When your dog bites someone you are liable for damages I thought y'all had 'high IQs'

The talk was really good, so the paper should not disappoint — check it out!

It is clear that Tellegen’s history of the field is shaped by his own concerns: a Catholic thinker trying to rethink (Christian) community in a technological society. That agenda, shaped not only how he understood technology, or how he wanted to study it, but also the history he wrote of the field.

We start from this beautiful enigmatic quote from the Dutch catholic philosophers of technology Frans Tellegen, who summarizes the history of philosophy of technology as follows. Do you recognize all the names that he assumes as self-evident?

This also gives us a way to go beyond familiar narratives about the field. As we argue, the field has a richer history that often assumed. One should be sceptical of common narrative such as that of a recent empirical turn, or one where modern technology somehow makes older perspectives obsolete.

Qua ontology, for example, we distinguish between at least three models: seeing technology as concrete artefacts (empirical turn, Simondon); seeing it as the underlying logic shaping society (Ellul, Heidegger); or seeing it the anthropology resulting in technical action (Scheler, Bergson, Dewey)

These questions reveal that two philosophies might both investigate industrialization or AI while understanding its nature differently, investigating it through different methods, pursuing different goals, and placing it within very different histories.

As a framework, we propose four questions: 1. Ontology: how does a philosophy define its object “technology”? 2. Method: How should this object be investigated? 3. Telos: Why is it worthwhile to focus on this object? 4. History: What historical narrative does it tell to make itself self-evident?

Philosophers of technology like to stress contingency: technologies are have no timeless essence, but are the product of the societies in which they took shape. Why would the same not apply to the *philosophies*? Ways of looking at the world are as contingent as the technologies themselves!

Our central claim is that history of philosophy of technology should historicize not only the technologies we discuss, but also the philosophical frameworks through which those objects become intelligible as “technology.” In other words: the philosophy of technology is more than technology.