The TV series American Gods (2017-2021) features a war between the Old Gods, a syncretic pantheon of deities of the natural powers drawn from all mythological and religious traditions, and the New Gods, the deities of history and the artificial realm of man-made technics. Gods of both fences are shown as beings whose morals beyond good and evil is entirely focused on fulfilling their will to power in terms of immortality. Humans are trapped within this conflict; their only option is (...) seemingly limited to choose which side they stand. While the series sumptuously renders Heidegger’s claim that metaphysics and technics are the same, it also employs a different and positive meaning of the latter: by showing the old gods, the new ones, and humans as different options about existence – namely the logic of sacrifice, the logic of hedonism, and the economic logic of human reason – and eventually rejecting all of them as viable solutions, it favours an idea of existence as full open-ness and experimentality. In the end, technics is one with man’s self-creativity, embodied in his very biology, providing him an escape route from the vicious circles constantly ambushing him on his path towards authenticity – namely, all deities, religious as well as secular. (shrink)

We take for granted that only certain kind of things exist - electrons but not angels, passports but not nymphs. This is what we understand as `reality'. But in fact, `reality' varies with each era of the world, in turn shaping the field of what is possible to do, think and imagine. Our contemporary age has embraced a troubling and painful form of reality: Technic. Under Technic, the foundations of reality begin to crumble, shrinking the field of the possible and (...) freezing our lives in an anguished state of paralysis. Technic and Magic shows that the way out of the present deadlock lies much deeper than debates on politics or economics. By drawing from an array of Northern and Southern sources - spanning from Heidegger, Junger and Stirner's philosophies, through Pessoa's poetry, to Advaita Vedanta, Bhartrhari, Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra's theosophies - Magic is presented as an alternative system of reality to Technic. While Technic attempts to capture the world through an `absolute language', Magic centres its reconstruction of the world around the notion of the `ineffable' that lies at the heart of existence. Technic and Magic is an original philosophical work, and a timely cultural intervention. It disturbs our understanding of the structure of reality, while restoring it in a new form. This is possibly the most radical act: if we wish to change our world, first we have to change the idea of `reality' that defines it. (shrink)

At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves, with beings formed by nature. This distinction persisted until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of the technical object. This philosophy developed while industrialisation was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of social organisation, which highlighted technology's new place in philosophical enquiry. Bernard Stiegler goes back to the beginning of Western philosophy and revises (...) the Aristotelian assessment, developing a complex argument whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinctive temporality and dynamic of its own. The author engages the ideas of Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela. (shrink)

In this volume, first published in 1983, Jon Elster approaches the study of technical change from an epistemological perspective.

Technics and Time 2: Disorientation continues Stiegler's interrogation of prosthetic and ortho-thetic memory in light of the crisis that arises when speed and delay are irreconcilable, the crisis of "human being" itself.

Humans are always interested in distinguishing natural and artificial entities although there is no sharp demarcation between the two categories. Surprisingly, things do not improve when the second type of entities is restricted to the arguably more constrained realm of physical technical artifacts. This paper helps to clarify the relationship between natural entities and technical artifacts by developing a conceptual landscape within which to analyze these notions. The framework is developed by studying three definitions of technical artifact which arise from (...) different perspectives. All these perspectives share two intuitions: that technical artifacts are physical objects that exist by human intervention; and that technical artifacts are entities to be contrasted to natural entities. Yet the perspectives are different in the way they spell out these intuitions: the relevant human intervention may range from intentional selection to intentional production; and the contrast between technical artifacts and natural entities may be introduced by a constitution relation or by defining properties that set technical artifacts apart. The three perspectives are compared and their similarities and dissimilarities are explored with the help of ontological analysis. (shrink)

This is a technical supplement to "Abstraction and Grounding", forthcoming in /Philosophy and Public Affairs/.

Acoustic Technics, aware that digital and computer embedded technologies produce data that today can be transformed into acoustic images, notes the transformations these phenomena imply for a diverse set of practices, such as music, communication, medical diagnosis, and scientific knowledge.

In this paper we present an action-theoretic account of artefact using and designing and describe our ICE-theory of function ascriptions to technical artefacts. By means of this account and theory we analyse the thesis of the dual nature of technical artefacts according to which descriptions of technical artefacts draw on structural and intentional conceptualisations. We show that the ascription of technical functions to technical artefacts can connect the intentional and structural parts of descriptions of artefacts, but also separate these parts. (...) Our conclusion is that the concept of technical functions forms a ‘conceptual drawbridge’ between the intentional and structural natures of technical artefacts.Keywords: Intentional and structural descriptions; Technical artefacts; Function theory; Action theory; Use; Design. (shrink)

BackgroundNon-technical skills are cognitive and interpersonal skills underpinning technical proficiency. Ethical values and respect for human dignity make operating room nurses responsible for nursing decisions that are clinically and technically sound and morally appropriate.AimTo learn what ethical issues operating room nurses perceive as important regarding non-technical skills.Research designQualitative individual in-depth interviews were conducted. The interviews were analysed using Braun and Clarke’s six phases for thematic analysis.Participants and research contextEleven experienced perioperative/operating room nurses working in an operating unit at a Norwegian (...) university hospital.Ethical considerationsApproval was given by The Norwegian Social Science Data Service in care of the hospital’s Data Protection Officer.FindingsThree main themes were found: respect and care for the patient, making the patient feel safe, and respect within the perioperative team. These features or themes, which incorporate collaboration and communication, are closely connected to patient safety.DiscussionDefending the patient’s dignity is part of caring for and respecting the patient. The manner in which the operating room team collaborates is important for the patient to feel safe and secure. Poor teamwork may have dire consequences. Reciprocal respect within the team includes respect for each other’s tasks and responsibilities and to talk to one another in a friendly manner.ConclusionBeing respectful and contributing to a caring atmosphere are central ethical skills in the operating room. To patients, harmonious teamwork translates into a feeling of safety and being cared for. The nurses see respect and patient safety, and respect and reciprocal politeness among the members of the perioperative team as central ethical non-technical skills. Lack of respect influences the team negatively and is detrimental for patient safety. Good communication is an important safety measure during surgery and creates a feeling of good ‘flow’ within the operating room team. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore the close link between technology and death in the philosophical writings of Lewis Mumford. Mumford famously argued that throughout the history of western civilization we find intertwined two competing forms of technics; the democratic biotechnic form and the authoritarian monotechnic form. The former technics were said to be strongly compatible with an organic form of life while the latter were said to be allied to a mechanical power complex. What is perhaps less (...) well known is the extent to which Mumford characterizes the authoritarian technical form as being a technics of death. This article will argue that the connection between death and technics is a key theme in Mumford’s philosophy of technology. In addition to elaborating this theme and detailing how it informs Mumford’s other positions on the nature of technology, this article will also argue that Mumford’s theory of a technics of death bears witness, both implicitly and explicitly, to the influence of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the death instinct. Freud’s account of the death instinct will be outlined briefly and its influence on Mumford’s writings will be explained. Death, in Mumford’s technological writings, has a generally negative function and serves to warn humanity of the perilous course that its technological civilization is set upon. However it also has a positive function in that it encourages man to transcend its biological existence in acts of creativity and purpose. Death, in this positive sense, serves the purpose of life whereas, in the negative sense, it hinders it. The role of death, in both aspects, will be explored and related to Mumford’s overall perspective on technics and life. It is argued that Mumford’s philosophy of technology cannot be fully understood without an awareness of his views on death and its role in the life of technological society. (shrink)

This essay explores the nature and neurological basis of creativity in technical production. After presenting a model of expert technical cognition based in cognitive anthropology and cognitive psychology, the authors propose that craft production has three inherent sources of novelty — procedural drift, serendipitous error and fiddling. However, these are quite limited in their creative potential, which may help explain the virtual absence of innovation over the long millennia of the Palaeolithic. Innovation can be far more rapid and effective via (...) invention, which requires folk theories of causation and adequate working memory capacity, all fairly recent evolutionary developments. The neurological basis of expert technical cognition lies in well-known cortical and sub-cortical structures, but recent research has established a provocative role for the cerebellum in the formulation of novel arrangements. (shrink)

Donald Schön’s theory of reflective practice has received unprecedented attention as an approach to professional development in nursing and other health and social care professions. This paper examines technical rationality in Schön’s theory of reflective practice and argues that its critique is a broad and often overlooked epistemological underpinning in this work. This paper suggests that the popularity of Schön’s theory is tied in part to his critique of technical rationality, and to his acknowledgement of the significance of practitioner experience (...) and indeterminate zones of practice in the development of expertise. Schön tapped into a growing disillusionment with technical rationality that coincided with a crisis of knowledge across a range of disciplines. The question is raised as to whether Schön’s critique sets up a dichotomy between technical rationality and experience, or overcomes it. The conclusions suggest that Schön is not discarding research‐based professional knowledge, but rather challenging conflated views of its practical significance. In this way, it is proposed that his critique of technical rationality can be interpreted as an attempt to overcome dualistic thinking as it pertains to professional knowledge. (shrink)

Embracing an inter-disciplinary approach grounded on Gärdenfors’ theory of conceptual spaces, we introduce a formal framework to analyse and compare selected theories about technical artefacts present in the literature. Our focus is on design-oriented approaches where both designing and manufacturing activities play a crucial role. Intentional theories, like Kroes’ dual nature thesis, are able to solve disparate problems concerning artefacts but they face both the philosophical challenge of clarifying the ontological nature of intentional properties, and the empirical challenge of testing (...) the attribution of such intentional properties to artefacts. To avoid these issues, we propose an approach that, by identifying different modalities to characterise artefact types, does not commit to intentional qualities and is able to empirically ground compliance tests. (shrink)

Cinematic time -- The cinema of consciousness -- I and we : the American politics of adoption -- The malaise of our educational institutions -- Making (the) difference -- Technoscience and reproduction.

Not until the twentieth century did science come to be regarded as fundamentally technical in nature. A technical field, after all, meant not just a difficult one, but one relying on concepts and vocabulary that matter only to specialists. The alternative, to identify science with an ideal of public reason, attained its peak of influence in the late nineteenth century. While the scale and applicability of science advanced enormously after 1900, scientists have more and more preferred the detached objectivity of (...) service to bureaucratic experts over the cultivation of an engaged public. This reshaping of science, which has been both celebrated and condemned, provided a stimulus to the incipient field of history of science, and it remains a key historical problem. (shrink)

For several hundred thousand years, the genus homo deployed a characteristic technical creativity, communicating and transmitting its outcomes, together with its operative protocols, without the available recourse to articulated language. The thesis proposed here is that the aforementioned functions should be attributed to a complex intertwining of embodied abilities, which can in turn be ascribed to the classic philosophical concept of imagination. It is through imagination that the human becomes involved in material engagement, by virtue of which its extended mind (...) takes part in the processes of producing artifacts and is in turn shaped by them. The main issue of this article consists in investigating how this involvement occurs and the part that articulated language plays in it, following the invention of the latter. The latter’s emergence can indeed be traced back to the transformation and specialization of a recursive element, already present in the pre-linguistic work of imagination, whose ability to implement a denotative semantics is discussed in particular. (shrink)

Many outside science and engineering, especially social scientists and “rhetoricians”, claim that rhetoric, “the art of persuasion”, is an important part of technical communication. This claim is either trivial or false. If “persuasion” simply means “effective communication”, then, of course, rhetoric is an important part of technical communication. But, if “persuasion” has anything like its traditional meaning (a specific art of winning conviction), rhetoric is not an important part of technical communication; indeed, its use in technical communication would be unethical. (...) [By] an advocate is meant one whose business it is to smooth over real difficulties, and to persuade where he cannot convince. (shrink)

An essay review of the Routledge Revival edition of Oswald Spengler, 'Man and Technics (1932).

Every living science, especially in its early stages, is compelled to devise fresh terms, either by coining new words or by giving new meanings to old ones. Unless and until these fresh terms become absorbed in the vocabulary of everyday speech, their unfamiliarity makes them a target for the shafts of the humourist. There can be no doubt that in the late fifth century B.C. literary criticism was still a new science. We can trace its beginnings in the treatises of (...) the Sophists, many titles of which have been handed down to us. Strepsiades' lesson in metric, though of itself amusing enough, would certainly gain in topical appropriateness if enacted at a time when such investigations were not only much in the air, but were still novel. And the whole ‘Agon’ of the Frogs, the character of which is forecasted in lines 796–802, depicts in the strongest colours the contrasted views of technician and inspirationist. We should therefore naturally expect a play of such a kind, written at such a time, to be full of technical jargon, barely understood by the ‘man in the street,’ and forming the object of his half-contemptuous amusement. That is, I believe, exactly what we do find, to an extent insufficiently recognized. Professor Radermacher, in his recent edition of the Frogs, has rendered valuable service by pointing out the frequent occurrence in that play of technical terms which meet us later in Dionysius of Halicarnassus and other critics. But I believe that technical language lurks unsuspected in many other passages, though the precise meaning may often be beyond recovery. (shrink)

Motivated by the significant amount of successful collaborative problem solving activity on the Web, we ask: Can the accumulated information propagation behavior on the Web be conceived as a giant machine, and reasoned about accordingly? In this paper we elaborate a thesis about the computational capability embodied in information sharing activities that happen on the Web, which we term socio-technical computation, reflecting not only explicitly conditional activities but also the organic potential residing in information on the Web.

The evermore explicit technicization of the world, together with the immeasurable nature of the political and ethical questions that it poses, explicitly defy the syntheses of human imagination and invention. In response to this challenge, how can philosophy, in its relation of nonrelation with politics, help in orienting present and future negotiation with the processes of complexification that this technicization implies? The article argues that one important way to do this is to think and develop our understanding of technicity from (...) out of metaphysics, its destructions and deconstructions. The argument proceeds from the aporia of knowledge in Plato's Meno, situates continental philosophical thought's various articulations of the ‘other’ of metaphysics in relation to the problematic of this aporia and claims that certain understandings of this alterity can be further articulated in terms of technical supplementarity. Working between the concept of ‘arche‐writing’ in the thought of Jacques Derrida and that of ‘epiphylogenesis’ in that of Bernard Stiegler, the article then develops this supplementarity in terms of a play between originary technicity and its historical differentiations, one that both holds to the articulation of alterity in recent continental philosophy and develops it further in terms of its relation to historical determination. This relation, posited through a thinking of technicity, permits, finally, the ‘development’ of an ethics of giving time with which negotiation with processes of complexification can be undertaken in the name of justice. An ethical relation to these processes thereby emerges through the very excess of the human. (shrink)

Note: This is not an ad hoc change at all. It’s simply the natural thing say here – if one thinks of F as a generalization of classical logical entailment. The extra complexity I had in my original (incorrect) definition of F was there because I was foolishly trying to encode some non-classical, or “relavant” logical structure in F. I now think this is a mistake, and that I should go with the above, classical account of F. Arguments about relevance (...) logic need to be handled in a different way (and a different context!). And, besides, as Luca Moretti has shown (see below), the original definition of F cannot be the right basis for C ! OK, now on to C. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to contribute to a philosophy of technics by proposing an answer to the following question: what is the nature of the human body as an element of technical systems? The argument focuses on an examination of the phenomenon of bodily technics. This examination is guided by the conviction that Pierre Bourdieu's social theory can be read as contributing significantly to an answer to the above question. However, since Bourdieu's project is not directly aimed at (...) enhancing our understanding of the technicity of the human body, a reading of Marcel Mauss's seminal essay on bodily technics is also discussed to set the stage for an examination of the technicity of the body and to justify the manner in which Bourdieu's theory is read here. Through a careful study of the key notions of habitus, field, practice, time and rule, Bourdieu's social theory is systematically presented and explored for its contribution to an understanding of the question raised in this article. In conclusion, a number of remarks are made on how the relation between Mauss and Bourdieu is to be understood and on the argumentative strength of Bourdieu's work. (shrink)

What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own. The Aristotelian concept persisted, in (...) one form or another, until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of technics. Lodged between mechanics and biology, a technical entity became a complex of heterogeneous forces. In a parallel development, while industrialization was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of knowledge as well as contemporary social organization, technology was acquiring a new place in philosophical questioning. Philosophy was for the first time faced with a world in which technical expansion was so widespread that science was becoming more and more subject to the field of instrumentality, with its ends determined by the imperatives of economic struggle or war, and with its epistemic status changing accordingly. The power that emerged from this new relation was unleashed in the course of the two world wars. Working his way through the history of the Aristotelian assessment of technics, the author engages the ideas of a wide range of thinkers—Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela. (shrink)

This interview with Bernard Stiegler’s long-time translator and collaborator, Daniel Ross, examines the connections between different periods of Stiegler’s work, thought, writing and activism. Moving from the three volumes of Technics and Time to the final large-scale collaborative project of The Internation, the discussion concentrates on Stiegler’s conceptualization of ‘protentionality’, hope and care for a world confronted by climate crises, entropy and computational economic reconfigurations of work, economy and imaginations for futural possibilities. The interview foreshadows the special issue on The (...) Internation project planned by Bishop and Stiegler for TCS that will appear in the near future. (shrink)

Birthing is a natural phenomenon. However, in the era of modernisation, it has dramatically changed and transformed into a technological affair. Some feminists claim that advances in medicine and assisted reproductive technologies have opened up numerous opportunities and choices for women to free themselves from their destined role of maternity by separating sex from reproduction. But are these technological artefacts always there to emancipate women or just another way to keep them subordinated to serve social needs? Other feminists argue that (...) technology is a controlling tool. It eliminates a woman’s choice and uses her body as a baby-manufacturing machine to perpetuate pervasive social roles and responsibilities. Again, if technology is simply a patriarchal trap, then can technological exclusion be the key to all reproductive issues? It seems not! Technology is the inevitable new reality of the world influenced by socio-cultural practices, values, norms and belief system that has a strong impact on human existence. The present paper is an attempt to critically explore and evaluate the ethical challenges posed by technicization of motherhood from two opposite feminist perspectives. I argue that these ART-centred debates are significant but polarised and insufficient to resolve maternal problems. Thus, we need an egalitarian model of technology that saves women from the threat of technicization, and be able to provide a dignified use of it. The paper discusses the impact of technicization on maternal self in relation to ARTs and proposes suggestions to overcome this problem. (shrink)

It is argued that we cannot understand the notion of proper functions of artefacts independently of social notions. Functions of artefacts are related to social facts via the use of artefacts. The arguments in this article can be used to improve existing function theories that look to the causal history of artefacts to determine the function. A view that takes the intentions of designers into account to determine the proper function is both natural and often correct, but it is shown (...) that there are exceptions to this. Taking a social constitutive element into account may amend these backwards looking theories. An improved theory may either have a disjunctive form—either the history or collective intentions determine the proper function—or, as is suggested in the article, be in the form of an encompassing account that views the designers’ intentions as social, in so far as they are accepted by the users. Designers have authority, which is a social fact. The views argued for here are applied to two existing theories of artefact functions, a causal historic approach and an action theoretic approach.Keywords: Function; Artefact; Evaluative judgement; Action; Collective intentionality. (shrink)

This paper describes the relationship between technics and desire in light of Bernard Stiegler’s new critique of political economy. The starting point for the analysis is Stiegler’s critique of the reinterpretation of Freud’s legacy by Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization. The context of the analysis is the ongoing mutation of consumer capitalism into computational capitalism—one in which automated calculation systems are used to control all forms of mental and affective human activity. Digital automatization, I argue, encourages a different view (...) of what Marcuse called “the automatization of the superego.” It also requires us to rethink to what extent desire is conditioned techno-logically beyond the limits of Marcuse’s critique of Freud, capitalism and technology. The article pays special attention to Stiegler’s reinterpretation of the theory of sublimation in relation to contemporary capitalism and its technological infrastructure (from television to digital platforms). It is also an attempt to include the question concerning technology in psychoanalytic thinking. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Background Concepts for Examining LTS Dynamics Societal Implications of LTS References and Further Reading.

Introduces the technical tools and concepts employed in advanced work in philosophy. Beginning with the fundamentals of set theory, the author examines relations, functions and the theory of arithmetic before using these tools to clarify the metatheory of the predicate calculus.

It is commonly held that Christian ethics generally and Christian bioethics particularly is the application of Christian moral systems to novel problems engaged by contemporary culture and created by contemporary technology. On this view, Christianity adds its moral vision to a technology, baptizing it for use. In this essay, I show that modern technology is a metaphysical moral worldview that enacts its own moral vision, shaping a moral imaginary, shaping our moral perception, creating moral subjects, and shaping what we imagine (...) as moral intentions. In fact, modern technics has its own liturgics, which is foreign to Christian Divine Liturgy. Divine Liturgy is world forming, showing us a different world than the one that comes into relief in the ersatz liturgy of modern medical technics. (shrink)

Media studies as a field has traditionally been wary of the question of technology. Discussion of technology has often been restricted to relatively sterile debates about technological determinism. In recent times there has been renewed interest, however, in the technological dimension of media. In part this is doubtless due to rapid changes in media technology, such as the rise of the internet and the digital convergence of media technologies. But there are also an increasing number of writers who seem to (...) believe that media theory, and more widely social science and the humanities, needs to rethink the question of technology and its relationship to society, culture and cultural production. Andrew Feenberg has characterized the two most dominant positions as, on the one hand, the social constructivist or 'technology studies' approach to technology, and, on the other, 'substantivist' theories of technology. The social constructivist approach, aims to counter technological determinism by showing how the development of technology is shaped not by technical and scientific progress but by contingent social, cultural and economic forces. The limitation of this view, however, is that it tends to see technology as no different from any other social process and it may lose the ability to distinguish between the technical object and any other social formation or cultural artefact. Doubtless constructivism would like to see technology as a subset of the cultural artefact and not vice versa, therefore explaining technology in terms of culture and society. But there are powerful arguments for arguing something like the opposite: in other words for understanding culture and society in terms of or as technical objects. In recent years this argument has been put most forcefully by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler and it is to his work and its implications for media theory that this essay is dedicated. In particular I will show how Stiegler might defend his ideas around technics from the charge of technological determinism. Firstly, technics is not understood in the narrow sense of techno-scientific technology but in the wider sense of all the ways in which the human is exteriorised into artefacts or organized inorganic matter. Technics in this sense is therefore inseparable from culture and society and it makes no sense either to talk of technics determining culture and society or vice versa. Culture and society are not constituted by technics as if by a cause but rather constituted through it. Secondly, a technics in Stiegler's sense does not represent scientific progress or a deterministic evolution; rather, however strange this may seem, technics is a kind of pure accidentality or contingency. For Stiegler it is because of the exteriorisation of the human into artefacts or inorganic organized matter that culture and society constitute themselves contingently. Stiegler's work therefore offers a way for us to rethink the relationship between culture and technology in ways which can productively reconfigure the concerns of critical theory. (shrink)

Novel, as a literary genre, is described as the expression of events and emotions by using unconventional methods and techniques; beyond this, novek is also a subject of sociology. For this reason, writers have used the art of the novel as a way of expressing the pain experienced by the individual and its social dimensions. One of these writers is Mourid Barghouti (d. 2021), who was born in Palestine in 1944 and studied English Language and Literature at Cairo University. Banned (...) from entering Palestine in 1967 when he graduated from the university, and exiled from Egypt for criticizing Anwar al-Sādāt's (d. 1981) visit to Israel, Barghouti lived in exile for 17 years in various Arab and European countries away from his wife and child. Barghouti, who returned to Palestine 30 years after his departure, wrote a novel called I Saw Ramallah. This novel was first published in 1997, and he expressed his homesickness and the experiences of the Palestinian people after the occupation. Divided into nine chapters, consisting of 220 pages and translated into many languages, the novel shows the drama of many Palestinians who entered the British mandate after World War I, whose lands were occupied with the establishment of Israel in 1948, and who was forced to leave their homeland. In this sense, the novel I Saw Ramallah reflects both the expatriation of Palestine and the author. In this study, the work named I Saw Ramallah was elaborated in terms of technique in order to determine to what extent the author used the rules of the art of the novel, and thematically which subjects were handled in the novel. It is understood that the name of the novel was chosen to reflect the content by making use of the symbolic value of the place. This novel is seen as an autobiographical novel type, due to the author’s narrator technique used and the author tells his own life. The author's entry into Palestine is used as the objective tense of the novel; the author, with recollections and connotations in objective time, conveyed his experiences by using the flashback method. Events that contain enough sadness have been tried to be conveyed as they happened by mentioning time, place and individuals in order to awake the reader's feelings. Although the events in the novel are listed non-chronologically, when the whole novel is examined, it is seen that the author writes his experiences within the framework of the days he spent in Ramallah and the memories that they remind him of, and in the order in which they come to mind. In almost all of the novel, classical Arabic is preferred. The novel has avoided as much forced expressions and literary expressions that enlarge or reduce events as possible. Although it is impossible to claim that he is completely impartial as a Palestinian, it is seen that the author describes the events with the simplicity of a Palestinian citizen, away from political conflicts as much as possible and in a natural language. It is possible to say that the dominant use of critical style in the novel as the experiences of a writer suffered living abroad throughout his life, shaped his perspective on life and its reflection on the novel. The main topic of the novel is the absence from home. In addition, those killed far away from their homeland, Jewish settlement, the effect of Jewish occupation on the social life, the Oslo Agreement and the role of the phone in the life of the expat are handled as sub-themes. Although the novel named I Saw Ramallah is mostly close to daily or commemorative works and does not fully fit in the definitions of novel art as it emerged in the West, it includes the style of novel art at a certain level. It is seen that the novel has an important place in terms of raising awareness on the Palestinian issue in the Arab and Islamic world. The novel I Saw Ramallah, which was awarded The Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature by the American University in Cairo in 1997, is likely to have received this award because of its thematic aspect rather than its stylistic aspect. Considering this award that the novel won against its peers and the considerations we mentioned during the technical and stylistic analysis we made about the novel, it is seen that the art of the novel in Arabic literature is still in the development stage. (shrink)

Ekphrasis is familiar as a rhetorical tool for inducing enargeia, the vivid sense that a reader or listener is actually in the presence of the objects described. This book focuses on the ekphrastic techniques used in ancient Greek and Roman literature to describe technological artifacts. Since the literary discourse on technology extended beyond technical texts, this book explores 'technical ekphrasis' in a wide range of genres, including history, poetry, and philosophy as well as mechanical, scientific, and mathematical works. Technical authors (...) like Philo of Byzantium, Vitruvius, Hero of Alexandria, and Claudius Ptolemy are put into dialogue with close contemporaries in other genres, like Diodorus Siculus, Cicero, Ovid, and Aelius Theon. The treatment of 'technical ekphrasis' here covers the techniques of description, the interaction of verbal and visual elements, the role of instructions, and the balance between describing the artifact's material qualities and the other bodies of knowledge it evokes. (shrink)

This article focuses on tracing and extending Michel Foucault’s contributions to the philosophy of technology. At first sight his work on power seems the most relevant. In his later work on subjectivation and ethics technology is absent. However, notably by recombining Foucault’s work on power with his work on subjectivation, does his work contribute to solving pertinent problems in current approaches to the ethics of technology. First, Foucault’s position is compared to critical theory and Heidegger, and associated with the approach (...) of “technical mediation” (Latour, Ihde, Verbeek). Next, a detailed study of Discipline and Punish , results in the identification of two distinct “figures of technical mediation”. Finally, Foucault’s later work on ethics and subjectivation is employed to elaborate an ethics of technology that focuses on care for the quality of the interactions and fusions with technology. Hybridization is central in the approach: it is not to be rejected, neither is it the greatest danger, but it does deserve the greatest care. (shrink)

Technical change, defined as the manufacture and modification of tools, is generally thought to have played an important role in the evolution of intelligent life on earth, comparable to that of language. In this volume, first published in 1983, Jon Elster approaches the study of technical change from an epistemological perspective. He first sets out the main methods of scientific explanation and then applies those methods to some of the central theories of technical change. In particular, Elster considers neoclassical, evolutionary, (...) and Marxist theories, whilst also devoting a chapter to Joseph Schumpeter's influential theory. (shrink)

Life -- Labour -- Psyche -- Being -- The other -- Time -- Death.

Neuro-technical interfaces are technical devices that bridge the electronic world to neurons with the objective to establish a long term stable contact for bidirectional information exchange. What does that mean in detail and to what kind of machine and for what purpose should the central nervous system, i.e. the brain, be connected? Science fiction literature and movies offer a tremendous variety of usually uncomfortable scenarios including cyborg and robocop super-humans and mass control. Do these implants change the psyche in general (...) and what is feasible in nowadays therapeutic and rehabilitative approaches? In this overview, the author will not answer these questions but tries to deliver an overview of the technological background, the opportunities and the limitations of neuro-technical interfaces to the central nervous system. The fundamental specifications for neuro-technical interfaces will be introduced. Different degrees of implant invasiveness will be discussed and lead to a summary of clinical systems with their application-specific complexity. Actual technological opportunities and limitations will be addressed as well as general physical limitations. Current and future scenarios of neuro-technical interfaces to the central nervous system will be presented from an engineering point of view arising some questions that might be of interest with respect to ethical and societal implications when those interfaces are transferred into clinical practice and public applications. (shrink)

The article examines two digital phenomena linked to money and finance, which are the bitcoin and high-frequency trading, through the lens of Vilém Flusser’s concept of technical image. Flusser’s theory highlights three aspects of technical images: they are engendered by the act of organizing particles, are produced by people who operate devices through keys, and are mediated by code, which is linear and pertains to the era of written text, which Flusser conflates with the notion of history. In this article, (...) the argument focuses on the aspects of high-frequency trading and the blockchain that relate to the idea of images. The sections investigate how money has historically operated in the logic of Flusser’s description of symbol manipulation in relation to consciousness and temporality: from the circular time of magical consciousness to the linear time of historical consciousness, and more recently, to the non-dimensional time of post-historical consciousness. The article argues that there are two levels, or layers, in the images involved in cryptocurrencies or algorithmic trading, but only one of them is visible to the human operator or viewer, in the form of a price. The other, which indeed represents the operations in the system, is only accessible to the machines themselves. The questions raised concern the role of these recent digital financial and monetary forms in the development of a reality dominated by apparatuses and technical images. (shrink)

In recent decades, debate on the quality and safety of healthcare has been dominated by a measure and manage administrative rationality. More recently, this rationality has been overlaid by ideas from human factors, ergonomics and systems engineering. Little critical attention has been given in the nursing literature to how risk of harm is understood and actioned, or how patients can be subjectified and marginalised through these discourses. The problem of assuring safety for particular patient groups, and the dominance of technical (...) forms of rationality, has seen the word ‘unavoidable’ used in connection with intractable forms of patient harm. Employing pressure injury policy as an exemplar, and critically reviewing notions of risk and unavoidable harm, we problematise the concept of unavoidable patient harm, highlighting how this dominant safety rationality risks perverse and taken‐for‐granted assumptions about patients, care processes and the nature of risk and harm. In this orthodoxy, those who specify or measure risk are positioned as having more insight into the nature of risk, compared to those who simply experience risk. Driven almost exclusively as a technical and administrative pursuit, the patient safety agenda risks decentring the focus from patients and patient care. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs L.S. Vygotsky’s account of anthropogenesis with respect to the work of anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan and late philosopher Bernard Stiegler, situating Vygotsky as a forerunner to recent theories that posit cultural scaffolding and niche construction as the main drivers of human cognitive evolution. One might think there is an immediate affinity between Vygotsky and the techno-centric accounts of Leroi-Gourhan and Stiegler. Following Leroi-Gourhan, Stiegler argues that “technics” is the main driver in the anthropogenic development of “reflective consciousness.” Vygotsky (...) likewise claims that “psychological tools” are responsible for the development of uniquely human forms of consciousness. However, closer inspection reveals deep disparities between Vygotsky and the French thinkers. In Stiegler’s philosophical redeployment of Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropology, “reflective” cognition is the product of a prehistorical rupture in which some threshold of technical-cortical complexification is breached. For Vygotsky, on the other hand, the inverse scenario obtains. Technical development initially proceeds in tandem with the complexification of biologically based signaling behavior until the introduction of signs, which then radically restructure the cognitive apparatus. Due to inconsistencies regarding the equivalency of the technical and semiotic in Stiegler and Leroi-Gourhan, I advance a Vygotskian account where anthropogenesis is the result of semiotic rather than technical intervention. This aims to establish Vygotsky’s “Cultural Historical” approach, and the Marxian-dialectical tradition from which he draws, as not only presaging recent naturalistic accounts of development, but offering a relevant theoretical program that may continue to inspire contemporary enculturated accounts of anthropogenesis. (shrink)