Abstract

I present four visions of technology that prevail in contemporary philosophical discussions: the instrumental, the metaphysical, the systemic and the socio-critical. In previous studies, I outlined four paradigms for describing and evaluating them, focusing on the impact of technologies on the human world: Prometheus, Daedalus, Faust and Cyborg. In this chapter these visions will be examined in light of their main representatives, namely (i) Bacon, Descartes and Marx (instrumental, which is the most popular and whose roots go back to Aristotle); (ii) Heidegger, Plato, and Aristotle, opening up two ways of introducing the metaphysical approach: focusing on the ontological structure of technical objects, e.g. Aristotle and Scholastics; focusing on our attitude to them, e.g. Plato and Heidegger, an attitude of dependence, with Heidegger taking modern technique as a Gestell (device) and a kind of prison; (iii) Jacques Ellul, Max Weber, Arnold Gehlen, Simondon, McLuhan and more recently Langdon Winner and Don Ihde, on the trail of Husserl’s Lebenswelt (technique = way of life) – all of them with their different systemic vision, in today’s main rival to the instrumental view and characterized by three variants, linked to anthropological, cybernetics and genetic engineering approaches: extensionist (McLuhan), fusionist (Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour) and eugenics or perfectionist (human enhancement: Harris and Savulescu); (iv) Feenberg, the heir to Marcuse, who argues for a critical vision of technique, alongside Michel Foucault and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. My intention is to extend these paradigms and visions of technology to new research on ethical, epistemic and ontological aspects of biotechnology as applied to human beings.