Philosophy of Science Commons^™

Artificial Intelligence In Surveillance And Privacy, Elizabeth D. Brasher

NEXUS: The Liberty Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies

This paper attempts to provide insight into the new and developing world of artificial intelligence and its integration into surveillance technologies. These technologies being implemented by the government, retail companies, healthcare organizations, and more, all raise ethical questions and implications addressed in this article; other topics, such as the integration of Christian ethics and responsibilities, are also explored.

The Danger Of Deepfakes: Information Pollution And Epistemic Insecurity, Camille Doherty

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the dangers of deepfakes to democratic stability, emphasizing their capacity to pollute our information ecosystem and undermine trust in media. Beyond the immediate political harms from deepfake incidents, deepfakes are troubling for their impact on our collective relationship to media, truth, and one another. As exposure to deepfakes becomes more common, discerning fact from fiction will become increasingly difficult. Over time, this could foster widespread skepticism of all media and, worse, apathy toward truth itself. With eroded trust and shared truths, democracies risk losing epistemic security – the foundation for informed deliberation, decision-making, and accountability in democratic …

Recognition And Domination: A Hegelian Approach To Evolving Gender And Technology Paradigms, Zachary Davis

CMC Senior Theses

This paper aims to develop a strong account of recognition. It begins with a Hegel-inspired account of recognition as a fundamental desire that drives humanity. This account establishes recognition as fundamental to the initial subject formation of independent self-consciousnesses as agents. I offer the lord-bondsman dualism to provide a critique of domination as oppositional to securing the means for recognition. This entails that, as history progresses the world ought to move towards universally adopting mutual recognition relationships without domination. I adopt this goal as an ideal form of recognition. In Chapter 2, I apply this recognitional framework to gender. Through …

Heightened Technology In The Care Of Type 1 Diabetes: An Ethical Symbiosis?, Susanna Larsen

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

This paper explores the common negative consequences and ethical issues associated with the evolving medical technology used in the care of Type 1 diabetes. In this paper, I will discuss the ethical impacts of technology on diabetic youth: their view of self, their mechanical requirements, and their health priorities. In order to define the scope of the issues, I will use the following intellectual tools: feminist theory, care ethics, and philosophical discussions of control. This paper will also outline some possible solutions to these ethical issues.

The "Therapeutic Relationship:" Emergence, Eclipse, And Transformations Of A Social Technology., Ulrich Koch

Clinical Research and Leadership Faculty Publications

This essay situates the history of "the relationship" as a therapeutic technology within the broader context of changing social relations in the twentieth-century United States. More specifically, it outlines the emergence and subsequent diffusion of practices that aim to cultivate a social bond between therapist and patient that may serve as a psychotherapeutic tool. The article highlights the transformations of this technology as its institutional and epistemic foundations became challenged. Initially conceived as an "artificial" social relation designed to help with "personal adjustment," the therapeutic relationship was soon also deployed by non-experts and became a model for more healthful social …

The Scope Of Inductive Risk, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

The Argument from Inductive Risk (AIR) is taken to show that values are inevitably involved in making judgements or forming beliefs. After reviewing this conclusion, I pose cases which are prima facie counterexamples: the unreflective application of conventions, use of black-boxed instruments, reliance on opaque algorithms, and unskilled observation reports. These cases are counterexamples to the AIR posed in ethical terms as a matter of personal values. Nevertheless, it need not be understood in those terms. The values which load a theory choice may be those of institutions or past actors. This means that the challenge of responsibly handling inductive …

Course Syllabus (Sp19) Coli 214b--Literature & Society: "A.I. And Other Radical Humanisms In Cyberpunk And Science Fiction", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

As that which we call “technology” continues to evolve as both concept and practice, we discover ever more inventive ways to answer its call, and science fiction seems to serve as a universal standpoint from which global societies manage to confront, question, and reimagine the nature of our shared humanity as a radically technical relation. While the growing social pervasiveness of artificial intelligence and the attendant encoded transformations of “the human” appear, together, to form a relatively absolute horizon of political thinking, social agency, and aesthetic experience, it seems certain that our current crisis also offers us …

Course Syllabus (W19 Online) Coli 331t--Television Culture: "Lens, Mirror, Screen: Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

Or a conjuncture of three moments in the dialectic of television as technical apparatus and cultural practice. In this course, we will read George Orwell’s 1984, view Michael Radford’s filmic adaptation of the novel, and consider a number of critical texts in order to think the psychological and social implications of television as an instrument of control, manipulation, and knowledge production. What, we ask, are the implications, in both 1984 and concrete experience, of light-speed communication capabilities for sense perception, consciousness, language, and awareness? In its dissemination of images and information, how does television impede and/or facilitate politics …

Technology From The Perspective Of Society And Public Interest, Chanwoon Park

Purdue Polytechnic Doctoral Dissertations

The ultimate goals of this study were to determine ways to reconcile technology with public interest and to understand the relationship between what we know and how we feel about technology. To achieve the goals, related literatures were reviewed; the mechanism of technology development was described with empirical data; and human perception of technology was tested with a survey. The duality of technology that implied technological inherencies of technical reason and social meanings was the principle assumption of the study. Neutrality of technology becomes a myth with the presence of social meanings embodied in technology. Given the huge impact of …

A Bite Of Technology – How Technologies Have Made Our Food “Transformers", Huanjia Zhang

Student Publications

This poster discusses one important metaphysical question concerning food and food technologies – that is, how technologies have gradually alienated food from its natural rooting and what are the consequent philosophical concerns behind that. In order to examine this question, this poster will discuss four key sources that each exemplifies a well-known, currently ongoing technology on different levels that has altered the natural properties of food and the controversy concerning such technology.

Course Syllabus (W17 Online) Coli 211m: "Superhero Film And Contemporary Culture", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

What might the current popularity and ubiquity of superhero film say about contemporary culture? This course will explore three possible implications of this question: (1) that the superhero genre reflects a moment in our species’ history of reconciling the human being-technology relation, which we shall view as a complex system constituted by our productive relations to material and ideological tools and their ensembles, the needs and aspirations that determine how we conceptualize and activate these relations, and the technically rationalized social reality that is their result, (2) that this ongoing process of reconciliation evinces, at once, the …

Enframing The Flesh: Heidegger, Transhumanism, And The Body As "Standing Reserve", Jesse I. Bailey

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

I argue that Heidegger's account of technology as "enframing" is a helpful lens through which to understand the possible effects and dangers of transhumanism. Without resorting to nebulous concepts such as "dignity," Heidegger's analysis can help us understand how new technologies employed to modify the body, brain, and consciousness will enframe our own bodies and identities as something akin to "standing reserve." Under transhumanism, the body is enframed as an external, technologically modifiable product. I indicate some of the problems that might arise when our own bodies no longer appear as central to our identity as embodied beings. Further, I …

Aesthetic Mediation And The Politics Of Technology: (Re)New(Ed) Strategies For A Critical Social Theory, Andrew J. Pierce

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

There is a rich history in early critical theory of attempting to harness the power of aesthetic imagination for the purposes of political liberation. But this approach has largely faded to the background of contemporary critical theory, eclipsed lately by attempts to reconstruct and apply norms of rationality to processes of democratic will formation a` la Habermas. This paper represents a small attempt to return the aesthetic element to its proper place within critical theory, by investigating the aesthetic aspects of certain forms of resistance to technological domination, forms of resistance that become ‘‘embodied’’ in technologies themselves. The phenomena of …

Constellating Technology: Heidegger’S Die Gefahr/The Danger, Babette Babich

Research Resources

Heidegger’s question concerning technology was originally posed in lectures to the Club of Bremen. This essay considers the totalizing role of technology in Heidegger’s day and our own, including a discussion of radio and calling for a greater integration of Heidegger’s thinking and critical theory. Today’s media context and the increasing ecological pressures of our time may provide a way to think, once again, the related notions of event [ Ereignis] and ownedness [ Eigentlichkeit ].

Heidegger And Our Twenty-Fi Rst Century Experience Of Ge-Stell Theodore Kisiel, Theodor Kisiel

Research Resources

I propose an etymological translation of Ge-Stell, Heidegger’s word for the essence of modern technology, from its Greek and Latin roots as “synthetic com-posit[ion]ing,” which presciently portends our twenty-first century experience of the internetted WorldWideWeb with its virtual infinity of websites in cyberspace, Global Positioning Systems, interlocking air traffic control grids, world-embracing weather maps, the 24-7 world news coverage of cable TV-networks like CNN, etc., etc.—all of which are structured by the complex programming based on the computerized and ultimately simple Leibnizian binary-digital logic generating an infinite number of combinations of the posit (1) and non-posit (0). The sharp …

Course Syllabus (Fa13) Coli 211 Literature & Psychology: "Power, The Subject, And Technological Rationality", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description and Objectives:

In this course, we will examine mechanisms of power and the processes by which these produce categories of subjectivity. Theoretically speaking, we will begin by considering these processes at the level of society and then dwell on their human experience at the level of the psyche. Here, we will aim to discover processes by which the subject reproduces conditions of domination by power at the level of psychic experience. Power-practices assume their condition of possibility by positing, on the one hand, that the category of the subject is a priori existent and, on the other, that …

Does The Mind Extend Out Into The World, Andrew D. Kishino

CMC Senior Theses

The extended mind debate juggles the possibilities of whether or not the mind extends out into the world. Today, with the rise in technology, we have an additional claim that our tools are responsible for extending our minds. The internet, smart phones, and other tools give us a foothold in the extended mind debate by providing real world examples of how our mind is perceived as extending out into the world. In discovering where the divide between mind and environment exists we can come up with a conclusion whether or not the mind truly extends out into the world.

“The Problem Of Science” In Nietzsche And Heidegger, Babette Babich

Research Resources

Nietzsche and Heidegger pose important philosophical questions to science and its technological projects. The resultant contributes to what may be called a continental philosophy of science and I argue that only such a rigorously critical approach to the question of science permits a genuinely philosophical reflection on science. The resultant contributes to what may be called a continental philosophy of science and I argue that only such a rigorously critical approach to the question of science permits a genuinely philosophical reflection on science. More than a thoughtful reflection on science, however, the heart of philosophy is also at stake in …

Heidegger Circle Conference 2001 - Proceedings, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Heidegger on Science and Technology. Proceedings of the 35th annual meeting of the North American Heidegger Conference at Fordham University: May, 2001. Convenor: Babette Babich

Heidegger Circle Conference 2001 - Proceedings, Babette Babich

Research Resources

Heidegger on Science and Technology. Proceedings of the 35th annual meeting of the North American Heidegger Conference at Fordham University: May, 2001. Convenor: Babette Babich

Hermeneutics Of Experimental Science In The Context Of The Life-World, Patrick A. Heelan

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Science is distinguished as an element of our total contemporary culture, or “historical science,” from science as the professional business of natural scientists, or “experimental science.” Phenomenology has always taken a very critical stance against certain defects or biases -- objectivism, scientism, technicism -- it has found in historical science. It is my purpose to show that these defects and biases, associated historically with physical science, are not necessary parts of physical science, and consequently, that physics, especially experimental physics, has all of those hermeneutical, ontological, historical and dialectical dimensions negated by historical science. The notion of dialectic is given …

Hermeneutics Of Experimental Science In The Context Of The Life-World, Patrick A. Heelan

Research Resources

Science is distinguished as an element of our total contemporary culture, or “historical science,” from science as the professional business of natural scientists, or “experimental science.” Phenomenology has always taken a very critical stance against certain defects or biases -- objectivism, scientism, technicism -- it has found in historical science. It is my purpose to show that these defects and biases, associated historically with physical science, are not necessary parts of physical science, and consequently, that physics, especially experimental physics, has all of those hermeneutical, ontological, historical and dialectical dimensions negated by historical science. The notion of dialectic is given …