “of use” that a given culture offers and that is not offered by ours.

Doom and Democracy: An Essay in Political Soteriology The essay explores the philosophical (metatheoretical) presuppositions of democratic social strategy in the current "apocalyptic age". Here democracy means a way of life based on the assumption that individual freedom, mutual respect and fundamental good will toward the other can be taken for granted; as a feasible and a desirable way of ordering human affairs. In this broadly cultural sense, democracy is an outgrowth of a deeply rooted consensus on the posture of (...) respect and good will toward all. Yet democracy, with its Enlightenment heritage of sober rationality, seems ill-equipped for dealing with apocalyptic threats. That what makes our age apocalyptic is truth denied. The arrogant posture of omnipotence leads to paralysis. A democratic strategy needs to be one that has the courage to face the truth and the commitment to deal heart and will with the finite tasks we recognise once we give up the arrogance of infinite ones. (shrink)

The telepresence experience can be evoked in a number of ways. A well-known example is a player of videogames who reports about a telepresence experience, a subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when physically situated in another place. In this paper we set the phenomenon of telepresence into a theoretical framework. As people react subjectively to stimuli from telepresence, empirical studies can give more evidence about the phenomenon. Thus, our contribution is to bridge the theoretical with (...) the empirical. We discuss theories of perception with an emphasis on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gibson, the role of the senses and the Spinozian belief procedure. The aim is to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon. A telepresence-study that included the affordance concept is used to empirically study how players report sense-reactions to virtual sightseeing in two cities. We investigate and explore the interplay of the philosophical and the empirical. The findings indicate that it is not only the visual sense that plays a role in this experience, but all senses. (shrink)

The phrase ‘synthetic biology’ is used to describe a set of different scientific and technological disciplines, which share the objective to design and produce new life forms. This essay addresses the following questions: What conception of life stands behind this ambitious objective? In what relation does this conception of life stand to that of traditional biology and biotechnology? And, could such a conception of life raise ethical concerns? Three different observations that provide useful indications for the conception of life in (...) synthetic biology will be discussed in detail: 1. Synthetic biologists focus on different features of living organisms in order to design new life forms, 2. Synthetic biologists want to contribute to the understanding of life, and 3. Synthetic biologists want to modify life through a rational design, which implies the notions of utilising, minimising/optimising, varying and overcoming life. These observations indicate a tight connection between science and technology, a focus on selected aspects of life, a production-oriented approach to life, and a design-oriented understanding of life. It will be argued that through this conception of life synthetic biologists present life in a different light. This conception of life will be illustrated by the metaphor of a toolbox. According to the notion of life as a toolbox, the different features of living organisms are perceived as various rationally designed instruments that can be used for the production of the living organism itself or secondary products made by the organism. According to certain ethical positions this conception of life might raise ethical concerns related to the status of the organism, the motives of the scientists and the role of technology in our society. (shrink)

The narrative of Plato’s cave story is loaded with ‘some of the most suggestive opposites in the repertoire, namely the contrasts between down and up, darkness and light, chains and freedom’ (Hrach...

The intent of my article is to examine critically the peculiar “forbidden” significance entailed in places designated as the commons. The commons are those places within a particular environment or ecosystem that serve as the essential life-giving resource for its members. Due to both changes in the earth’s climate and the over consumption of resources, the commons are in a state of desperate crisis throughout much of the world. A symptom of this crisis is the rising political and environmental violence (...) specific to those places that harbor the commons. One strategy employed to address the political crisis is the privatization of these life-giving resources. The justification for privatization rests on providing the economic support necessary to secure and gain greater access to the commons. There has been as a result a growing effort from both a human right and environmental standpoint to articulate a global provision that would protect the commons from the industries of privatization and commodification.In this article, I bolster these efforts by specifying the manner by which the commons resist privatization. My focus is on the type of place, or rather, the type of forbidden place the commons are. The commons do not resist by forbidding use or occupation. Quite to the contrary, they resist by giving life, by welcoming all who may sustain themselves through them. Their place is a place for no one precisely because it is a place for all. (shrink)

By drawing on the insights of a number of continental as well as Asian thinkers, this article reflects on the "significance" of comparative philosophy—both in the sense of discussing the "meaning" and in the sense of arguing for the "importance" of this endeavor. Encountering another culture allows one to deepen one's self-understanding by learning to "see oneself from the outside"; this deeper self-understanding in turn allows one to listen to what the other culture has to say. These two moments, or (...) movements, are interdependent and mutually supportive. Without the step back to self-understanding, we unknowingly reduce the other to the unrecognized categories of our own thinking; but without encountering another culture, our understanding of our own culture remains shallow. This article argues that an engagement with non-Western philosophy, particularly with a set of traditions as rich and radically different as those of Asian thought, can and should take place as a hermeneutic circling between self-understanding and openness to encounter: the dialogical step back and step forward are mutually supportive endeavors. For only by way of such dialogue do we attain the concrete freedom and possibility for transformation and change, that is, the ability to critically and creatively develop old customs or modes of thought and to critically and creatively adopt new ones. Moreover, only through such dialogue can we learn to not only let others be, but to share insights with them, and to build together a global community which neither reifies nor abolishes cultural differences. (shrink)

This article maintains that the process of globalization may be best understood as the spatial offspring of modern technology, just as “the end of history” is its temporal offspring. This conclusion is prefigured in the thought of four 20th-century thinkers who, despite their diverse personal and ideological background, came to almost identical conclusions about the role of technology in modernity. These thinkers, Kojève, Strauss, Schmitt, and Heidegger, may be considered as collaborators in deciphering the meaning of modern technology and its (...) planet-transforming capacities. (shrink)

Since Plato, Western thought has framed knowing as a method within ‘some realm of what is’ and a predetermined ‘sphere of objects’. The roots and the consequences of this stance towards reason and truth were noted by Heidegger, who equates the history of Western thought with the history of metaphysics. Since Plato, truth has relied on definition, hierarchy and mastery. Discourse on the truth begins to be discourse on the limits of things and, thus, on who is able to set (...) these limits and discourse. This dominant position erases its own traces, presents itself as unique and unavoidable, and excludes all other ways of thinking. This exclusion includes violence, and this violence is not merely a philosophical matter. It is written in the history of the West, which is a history that includes conquest, genocide and war. However, we can also identify in Heidegger ways to transcend this inner violence by returning to the originating stance towards truth, namely, truth as aletheia, or world disclosure. This article provides the groundwork to argue that Heidegger's thought, based on a call for existential responsibility, requires education to remake our existence. (shrink)

In my paper, by drawing on the writings Heidegger developed in the late 1920s, I wish to display what we may refer to as the thorough educational nature of Heideggerian reflection. It is my argument that the analysis of Dasein we find in the early Heidegger displays an extraordinary deep and dense reflection on selfhood and subjectivity, a reflection that is rooted in subject’s freedom and transcending. By paying attention to the interplay between these two features, I argue that in (...) the late 1920s, while challenging the notion of an all-encompassing consciousness as the place where everything should be understood and managed, Heidegger built a conception of selfhood and subjectivity in terms of freedom, responsibility, and ongoing transformation. Such a conception, I argue, is in and of itself educational. (shrink)

In his 2012 article Philosophy of Education for the Public Good: Five Challenges and an Agenda, Gert Biesta identifies five substantial issues about the future of education and the work required to address these issues. This article employs a Heideggerian reading of education to evaluate ‘Biesta’s truth’. I argue that Biesta’s point of view underestimates knowledge’s predominance and relativism; frames intentionality in pre-Heideggerian terms, which—although not a problem in itself because an individual is free to choose a particular perspective on (...) the concept—raises the issue of consistency in Biesta’s theoretical framework; and a final criticism concerns Biesta’s choice of tools for engaging with the identified challenges: The primary tools Biesta uses are intrinsic to the perspective he challenges. The use of a ‘first person perspective’ to frame pedagogy that focuses on the subject and ‘subjectification’ reaffirms the fundamental Western gesture that makes human beings subjects who ‘stand-over-and-against’ the world. I argue that it is possible to penetrate Plato’s ‘theoretical gaze’ and find a ‘weak’ alternative to an all-encompassing point of view of education through a Heideggerian approach that regards intentionality and thinking as ‘hearing’. (shrink)

In this paper, I wish to offer insight into the role of paradox in teaching. I will do so by analyzing teachers’ everyday work, taking a qualitative approach and constructing a small-scale empirical study. Philosophically, my attempt is framed by Heidegger’s thought. Drawing from research data, I argue the following: paradoxes and dilemmas are the very basis of teaching, and a teacher cannot see paradoxes and dilemmas if she/he has already made an choice of disengagement from the profession. Stated otherwise, (...) the sense of dependency, laceration, and even helplessness experienced by teachers I met and interviewed are not occasional or unwanted outcomes, but rather the very nature of the ethics of teaching. The rationale of teaching – curricula, objectives, and learning outcomes – is framed by teachers’ intentionality, namely, by teachers’ ‘being thrown’ and involved in leaving teaching situations. Teachers are simultaneously thrown into the projecting and understanding that co... (shrink)

It is often held that, in contrast to Husserl, Heidegger's account of intentionality makes no essential reference to the first- person stance. This paper argues, on the contrary, that an account of the first- person, or 'subjectivity', is crucial to Heidegger's account of intelligibility and so of the intentionality, or 'aboutness' of our acts and thoughts, that rests upon it. It first offers an argument as to why the account of intelligibility in Division I of Being and Time, based on (...) a form of third- person self-awareness, provides a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for intentionality. It then shows that Heidegger provides a further necessary condition in his analysis of the collapse of the one-self in Division II. This condition is 'conscience', which is both a genuine first- person mode of self-awareness and, it is argued, the origin of reason as that which distinguishes factic 'grounds' from normative 'justifications'. (shrink)

This paper addresses an apparent tension between a familiar claim about meaning in general, to the effect that the meaning of anything owes to its place, ultimately, within a ‘form of life’, and a claim, also familiar, about the meaning of human life itself, to the effect that this must be something ‘beyond the human’. How can life itself be meaningful if meaning is a matter of a relationship to life? After elaborating and briefly defending these two claims, two ways (...) of amending and thereby reconciling them are considered and rejected. These ways involve either spiriting away the issue of life's meaning or encouraging unwelcome metaphysical views. The author then argues that, rather than remove the tension between the two claims, each should be viewed as expressing an aspect of a delicate metaphysical position. This position is distinguished from ones, like transcendental idealism and constructivism, with which it might be confused, and is then related to Daoist and Zen thought and to the later philosophy of Heidegger. Crucial to the position is the proposal that the ‘beyond the human’ which enables life to be meaningful is both ineffable and ‘intimate’ with life itself. (shrink)

What is nowhere? Is it a non-place that has been created by the disappearance of distinct identities in the spread of standardised, global capitalism? Or has it come about as a result of colonialisation and the separation of indigenous cultures from their lands, and their replacement with vacuous, colonised, globalised non-places? This article suggests that ‘nowhere’, which was satirically entitled, ‘Erewhon’ by Samuel Butler due to the inverted action of machines, is still being created today, but by the combined forces (...) of financial capitalism, digital colonialisation and the present-day global curriculum, and its concomitant teaching and learning methods. Even though the present day curriculum refers to place, for example, in geographical studies, this referencing in no way establishes a connection with or to this place for the cohort. Rather, the present day curriculum precisely and systematically evacuates any possibility of connective-affective-synthesis (i.e. a cur... (shrink)

Is cybernetics good, bad, or indifferent? SherryTurkle enlists deconstructive theory to celebrate thecomputer age as the embodiment of difference. Nolonger just a theory, one can now live a virtual life. Within a differential but ontologically detachedfield of signifiers, one can construct and reconstructegos and environments from the bottom up andendlessly. Lucas Introna, in contrast, enlists theethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to condemn thesame computer age for increasing the distance betweenflesh and blood people. Mediating the face-to-facerelation between real people, allowing and (...) encouragingcommunication at a distance, information technologywould alienate individuals from the social immediacyproductive of moral obligations and responsibilities. In this paper I argue against both of thesepositions, and for similar reasons. Turkle''scelebration and Introna''s condemnation of informationtechnology both depend, so I will argue, on the samemistaken meta-interpretation of it. Like Introna,however, but to achieve a different end, I will enlistLevinas''s ethical philosophy to make this case. (shrink)

Responding to long-standing warnings that robots and AI will enslave humans, I argue that the main problem we face is not that automation might turn us into slaves but, rather, that we remain masters. First I construct an argument concerning what I call ‘the tragedy of the master’: using the master–slave dialectic, I argue that automation technologies threaten to make us vulnerable, alienated, and automated masters. I elaborate the implications for power, knowledge, and experience. Then I critically discuss and question (...) this argument but also the very thinking in terms of masters and slaves, which fuels both arguments. I question the discourse about slavery and object to the assumptions made about human–technology relations. However, I also show that the discussion about masters and slaves attends us to issues with human–human relations, in particular to the social consequences of automation such as power issues and the problem of the relation between automation and (un)employment. Finally, I reflect on how we can respond to our predicament, to ‘the tragedy of the master’. (shrink)

Can we conceive of a philosophy of technology that is not technophobic, yet takes seriously the problem of alienation and human meaning-giving? This paperretrieves 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? (shrink)

How one thinks about the relationship between individual autonomy (sometimes referred to as individual willpower or human agency) and technology can influence the way legal thinkers develop policy at the intersection of law and technology. Perspectives that fall toward the `machines control us' end of the spectrum may support more interventionist legal policies while those who identify more closely with the `we are in charge of machines' position may refuse to interfere with technological developments. The concept of soft determinism charts (...) a middle-ground between these two positions and could assist in the formulation of a general theory of the relationship between law and technology. Soft determinism maintains that technological developments are embedded in social, political, economic and other processes, and serve to guide and, potentially, configure future actions and relationships with these technologies, their users, and their subjects: while past technology develops shape the present, individuals and groups can still exert control over these technological developments. (shrink)

The Heideggerian rupture in the history of philosophy in the name of a phenomenological and poetic ontology has provided an opening which many of the key figures in twentieth century continental thought have exploited. However, this opening was marked by Heidegger himself as an ambiguous one, insofar as metaphysics was perhaps integrally ‘onto-theology,’ that is, ultimately continuous with the world-historical capture of the thought of being. This piece argues that the philosophy of Alain Badiou, which departs from the recognition that (...) Heidegger is the ‘last universally recognised philosopher’, provides the means for a radical reconsideration of the philosophy-theology relationship in its specifically Heideggerian form, involving as it does further questions of science and technology, the status of the poem, and the nature of ontological thought as such. We argue that, through the deployment of mathematics as ontology, the Gordian knot of onto-theology and its legion of consequences can be cut, and a new assemblage of many of the key Heideggerian motifs can be put into play: the poem, history, and philosophy itself. (shrink)

Irigaray demonstrates that metaphysics depends upon the specific negation and exclusion of the female body. Readings of Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman tend to highlight the status of this excluded materiality: is there an essential female body which precedes negation or is the feminine only an effect of exclusion? I approach Irigaray's work by way of another question: is it possible to move beyond a feminist critique of metaphysics and towards a feminist philosophy?

I am called herewith a collaborator-in-chief, mountain climber, and prophet. They all arise from the writers' largesse, not facts on the ground. But I will embrace them momentarily and then turn to...

This article examines discourses about mixed reality as a data-rich sensing technology – specifically, engaging with discourses of time as framed by developers, engineers and in corporate PR and marketing in a range of public facing materials. We focus on four main settings in which mixed reality is imagined to be used, and in which time was a dominant discursive theme – the development of mixed reality by big tech companies, the use of mixed reality for defence, mixed reality as (...) a technology for control of populations in civil society and mixed reality as a technology used in workplace settings. Across these settings, the broad narrative is that mixed reality technologies afford overwhelmingly positive benefits like efficiency and security through their capture, relay and rendition of data – affording a form of anticipatory power to the user. The framing of temporality, we argue, is underlain by social and political values, which represent certain interests, but leave others out in the imagination of mixed reality's technological advance. (shrink)

From the perspective of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, the Internet qualifies as a paradigm of modern technology, for it possesses all its essential properties to a very high degree: the setting-upon, the challenging revealing, the revealing of what-is as standing-reserve, and a multiple concealment. This article is dedicated to proving the truth of this statement through an analysis of the way in which the Internet satisfies in an exemplary way these properties of the essence of modern technology. Among the (...) possible corollaries of this analysis, we will focus on showing how it constitutes an argument against mythinformation philosophies such as Sloterdijk’s, as we show that the Internet is not governed by an alleged non-dominant, dialogical, and cooperative operativity. (shrink)

In modern continental thought, natural science is widely portrayed as an exclusively instrumental mode of reason. The breadth of this consensus has partly preempted the question of how it came to persuade. The process of persuasion, as it played out in Germany, can be explored by reconstructing the intellectual exchanges among three twentieth-century theorists of science, Heidegger, Habermas, and Werner Heisenberg. Taking an iconic Heisenberg as a kind of limiting case of “the scientist,” Heidegger and Habermas each found themselves driven (...) to place new constraints on their previously more capacious assessments of science, especially its capacity to reflect on its method. Tracing how that happened, through archival and historical contextualization and close readings of their texts, lets us make visible Heidegger and Habermas’s intellectual affinities and argumentative parallels, which derived not only from their shared grounding in earlier reactions against positivism, but also from confrontation with contemporary events. The latter included, for Heidegger, the rise of a technically powerful science exemplified by nuclear physics, and for Habermas, post-World War II controversies over science, technology, and their socially critical possibilities. (shrink)

Abstract As Paul B. Thompson suggests in his recent seminal paper, “‘There’s an App for That’: Technical Standards and Commodification by Technological Means,” technical standards restructure property (and other social) relations. He concludes with the claim that the development of technical standards of commodification can serve purposes with bad effects such as “the rise of the factory system and the deskilling of work” or progressive effects such as how “technical standards for animal welfare… discipline the unwanted consequences of market forces.” (...) In this reply, we want to append several points to his argument and suggest that he rightly points out that standards can promote various goods; however, there are peculiar powers wielded by standardization processes that might profitably be unpacked more systematically than Thompson's article seems to suggest. First, the concealment of the technopolitics around standards is largely due to their peculiar ontological status as recipes for reality. Second, technical standards can and do commit violence against persons, but such violence is often suffered not in the formation of class consciousness, as Marx might have put it, but as a failure to conform to the laws of nature . Content Type Journal Article Category Commentary Pages 1-6 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0048-1 Authors Lawrence Busch, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, 429A Berkey Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Kyle Powys Whyte, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)

This study aims to establish ideological effects of the pre-pandemic metaphor use in the mainstream media on users’ perceptions of their relationship with technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve that, 120 media articles from global mainstream media sources during the pre-pandemic period were collected and analysed at three levels: (1) metaphor identification; (2) deconstruction of conceptual source domains; (3) the coding of metaphorical expressions into psychological types of interpersonal relationships that are projected on technologies. The established metaphorical patterns were (...) tested in an online survey with 100 young adults and adults from Lithuania during the COVID-19 pandemic period of 2019-2020. The research findings resulted in the ideological perceptions of Reversed Agentivity and Mechanised Action characterising our relationship with technology and pointing out to the loss of individual autonomy, a lack of personal growth and more fragmented personal identity during the pandemic. (shrink)

This paper addresses ethical questions surrounding death given imagined but not unlikely technological advancements in the near future. For example, how will highly detailed interactive simulations of deceased personalities affect the way we deal with dying and interact with the dead? Most cultures have at least a vague sense of duties to the dead, and many of these duties are related to the memorial preservation of decedents. I worry that our advances might be paralleled by a deteriorating grasp of what (...) proper preservation is all about. With the phenomenological assistance of the 19th and 20th century philosophers Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, we can get a sense of some potential problems for what we ordinarily call ‘progress’. (shrink)

The paper works out an account of the piety proper to philosophical thought. The investigation proceeds as a critical interpretation of three enigmatic claims made by Martin Heidegger about ‘the piety of thinking,’ but the paper is not simply exegetical; the interpretive work is constantly in service of an attempt to think through the phenomenon independently. Plato’s Euthyphro and Nietzsche’s critique of scientific piety both hover in the background of Heidegger’s pronouncements, and they are given special attention here. Through the (...) investigation, philosophical piety is shown to be a virtuous capacity to respond with fitting submission to the truth as what is insurmountably prior to us. To respond fittingly is, at least, to deal well with sameness and difference, which in the case of piety means to recognize two features of our situation: that philosophical questioning necessarily arises out of a fundamental listening, or affirmation, and that we always belong to being but only ever across a gap. (shrink)

It is a truism that the design and deployment of information and communication technologies is vital to everyday life, the conduct of work and to social order. But how are individual, organisational and societal choices made? What might it mean to invoke a politics and an ethics of information technology design and use? This editorial paper situates these questions within the trajectory of preoccupations and approaches to the design and deployment of information technology since computerisation began in the 1940s. Focusing (...) upon the dominant concerns over the last three decades, the paper delineates an interest in design and use in relation to socio-technical theories, situated practices and actor-network theory. It is argued that each of these approaches is concerned with a particular form of politics that does not explicitly engage with ethics. In order to introduce ethics into contemporary debates about information technology, and to frame the papers in the special issue, it is argued that Levinas’ ethics is particularly valuable in problematising the relationship between politics and ethics. Levinas provides a critique of modernity’s emphasis on politics and the egocentric self. It is from a Levinasian concern with the Other and the primacy of the ethical that a general rethinking of the relationship between politics, ethics and justice in relation to information and communication technologies can be invoked. (shrink)

Although the implementation of mindfulness-based interventions in educational contexts appear to have demonstrated some benefits for students and teachers in research studies conducted over the last two decades, there are also those who criticize MBI’s for their instrumental focus. Exploring this debate, this article offers a case for the implementation of a more holistic and integral approach to mindfulness in educational settings. It will draw upon the philosophical legacy of Martin Heidegger and other critical theorists, who contest the dominant framing (...) of neoliberalism and encourage engagement with more systemic perspectives. During this exploration, we examine two polemics: whether mindfulness should be implemented technically or holistically and, whether the focus should be individual and/or collective. The article concludes that although mindfulness may be an efficient ‘self-technology’ to improve certain aspects of individual well-being, it is necessary to challenge this perspective as it promotes a type of ‘iatrogenic effect’. Specifically, it is argued that systemic failure is reframed as individual fallibility via a simplistic focus on well-being that may contradictorily foster appeasement to exploitative conditions. As an alternative, we offer a more integrative version, drawing in particular on the work of Ken Wilber, which proposes systemic as well as individual transformation. (shrink)