Ever since computers have been developed, people have dreamt of technological memories. Human memory exhibits crucial limitations with respect to storage capacity, retrievability and transferability - limits that should be overcome by technology. Yet today we are starting to experience the limitations of overcoming these limitations. Pleas are now made to build a certain mode of forgetting into our technologies. As it stands, we are struggling with the tension between technological remembering and forgetting. This article makes an attempt at a (...) deeper philosophical reflection on this tension. First, we sketch a few ideals of technological memory, that have been proposed throughout the last century. Yet lately, different voices have arisen, that point out the dangers and disadvantages of perfect technological remembering. Second, we discuss one of these perspectives and contrast it with the positions in favour of remembering. But this leads us, thirdly, into a discussion on the distinction between technological memory and 'human' memory: these two appear not so easily delineated. How to make sense of, at the same time, the resemblances and the differences between the two? In the ending section, fourthly, we attempt to do so, by way of Marshall McLuhan's theory of technologies as extensions, and Neil Postman's related idea of technology as a 'Faustian bargain'. Technological memory cannot simply imitate human memory, for every technology causes effects we cannot control. But if the 'extending of remembering' makes us eventually regret our greater capabilities and revert to technological forgetting, this 'extending of forgetting' will have its unforeseen consequences as well. In this doubled Faustian bargain, we must ask ourselves towards which of the two sides we have been biased, and how we can reach a balance that combines enforcement with - consciously sought-after - limitations. (shrink)

This book is a theoretical and completely rigorous analysis of voting in committees that provides mathematical proof of the existence of democratic voting systems, which are immune to the manipulation of preferences of coalitions of voters. The author begins by determining the power distribution among voters that is induced by a voting rule, giving particular consideration to choice by plurality voting and Borda's rule. He then constructs, for all possible committees, well-behaved representative voting procedures which are not distorted by strategic (...) voting, giving complete solutions for certain important classes of committees. The solution to the problem of mass elections is fully characterised. (shrink)

Is truth a supreme value? At times, we doctors have to contend with a complex dilemma in which we face the value of truth on the one hand and conflict with another value on the other. Is it sometimes permissible and even necessary not to report the truth in favour of another, more important value? This is a description of an experience in which a doctor had to handle such an issue when a pregnant Muslim woman asked for a document (...) that she wasn’t pregnant when in fact she was, in order to avert the possibility of being murdered to preserve the honour of the family. The doctor decided that the value of life was more important than the value of truth. (shrink)

This study aims to introduce a modal extension M4CC of Arieli, Avron, and Zamansky's ideal paraconsistent four-valued logic 4CC as a Gentzen-type sequent calculus and prove the Kripke-completeness and cut-elimination theorems for M4CC. The logic M4CC is also shown to be decidable and embeddable into the normal modal logic S4. Furthermore, a subsystem of M4CC, which has some characteristic properties that do not hold for M4CC, is introduced and the Kripke-completeness and cut-elimination theorems for this subsystem are proved. This subsystem (...) is also shown to be decidable and embeddable into S4. (shrink)

Resisting Contextual Information: You Can't Put a Salient Meaning Down Two experiments support the graded salience hypothesis, which assumes that early processing involves distinct mechanisms-linguistic and contextual-that do not interact but run parallel. While contextual processes make up an integrative, top-down mechanism that benefits from linguistic and extra-linguistic information, the linguistic mechanism is modular. Using Vu et al.'s materials, Experiment 1 shows that the sentential position of a target word is crucial for the operation of the global, predictive mechanism, whose (...) effects, accumulated in prior discourse, mask lexical effects in final, but not in initial position. Experiment 2 shows that even in a sentential position that favors contextual effects, lexical access is not affected: Salient meanings are activated upon encounter of the lexical stimulus, regardless of contextual information to the contrary. Taken together, these findings argue against direct access models, which suggest that context can selectively activate the appropriate meaning, regardless of salience. (shrink)

In this study, we prove the completeness and cut-elimination theorems for a first-order extension F4CC of Arieli, Avron, and Zamansky’s ideal paraconsistent four-valued logic known as 4CC. These theorems are proved using Schütte’s method, which can simultaneously prove completeness and cut-elimination.

The empirical-transcendental debate in philosophy of technology, as debates go, took a turn toward the counterposing of the two perspectives, ‘empirical’-pragmatic-pragmatist versus ‘transcendental’-critical. Postphenomenology aligns itself with the former standpoint, and it is in this spirit that commentators have criticized it for its too-instrumentalist stance and lack of overarching, i.e., transcendental orientation. But the positions may have become too starkly delineated in order for the debate to reach any breakthrough: a seemingly unbridgeable gap yawns between the stances of ‘technology with (...) a small “t”’ and ‘Technology with a capital “T.”' Is there any way to reorient the debate? In this paper I propose to do so by considering whether there would be some way of arriving from one end of the spectrum to the other—crossing the gap. Exploring the purported wasteland in between “technology” and “Technology” by way of object-oriented ontology (OOO)—Harman, Morton—we can find it actually filled with countless gaps, adhering to every thing. Following the radical insights of OOO, we’d have to attest to a ‘thing-transcendentality.’ The ‘gap,’ then, that seemed so threatening and all-encompassing, becomes smeared out, levelled down to a multiplicity of perspectives. And this casts the debate, with its purported strict tension between ‘empirical’ and ‘transcendental’ positions, in fresh terms, opening up new ways for studying how the two interrelate. (shrink)

Concerns about intercultural communication practices in child and family health were raised during a South Australian ethnographic study. The family partnership model was observed as a universal pedagogic tool introduced into the host organisation in 2003. It has a role in shaping and reshaping cultural production within child health practice. In this study, we draw on insights from postcolonial feminist scholarship together with three‐body analysis to critique the theoretical canons of care that inform intercultural communication in the child and family (...) health setting.We contend that although the family partnership model may be very useful, its intended universal application is problematic in the context of multiculture. Issues of race, gender and class were seemingly unattended when using a communication approach based in historical scientific rationalism. Liberal interpretations of discourses of equity and empathy arising out of contemporary models of communication were often adopted by child and family health nurses and protected them from seeing the inherent binaries that constrain practice. Insights from postcolonial feminist thinking enabled us to recognise the problems of applying theory to practice in a linear fashion. We demonstrate the use of three‐body analysis as a deconstruction strategy to refigure how theory might be understood and worked with in the multiculture that is Australia. (shrink)

This paper zooms in on a recent development in the discussion between postphenomenology and critical constructivism: the attempt at working out a political philosophy in the framework of postphenomenology, specifically Peter-Paul Verbeek’s. Verbeek contrasts mediation theory to critical theory, arguing that critical theorists only “talk”; they don’t “do.” While the latter reproach postphenomenology/mediation theory for its lack of politics, Verbeek actually poses that “real” politics cannot be done by critical theorists—indeed exactly because of their not doing, that is, doing in (...) the sense of helping to design and develop good real-world technological solutions. But this brings up pertinent questions, about whether a theory should “do” something, what that means, and whether calls for “doing” do not carry their own presuppositions with them that, if not made explicit, will bias the theory and its “use” toward certain directions. These issues are explored by way of among others an excursion into Rortyan pragmatism. Eventually, I conclude, it is perfectly acceptable that critical constructivism should “talk” and postphenomenology “do”—as long as we keep the meanings of those terms sufficiently clear. (shrink)

In this article we seek to lay bare a couple of potential conceptual and methodological issues that, we believe, are implicitly present in contemporary philosophy of technology. At stake are the sustained pertinence of and need for coping strategies as to ‘how to live with technology ’ notwithstanding PhilTech’s advancement in its non-essentialist analysis of ‘technology’ as such; the issue of whether ‘living with technology’ is a technological affair or not ; and the tightly related question concerning the status of (...) the methodological bedrock of contemporary PhilTech, the ‘empirical turn.’ These matters are approached from the perspective of the philosophical notion of the ‘art of living,’ and our argumentation is developed both as a context for and on the basis of the contributions to the special issue ‘The Art of Living with Technology.’. (shrink)

Laying the groundwork -- Bateson and technology -- The art of living with technology.

Femicide is an ongoing public health and human rights crisis of global proportions. Currently, however, there is a relative vacuum of ethics theory and discussion about femicide amongst the health professions. This article draws from three illustrative case examples along the continuum of femicide to explore contemporary ethical concerns relevant to addressing gender-based violence and death through clinical medicine and public health. Using an epistemic justice framework, we analyze the relative invisibility of femicide in public health discourse today, and renew (...) a conversation about ethical issues inherent to health interventions and policy-making around femicide. (shrink)

Critical theory of technology (CTT) and postphenomenology (PostPhen) complement each other finely. Yet whereas CTT runs the risk of negating the interwovenness of humans and technology, a problem partly resolved by PostPhen, PostPhen itself threatens to neglect its very own base, i.e., the condition of technology and society being first and foremost human endeavors. This paper suggests not to decry these two approaches but to add a third component in order to compensate for their deficiencies. That third partner consists of (...) a new-fledged version of philosophical anthropology elaborated on the basis of the media theory of Marshall McLuhan. I am here mainly concerned with how such an approach can supplement CTT, which it does by offering an account of technological mediation that harbors not only a relational-ontological but also—in contrast with PostPhen—a substantivist-ontological aspect, and in addition a proper theory of technological blindness, much needed to make sense of perceptive biases and meaning-constituting activities in everyday life. I will illustrate these issues by way of what I dub ‘the Mailman Problem’: a sketch of a very mundane instance of “deworlding” that is, however, not perceived as such. (shrink)

Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology features a sophisticated analysis of the ways by which social forces influence processes of technological design, production and use. While Feenberg is foremostly read as a critical theorist, this essay argues that his call to democratize technology stands on distinct phenomenological grounds. This is based on the way he illustrates the role of experience in subtending potentials for the progressive transformation of the sociotechnical sphere. Against this background, this essay identifies an important shift in (...) the way Feenberg articulates experience, from relating it to lifelong processes of learning and identity-construction (Bildung) to an emphasis on visceral immediacy (Erlebnis). This shift manifests a newfound focus on material, embodied meanings over-against linguistic ones, and results in a considerable tension between Feenberg’s appeal to experiential self-evidence and his critical position toward technology. The discussion of the two modes of experience exemplifies the current that underlies Feenberg’s work, namely the creation of traffic between ontological and ontic accounts of sociotechnical entities, practices and relations. (shrink)

In a world that is becoming more ‘networked’ than ever, especially on the personal-everyday level—with for example digital media pervading our lives and the Internet of Things now being on the rise—we need to increasingly account for ‘networked realities’. But are we as human beings actually well-equipped enough, epistemologically speaking, to do so? Multiple approaches within the philosophy of technology suggest our usage of technologies to be in the first instance oriented towards efficiency and the achievement of goals. We thereby (...) neglect the actual systemic, networked nature of technology, or its wider impacts. With regard to the pressing issue of how to cross the ‘gap’ between these two ‘modes,’ the paper at hand engages with the work of Gregory Bateson, reading him as a philosopher of technology. Bateson’s notions of “conscious purpose” and “learning” offer excellent tools to understand our predicament of living in a networked world but being partly unable to sufficiently grasp and come to terms with this situation. Moreover, as the article endeavors to demonstrate, Bateson’s thought is to be cast as a crucial addition to the body of theory being developed in the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

In his new book, Husserl’s Missing Technologies, Don Ihde provides yet another, and highly enriching, iteration of postphenomenology. My comments here concern a couple of observations that he makes along the way with regard to the “scientific” status of philosophy and the question of whether philosophies, like technologies, have “use-lifes.” These remarks actually pierce through to the core of the postphenomenological theoretical corpus. In particular, there are consequences for the concept of multistability that need to be discussed: Are some stabilities (...) better than others? In asking that question, which deserves the most emphasis: actuality or potentiality? And to what extent is there a continuity between “ideas” (i.e., theories) and technologies? (shrink)

In his new book, Husserl’s Missing Technologies, Don Ihde provides yet another, and highly enriching, iteration of postphenomenology. My comments here concern a couple of observations that he makes along the way with regard to the “scientific” status of philosophy and the question of whether philosophies, like technologies, have “use-lifes.” These remarks actually pierce through to the core of the postphenomenological theoretical corpus. In particular, there are consequences for the concept of multistability that need to be discussed: Are some stabilities (...) better than others? In asking that question, which deserves the most emphasis: actuality or potentiality? And to what extent is there a continuity between “ideas” (i.e., theories) and technologies? (shrink)

Is the World Wide Web (WWW) the true Citizens’ Medium? This issue has been ardently debated in recent years: some herald the WWW as an emancipating technological tool, others claim it to be just another ploy of capitalism. As empirical proof corroborating both sides proliferates, the correct answer must probably be situated somewhere at the intersection. Of this heterogenic ‘middle’ field the work of Michel de Certeau helps us to make sense. We take three de Certeauan concepts, sketched out as (...) binary pairs, and elaborate on them in relation to ‘Web 2.0’: strategy/tactics, passive/active, and writing/speech. Exactly the tension between the terms of these distinctions is played out on the Web. Yet boundaries do blur, and right there the contours of some hybrid ‘strategic tactics,’ performed by everyday users, are becoming visible. (shrink)

Postphenomenology and Media: Essays on Human–Media–World Relations explores our contemporary media landscape from the unique perspective of postphenomenology. This volume for the first time puts the central concepts of postphenomenology to work for the specific analysis of new, digital media—thus delivering a wholly innovative take on their study.

Weiss, Propen, and Reid gather a diverse group of scholars to analyze the growing obsolescence of the human-object dichotomy in today's world. In doing so, Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman brings together diverse disciplines to foster a dialog on significant technological issues pertinent to philosophy, rhetoric, aesthetics, and science.

French end-of-life law aims at protecting patients from unreasonable treatments, but has been used to force caregivers to prolong treatments deemed unreasonable. We describe six cases (five intensi...

Het ethos waarin de mens leeft en handelt is in verandering zolang de mens leeft en handelt. In De maakbare moraal reflecteren verschillende filosofen over de antwoorden die het moderne en hedendaagse denken kunnen bieden op vragen die net door dat veranderend ethos tot stand worden gebracht. De idee dat moraal 'maakbaar' zou zijn houdt meteen ook een kritisch standpunt in: wat precies is er in onze morele omgang met elkaar dat beheersbaar, expliciteerbaar, voorstelbaar... zou kunnen zijn? De maakbare moraal (...) bundelt bijdragen van Daniel Acke, Hans Alma, Sonja Lavaert, Julia Maria Mönig, Johan Stuy en Adelheid Rigo, Marc Van den Bossche, Yoni Van Den Eede, Karl Verstrynge en Else Walravens. De reeks Humanismen wil het denken over de hedendaagse condition humaine op een prikkelende en eigenzinnige manier stimuleren. Het begrip humanisme krijgt hier een zeer ruime omschrijving: respect voor de mens in zijn diversiteit en pluraliteit en voor de manier waarop individuen zoeken naar identiteit en zingeving. De reeks komt tot stand onder begeleiding van prof. dr. Marc Van den Bossche van de vakgroep Wijsbegeerte en Moraalwetenschappen van de Vrije Universiteit Brussel. (shrink)

In response to Peter–Paul Verbeek’s and Paul Levinson’s reviews of my article ‘In Between Us,’ I comment on four criticisms. Firstly, my approach of ‘mediation as such’ does not endorse the view of mediation as secondary to mediata (i.e., entities), but does not exclude it either. Secondly, my concepts of “transparency of use” and of “context” are to be seen as philosophical ‘tools’ and not as mutually exclusive states. Thirdly, I agree with Levinson that technologies do indeed remediate, and mostly (...) not for the worse. However, fourthly, at the same time we should always be on guard for their nefarious effects. (shrink)

Responding to the commentaries by Corey Anton and Ian Angus, I outline anew, and so seek to further clarify, the starting points of and motivations behind my reflection about the concrete-abstract distinction and the ways in which this plays out in technology use, seen from an epistemological standpoint. My eventual purpose is to begin to develop, on the basis of the conceptual exercise, guidelines for an emancipatory ‘art of living with technology,’ that circles around the attempt to think beyond the (...) immediate concrete, into the direction of the ‘abstract conditions’ shaping that ‘concrete.’. (shrink)

As we become more and more involved with digital technologies on a daily basis, we are in need of a model to make sense of what we do with and “in” them. Here we analyze the use of digital media by way of a collecting paradigm, since our online activities – centered on selecting, accumulating, organizing, and showing – strongly resemble the practice of collectors. In the first part of the paper, we outline the main traits of collecting practices, and (...) discuss relevant online practices in the light of these traits, thereby tracing the contours of an online “collecting culture.” In the second part, we list the possible underlying causes and motivations for collecting, and investigate how far these explanations also apply to online activity, so offering a preliminary framework for the further study of online practices. (shrink)

As we become more and more involved with digital technologies on a daily basis, we are in need of a model to make sense of what we do with and “in” them. Here we analyze the use of digital media by way of a collecting paradigm, since our online activities – centered on selecting, accumulating, organizing, and showing – strongly resemble the practice of collectors. In the first part of the paper, we outline the main traits of collecting practices, and (...) discuss relevant online practices in the light of these traits, thereby tracing the contours of an online “collecting culture.” In the second part, we list the possible underlying causes and motivations for collecting, and investigate how far these explanations also apply to online activity, so offering a preliminary framework for the further study of online practices. (shrink)