Philosophy of Technology

A Philosophy of Technology does not consist in analyzing technical devices under certain epistemological criteria. Philosophical reflection on the technical world only makes sense when it questions the ways in which these artifacts shape the experience of time, space, the body, language, and the I and the others. Philosophy of Technology, far from offering a retrospective reflection after technical developments occur, accompanies them from the outset. This coextensive thought makes explicit some close relationships of technology, such as its dependency on scientific constrains, the cultural tensions it generates, and the ontological consequences of its productions.

In this sense, Philosophy of Technology is not an auxiliary discipline, but a foundational field that interrogates the promises, risks, and metaphysical assumptions of every technical innovation. The question is not whether technology is “advancing,” but rather: in which direction, under which logics, and toward what ends.

Drawing from traditions that range from Plato to Bacon, and Heidegger to Simondon, or from Ortega y Gasset to Han, this area proposes a critical analysis of technical regimes, understood as the entanglements of knowledge, power, materiality, and meaning that constitute all technological forms. In particular, digital technologies and artificial intelligences pose new ontological, epistemological, and ethical challenges that must be addressed with renewed conceptual tools.

Some of the possible guiding questions:

• What kind of world do current technologies build, and what kind of world could they build?
• What form of rationality is embodied in algorithmic systems?
• How can fetishizing technology be avoided without falling into technophobic rejection?
• To what extent do technologies transform the notion of what it means to be a person?

All technology mediates—not only between means and ends, but also between the visible and the invisible, the say-able and the unsay-able, the possible and the unthinkable. Therefore, it is necessary to recognize technology as a current form of eminent symbolic mediation. In this context, a real Philosophy of Technology can’t content with classifying artifacts according to a certain critical judgment; it should seek to understand how this super-nature reconfigures the horizons of what is thinkable and livable between technical invention and an understanding of cosmos.

 I carry always the invisible 

I carry always the invisible
The things I know but do not know
And try to find, with a blind hand
In that country of the blind
That is the mind and all its thought
And every inner change of weather.
I tether the changing of light
Every shifting of sunsets towards night,
All those half lighted dreams before dawn
I make poems, give them homes.
Of the hieroglyphed lawn where the dogs scribbled by
Writing futures in dawn-frosted clover,
Down it goes, or it dies.
Annie Over. Hear the cries. Annie Over,
A ball, aU alone, climbs the sky.
Sent by loud boy unseen
To some girl on the green on the far side of noon.
I stash them away
To reread them some day in some winter where night
Comes at three, and my reason to be
Is a ball that’s sky rover
Hurled invisibly high
From no hand to no catch.
It will stay there because
I can make the arc pause,
I cry freeze
And the ball in a poem
Stays suspended in trees
And will never come down.
So you see, it is true
I carry always the invisible to me
As you carry that invisible made visible in you.

Ray Bradbury

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