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Copyright

Martin Ritter

Published On

2024-10-16

Page Range

pp. 121–142

Language

  • English

Print Length

22 pages

5. Technological Mediation without Empirical Borders

Chapter of: Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology(pp. 121–142)
This chapter provides a critique of the postphenomenological understanding of “technology” as something referring to empirically observable artefacts in reality. He argues that postphenomenology suffers from three main shortcomings: (1) it fails to engage with the question what constitutes a technology, (2) it mistakenly reduces technological mediations to observable interactions between humans and technologies, and (3) its commitment to the empirical turn in the philosophy of technology and its according focus on case studies provides limited access to postphenomenology’s self-proclaimed object of study: human-technology relations. In providing these critiques, the chapter offers a substantial general critique of the empirical turn in the philosophy of technology, as well as points towards the need to find a language to articulate how the notion of “technological mediation” is not bounded to particular empirical circumstances.

Contributors

Martin Ritter

(author)
Deputy Director at the Institute of Philosophy at Czech Academy of Sciences
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7426-7005

Martin Ritter is Deputy Director at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Senior Researcher at its Department of Contemporary Continental Philosophy. He is also affiliated with the Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics - Prague. From 2007 to 2020, he taught philosophy at Charles University, Prague. From 2020 to 2022, he was a visiting scholar in the research group Philosophy of Media at the University of Vienna. Besides numerous journal articles especially on phenomenology, critical theory, media philosophy, and philosophy of technology, he has recently published two monographs: To Liberate the Future by an Act of Cognition. Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Truth (Filosofia 2018, in Czech), and Into the World. The Movement of Patočka’s Phenomenology (Springer 2019).