Abstract
As a regular reader of Science, Scientific American, Nature and The Eonomist, I could not miss how so many articles in these science-technology journals refer to micro-processing, which today dominates so much science-praxis. I have become aware that how science happens, changes primarily with a wide context of instrument changes. That is what this paper is about. Heidegger’s technologies were largely Industrial-Big, Machinic, and Mechanical. Science, today often a leader, is now operating by using micro-nano processes and has often shifted to biological and medical sciences, marking a change in how science operates. This has significant consequences for how we should think about the “transcendental” and the “empirical” in philosophy of technology.
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Notes
The essays in this special issue originate in the workshop “An Encounter Between Don Ihde and Bernard Stiegler: Philosophy of Technology at the Crossroads Again,” organized by Pieter Lemmens and Yoni Van Den Eede, at Radboud University Nijmegen on January 11–12, 2018.
Those who do philosophy of science are well aware that the shift from early modern science to late modern science was a major paradigm shift, roughly caricatured by the change from Galilean-Newtonian science to Einsteinian-quantum science. My recent awareness is that much classical phenomenology—I suspect—remains ‘Newtonian’ and has not yet fully adapted to ‘Einsteinian-quantum’ science. This is a sub-research task I intend to investigate. This ‘Newton > Einstein’ shift does relate closely to the classical > postphenomenology shift as well as will be noted indirectly in what follows, and it entails equally radically different technics.
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Ihde, D. From Heideggerian Industrial Gigantism to Nanoscale Technologies. Found Sci 27, 245–257 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09731-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09731-8