Our group’s research on the problems concerning technology is more than just a mere addition to the empirical current that dominates the international debate on the philosophy of technology. It is a significant contribution that seeks to avoid the risk of losing sight of ‘the bigger picture’, i.e. the anthropological, social and cultural conditions of possibility in which the creation and uses of technology are always embedded. We aim to overcome an excessively ‘technophobic’ tendency on the part of the philosophy of technology, which is too often characterised by a vision that is as deterministic and pessimistic of the technology phenomenon as it is careless of the concrete reality of the technologies that are produced and used; on the other hand, it will be a matter of avoiding naive and ethically problematic ‘techno-optimistic’ postures.
Our group’s specific intention is to apply this approach also to digital technologies and media, which increasingly characterise contemporary forms of life. We are not just studying these technologies, but we are initiating a reflection on imaginaries and narratives concerning technology, not only as narratives about technology but also in technology itself.This is a unique and engaging perspective that we believe will pique your interest.
Thus, it is a matter of recognising, for example, how great political, ethical, and metaphysical-theological myths and narratives (utopia-dystopia tension, technological solutionism, neo-liberalism, computational rationality, the unity and separability of reason, a messianic-pentecostal vision of the computational reunification of different human activities) are at the origin of certain design choices of digital technologies.
This approach will allow the group to address the ethical issues related to digital technologies by also considering media-induced behaviour. However, it will not yield to a rigid and unidirectional technological determinism but instead seek to understand the why of the conditionings and the origin of the specific design choices that produced them.
