Technologies of various kinds mediate nearly all our relationships. From AI to social networks to bio-hacking, we face more choices not only about how to govern our relationships with other people, but also about how to view and modify our relationships with our own psyches and even our own bodies. The questions this raises are at once metaphysical and epistemological, aesthetic, ethical, and political — and most of the technologies worth discussing raise all four at once.
I plan a structure and then follow the discussion. The reading schedule is a starting point; what we actually read comes out of what students get interested in, so no two versions of the course have run the same way. Each week pairs theory with our own research — sometimes using a technology directly, sometimes working from other people's accounts of it — and the term ends in a project each student designs.
Digital Intensive. Currently PHIL 251; proposed for the 300 level.
How the Course Works
Students build their own sites through UMW's Domain of One's Own and keep a public journal there all term, commenting on each other's posts. Everything syndicates back to the course site, so the class reads each other as the semester goes. Alongside the blog, mini-projects apply the reading to a specific technology, and the term closes with a self-designed final project and a presentation.
I also build course-specific reading tutors for students to argue with while they read — one for Heidegger's “The Question Concerning Technology,” another for Nietzsche's free spirits. Reading against something that will push back is different from reading alone.
Fall 2024
Four units, though the last two ran together in practice.
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Technology and Nature
Dusek on what technology is, then Heidegger's “The Question Concerning Technology” read against Hölderlin's “The Rhine,” Ansel Adams on the Hoover Dam, and Burtynsky's photographs.
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Identity and Technology
Arendt on freedom and the closing pages of The Human Condition; Marcuse's “The End of Utopia”; Odell's “Anatomy of a Refusal”; Keynes and the basic income argument; therapy bots, the statistical self, and predictive algorithms; Nietzsche on free spirits.
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Ethics and Enhancement
Murray on enhancement, Savulescu on the obligation to enhance, Sandel's The Case Against Perfection, and the argument over procreative beneficence — alongside prenatal screening as a technology already doing this work.
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Virtual Realities
Chalmers on the virtual and the real, Searle on whether computers can think, and Bostrom's simulation argument.