Understanding Technology in Modern Culture: methodological reconstruction of philosophical approaches

Abstract

The subject of the research is philosophical approaches to the analysis of technology reflecting the understanding of technology in modern culture. The problematization of technology occurs in connection with the desire of people to control it, reducing the determinism of their lives by external forces. To explain the connection between technology and man, numerous philosophical approaches have been proposed — systems of views expressing a certain way of seeing and based on basic concepts (reflecting the main aspects of the subject of research). Depending on the properties attributed to the technique and the goals of study, these approaches offer various forms of its awareness and practical development. At the existing level of philosophical knowledge, these concepts are not systematized and not coordinated; implied assumptions are not formulated openly, the main problems and prerequisites of the study, the factors taken into account, the meaning of the terms used are not always explicitly stated. The author comes to the conclusion that the analysis of these approaches with the help of logical reconstruction will bring the greatest methodological benefit: the identification of philosophical concepts (including the articulation of unconscious ideas), their comparison and analysis of methodological foundations (identification of the principles underlying them). It is concluded that the following have the greatest potential for research: a socio-natural approach analyzing nature and human society (generating technology) as steps of a single ladder of evolution having common laws of functioning; a sociotechnological approach considering socio-cultural and technical practices as generated by the communication environment; a biotechnological approach exploring natural and technical systems as successive stages of the evolution of the Universe, not taking into account the subjective factor of technology development. As a result, developing a philosophy of technology that combines all the diversity of these approaches and explains their mutual correspondence, we will analyze the anthropological foundations of technical activity.