Abstract

This volume is a collection of essays of a philosophical nature on the subject of technology, introducing authors from the Portuguese-speaking community, namely from Portugal itself, some African countries and Brazil. This polyphony of voices is still little known in European and North American philosophical circles, even though they address the same twentieth- and twenty first-century challenges – challenges which are difficult to deal with without the achievements of science and technology (and techno-scientific systems) and their consequences for the natural world, the human condition and collective life, as well as in terms of new uncertainties in the future. Some of the voices collected here view technology in a world historical period characterised by the twilight of empires, dictatorial domination, the destruction brought about by wars already carried out under industrialized science, the nuclear threat, and propaganda, but also by the winds of decolonization, economic growth driven by the science-technology complex and by big science, the increase in the influence of the media and the birth of the consumer society. Other voices, from a subsequent generation, have experienced a context in which new dilemmas have arisen, associated with the irruption of the techno-sciences, in particular in the domains of biotechnology and information, the continuous expansion of markets, the deep technologization of war, and the acceleration of innovation, generally more technical and commercial than social. Genetic manipulation of human beings, the environmental crisis and climate change, artificial intelligence, the virtualization of social relations, the imaginaries of the subcultures of high technology and their dreams of downloading minds to computers and the cyborgization of the body, among so many other developments associated with techno-science, define the horizon for all those who made the transition into the twenty-first century and have to find answers within it. Philosophical and social thought on technology in the Portuguese language fully incorporates the international discussion of these issues, but there are different nuances and emphases in each of the Portuguese-speaking countries, linked to their specific continents and cultural and social contexts. Clear examples are the question of technological dependence, historical experience (particularly in Latin America and Africa) with the incorporation of Western technology into the social structure of ancestral communities and critical distancing on the inter-penetration of techno-science and economic globalization. But they all offer us thought-provoking reflections for the possible fertile interaction of philosophy and technology.