This volume contributes to postphenomenological research into human-technology relations with essays reflecting on methodological issues through empirical studies of education, digital media, biohacking, health, robotics, and skateboarding. This work provides new perspectives that call for a comprehensive postphenomenological research methodology.
This edited collection explores the distinctive contributions of postphenomenological perspectives toward imaging in science, medicine, and everyday life. With its original empirical investigations of imaging across a variety of fields, the book expands our conceptual framework for understanding images.
Architecture and urban design are typically considered as a result of artistic creativity performed by gifted individuals. Postphenomenology and Architecture: Human Technology Relations in the Built Environment analyzes buildings and cities instead as technologies. Informed by a postphenomenological perspective, this book argues that buildings and the furniture of cities—like bike lanes, benches, and bus stops—are inscribed in a conceptual framework of multistability, which is to say that they fulfill different purposes over time. Yet, there are qualities in the built environment that are long lasting and immutable and that transcend temporal functionality and ephemeral efficiency. The contributors show how different perceptions, practices, and interpretations are tangible and visible as we engage with these technologies. In addition, several of the chapters critically assess the influence of Martin Heidegger in modern philosophy of architecture. This book reads Heidegger from the perspective of architecture and urban design as technology, shedding light on what it means to build and dwell.
This book presents a new and radical interpretation of some of Martin Heidegger’s most influential texts. The unfamiliar interpretations all seek to question and unframe hasty assessments of the concepts and constellations of thoughts surrounding Heidegger’s notion of modern technology.
We relate to things and things relate to us. Emerging technologies do this in ways that are interesting and exciting, but often also inaccessible or invisible. In Relating to Things, leading design researchers and philosophers respond to issues raised by this situation - inquiring into what it means to live with and relate to things that can actively relate to us, and that relate to each other in ways that do not involve us at all. Case studies include Amazon's Alexa, the Internet of Things, Pokémon Go and Roomba the robot vacuum cleaner. Authors explore everything from the care work undertaken by objects, reciprocal human/machine learning, technological mediation as a form of control, and what it takes to reveal things that tend to be hidden and that often (by design) conceal the ways in which they use us. As a whole, the book is a collaborative philosophical inquiry into the nature and consequences of contemporary technological things. It is a design inquiry into the current nature of the artificial, and possibilities for how things might be otherwise.
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology gives readers a view into this increasingly vital and urgently needed domain of philosophical understanding, offering an in-depth collection of leading and emerging voices in the philosophy of technology. The thirty-two contributions in this volume cut across and connect diverse philosophical traditions and methodologies. They reveal the often-neglected importance of technology for virtually every subfield of philosophy, including ethics, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and political theory. The Handbook also gives readers a new sense of what philosophy looks like when fully engaged with the disciplines and domains of knowledge that continue to transform the material and practical features and affordances of our world, including engineering, arts and design, computing, and the physical and social sciences. The chapters reveal enduring conceptual themes concerning technology's role in the shaping of human knowledge, identity, power, values, and freedom, while bringing a philosophical lens to the profound transformations of our existence brought by innovations ranging from biotechnology and nuclear engineering to artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and robotics. This new collection challenges the reader with provocative and original insights on the history, concepts, problems, and questions to be brought to bear upon humanity's complex and evolving relationship to technology.
Science is highly dependent on technologies to observe scientific objects. For example, astronomers need telescopes to observe planetary movements, and cognitive neuroscience depends on brain imaging technologies to investigate human cognition. But how do such technologies shape scientific practice, and how do new scientific objects come into being when new technologies are used in science? In How Scientific Instruments Speak, Bas de Boer develops a philosophical account of how technologies shape the reality that scientists study, arguing that we should understand scientific instruments as mediating technologies. Rather than mute tools serving pre-existing human goals, scientific instruments play an active role in shaping scientific work. De Boer uses this account to discuss how brain imaging and stimulation technologies mediate the way in which cognitive neuroscientists investigate human cognitive functions. The development of cognitive neuroscience runs parallel with the development of advanced brain imaging technologies, drawing a lot of public attention—sometimes called “neurohype”—because of its alleged capacity to demystify the human mind. By analyzing how the objects that cognitive neuroscientists study are mediated by brain imaging technologies, de Boer explicates the processes by which human cognition is investigated.
Interpreting Technology puts Ricoeur’s work at the center of contemporary philosophical thinking concerning technology. It investigates his project of critical hermeneutics, the growing ethical and political impacts of technologies on the modern lifeworld, and ways of analyzing global sociotechnical systems such as the Internet.
This book investigates multiple facets of the emerging discipline of Tangible, Embodied, and Embedded Interaction (TEI). This is a story of atoms and bits. We explore the interweaving of the physical and digital, toward understanding some of their wildly varying hybrid forms and behaviors. Spanning conceptual, philosophical, cognitive, design, and technical aspects of interaction, this book charts both history and aspirations for the future of TEI. We examine and celebrate diverse trailblazing works, and provide wide-ranging conceptual and pragmatic tools toward weaving the animating fires of computation and technology into evocative tangible forms. We also chart a path forward for TEI engagement with broader societal and sustainability challenges that will profoundly (re)shape our children’s and grandchildren’s futures. We invite you all to join this quest.
This book develops an original theoretical framework for understanding human-technology relations. The author’s approach, which he calls technoanalysis, analyzes artificial intelligence based on Freudian psychoanalysis, biosemiotics, and Latour’s actor-network theory. How can we communicate with AI to determine shared values and objectives? And what, ultimately, do we want from machines? These are crucial questions in our world, where the influence of AI-based technologies is rapidly growing. Unconscious dynamics influence AI and digital technology and understanding them is essential to better controlling AI systems. This book’s unique methodology— which combines psychoanalysis, biosemiotics, and actor-network theory—reveals a radical reformulation of the problem of the human mind. Technoanalysis views the mind as a hybrid network of humans and nonhuman actants in constant interaction with one another. The author argues that human unconscious dynamics influence and shape technology, just as technology influences and shapes human unconscious dynamics. He proceeds to show how this conception of the relationship between the unconscious and technology can be applied to social robotics and AI. Unconscious Networks will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in philosophy of technology, philosophy of artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, and science and technology studies.
In Technology and Anarchy: A Reading of Our Era, Simona Chiodo argues that our technological era can be read as the most radical form of anarchism ever experienced. People are not only removing the role of the expert as a mediator, but also trying, for the first time in history, to replace the role of a transcendent god itself by creating, especially through information technology, a totally immanent technological entity characterized by the typical ontological prerogatives of the divine: omnipresence (by being everywhere), omniscience (by knowing everything, especially about us), omnipotence (by having power, especially over us), and inscrutability. Chiodo proposes a novel view of our technological era by reading it as the last step of a precise trajectory of Western thought, i.e. as the most radical form of anarchism we have ever experienced, due to the crisis of the founding epistemological relationship between ideality and reality. By doing this, Chiodo helps fill the gap between technological innovation and the humanities, which is becoming an emerging research goal that is more and more urgent in order to face the greatest challenges of our present and future.
This collection of essays, written by an international group of scholars, provides a more critical and creative contemporary practice of “sustainability.” The book sets this practice free from its reductive interpretations and applies a more thoughtful environmental ethics to the current and emerging technologies that dominate our lives.
