Human Flourishing In Science And Technology

Human Flourishing in Science and Technology

Flourishing -a state where people experience positive emotions, positive psychological functioning and positive social functioning

POSITIVITY

Human Flourishing • an effort to achieve selfactualization and fulfilment • Each has the rights to pursue efforts on self.

Human Flourishing • Human potentialities, including talents, abilities, and virtues in the pursuit of his freely and rationally chosen values and goals.

Human civilizations and the development of science and technology

Bearer • a person or thing that carries or holds something. • Human flourishes and finds meaning in the world that he/she builds. • Human may unconsciously acquire, consume or destroy what the world has to offer.

Science and Technology • must be treated as part of human life that needs reflective and meditative thinking. • must be examined for their greater impact on humanity as a whole.

Reflective Thinking

Reflective Questions

What did I learn?

How are you doing it?

What was hard?

Meditative thinking

A kind of thinking that thinks the truth of being, that belongs to being and listens to it.

TECHNOLOGY AS A MODE OF REVEALING

MARTIN HEIDEGGER • a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition of philosophy. • Important philosophers of the 20th century.

HEIDEGGER’S VIEW ON TECHNOLOGY - Opposes the “a means to an end” or “a human activity.” - instrumental - anthropological

What is technology if it is neither a means to an end nor a human activity?

HEIDEGGER’S VIEW ON TECHNOLOGY - Technology, according to Heidegger must be understood as “a way of revealing” (Heidegger 1977, 12). - Revealing is alètheuein means “to discover” - Related verb is alètheia means “truth”

How can technology be a way of revealing?

How can technology be a way of revealing? • by entering into a particular relation with reality, reality is ‘revealed’ in a specific way. • technology embodies a specific way of revealing the world, a revealing in which humans take power over reality. • Technology reveals the world.

Example: • • • •

Ancient discovery (fossils, places, artifacts). Cultures, traditions and beliefs. The state of the health. Informations

Ancient discovery

Cultures, traditions and beliefs

The state of the health

Informations

What is reality? • according to Heidegger, it is not given the same way in all times and all cultures (Seubold 1986, 35-6). • not something absolute that human beings can ever know once and for all • Sometimes inaccessible for human beings.

WHY IS TECHNOLOGY NOT A HUMAN ACTIVITY?

According to Heidegger, there is something wrong with the modern, technological culture we live in today. In our ‘age of technology’ reality can only be present as a raw material (as a ‘standing reserve’). This state of affairs has not been brought about by humans; the technological way of revealing was not chosen by humans.

We need to open up the possibility of relying on technologies while not becoming enslaved to them and seeing them as manifestations of an understanding of being.

Reference • https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/philosophyoftechnology/0/steps/26314 • Heidegger, Martin. “The question concerning technology (W. Lovitt, Trans.) The question concerning technology: and other essays (pp. 335).” (1977). • Seubold, Günter. Heideggers Analyse der neuzeitlichen Technik. Freiburg-München: Alber, 1986.