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On Digital Bildung: Raising a Critical Awareness of Digital Matters

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Abstract

The aim of the article is to theoretically develop a notion of digital Bildung that accepts the “world” of today as characterised by the entanglement of humans and technology. I draw on Adorno’s critical notion of Bildung, Luciano Floridi’s and Katherine Hayles’ respective understandings of the human-technology entanglement, and the social philosophy of the American philosopher Robert Brandom to understand Bildung as a piecemeal process. Nevertheless, Bildung is a rational process of making explicit the implicit connections to which we commit ourselves by being entangled in a tech–non-tech world. The article contributes to delineating a theoretical notion of digital Bildung that accepts and develops Bildung as critically precipitating from within this entanglement—what Brandom terms a semantic self-consciousness.

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Notes

  1. In what follows, I will assume that Bildung means digital Bildung. So reference to technology, unless otherwise stated, means digital technology.

  2. I am thinking here of the case of ofqual. See British Government (2020).

  3. This would need to take the whole discussion of philosophical naturalism into consideration, and given our non-determinist and non-reductionist point of departure, Rouse (2015) would be a good place to start.

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  1. Aalborg University, Rendsburggade 14, 1-232, 9000, Aalborg, Denmark

    Bo Allesøe Christensen

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Correspondence to Bo Allesøe Christensen.

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Christensen, B.A. On Digital Bildung: Raising a Critical Awareness of Digital Matters. Stud Philos Educ 42, 303–322 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-023-09870-y

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