After following this course you will be able to:

• describe the central role played by science and technology as well as industrialisation in human history up to the present day;
• explain how this role is conceptualised, evaluated and criticised in twentieth-century and contemporary philosophy, specifically in Heidegger and Stiegler;
• describe and explain the impact of technoscience (as the marriage of science and technology) and industrialization on the human condition;
• critically apply the above to current developments in scientific research and technological innovation (e.g. the NBIC revolution in technoscience);
• understand the general thrust and basic concepts related to technology and the human condition in the work of Heidegger and Stiegler;
• present your research in various forms (oral, written) to various audiences (specialists & non-specialists, lay audience).

Science, Technology and the Human Condition

Today, nobody would deny the fact that science and technology are the two phenomena that determine our increasingly global civilisation as no others. Over the past centuries, the Western world has become increasingly characterised by scientific thinking and practice and by a technological approach to almost every domain of life. The last century has seen a globalisation of the originally Western scientific worldview, which is now the dominant view all over the planet. Nowadays we live in a ‘knowledge society’, our time is characterised as the ‘technological age’, our everyday explanations are permeated by scientific jargon, every domain of daily live is increasingly technologised, and we seek the solutions to all sorts of problems in the scientific and technological realms. We moreover seek to secure the future of our national wealth in ‘innovation’, which in turn we try to stimulate by means of scientific research policies aimed at strengthening research and development (R&D). Paradoxically enough, scientific research also furnishes indications of the limits and detrimental effects of our dominant growth models and at the same time indicates ways out of the impasse, the global ecological crisis being the most salient example. This scientific mode of thinking and acting is the result of a complex and fascinating historical trajectory.

One of the decisive events in this trajectory has been the marriage of science and technology in the late eighteenth century, which has set humanity on the path of industrialisation and has totally changed the parameters of human life on earth. In this seminar we will focus on this event and examine its nature and its impact on human life, based on the leading assumption that the human life form may be understood as a technical life form, fundamentally constituted and conditioned by technology. We will also take a look at the various interpretations of the technoscientific turn by some of the most important contemporary philosophers. Questions to be dealt with are: what is the nature of science, what is the nature of technology, what is the relation between science and humanity, and between technology and humanity, and what exactly happens when science and technology, which have traditionally followed separate historical trajectories and were even perceived as being opposed to each other, begin to cooperate and get intertwined more and more? Main authors to be discussed are Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler.