Phenomenology and Technology

About

Phenomenology investigates the conditions of what makes things appear as such, or, it suggests that there is a co-constitutive relationship between us and the phenomena we encounter in our engagement with the world. One of these phenomena is the phenomenon of technology. Probably the most famous phenomenological analysis of technology is Martin Heidegger’s (1977) essay The Question Concerning Technology, which illustrates the distinctive claim of phenomenology vis-à-vis technology, namely, that technology is not merely an artifact or our relationship with this or that artifact; rather, the artifact—and our relationship with it—is already an outcome of a particular ‘technological’ way of seeing and conducting ourselves in and towards the world. Other phenomenologists, such as Hubert Dreyfus and Albert Borgmann, have extended Heidegger’s work into more specific critiques of particular technologies and particular contemporary ways of being. However, phenomenology does not function only as an approach to reveal and critique our relationship with technology. As an example, Bernhard Waldenfels (2002) refers to the concept of Phänomenotechnik, which entails a critique and analysis of how various techniques (including media-enhanced visual techniques, auditory techniques, learning techniques, movement techniques, bodily techniques, and life techniques of various kinds) both enables and limits human experience. Another thinker Don Ihde (1990, 1995, 2002, 2010) has used the resources of phenomenology to give a rich account of the variety and complexity of our relationship with technology—what he refers to as a post-phenomenology of technology (Ihde 2009, 2010; Selinger 2006). With post-phenomenology Ihde wants to move away from ‘transcendental’ narratives of the technological to a more grounded empirical analysis of the human-technology relationship. With the emergence of new technologies, such as virtual reality, AI and gene editing to name a few, scholars have emphasized subjects’ embodied and embedded lived experiences and their interactions with technological practices, arguing that technologies gain meaning and shape within specific contexts, actively shaping those contexts in return. As Hofmann and Svenaeus (2018) put it: “New technologies not only open up new spaces of possibilities for our doings; they also make us see things in new ways, they shape our experiences, dominate the goals of human projects, changing our views on what is worth pursuing in the first place.”

The goal of the conference is to bring together various phenomenological perspectives on technology, focusing on historical analyses on the essence and critique of technology within phenomenological tradition; on the debates whether technology should be analyzed as a whole or through individual artifacts; on methodological discussions exploring the role of phenomenological methods analyzing human-technology relationship; and on addressing the current phenomenological research (both theoretical and empirical) on the individual’s use of various new technologies. Interdisciplinary research, combining phenomenology with other fields of studies, is also welcome.