How is the Church going to cope with the transition to a post-capitalist society?

[little2add]

13 hours ago, Era Might said:

ironment. I don't particularly like cars or surgery/medicines and would just as soon avoid them

Them things are a blessing!   Your attitude is funny/ a little  hypocritical 

[Era Might]

2 hours ago, little2add said:

Them things are a blessing!   Your attitude is funny/ a little  hypocritical 

I don't see technology as a good in itself. Every technology is a substitute for man's own abilities. Technology can be useful, but I don't consider it a "blessing." Every technology, even language, changes our relationship to the world. Our existence is mediated through our technologies. We have to be critical of them, especially technologies that we consider indispensable, like the automobile. 

[Nihil Obstat]

Some philosophers of science have argued that technology is any material whatsoever which is used by humans.

[Era Might]

1 hour ago, Nihil Obstat said:

Some philosophers of science have argued that technology is any material whatsoever which is used by humans.

Jacques Ellul wrote a book about technique, which in his argument technology is only a part of. He saw technique as the entire process of organization, efficiency, standardization. He saw modernity as unique not because of technology, which all civilizations have had, but because ours is a technical civilization. We reduce everything to technique. That's the drive of capitalism, to always innovate, consolidate, optimize efficiency, etc. We are dominated by the clock. Even our pastimes are defined by technique: statistics, schedules, strategy, etc.

I'm not sure I would agree that technology is any material. Water, for example. A water bottle would be a technology.

It seems that there has to be something unnatural for there to be a technology. The alphabet, for example, is a technology for recording sound. There is no correlation between the shapes and sounds, it's just a system we've devised. 

[Nihil Obstat]

You might be interested in reading Hans-Jorg Rheinberger's "Toward a History of Epistemic Things". Very interesting book.

[Era Might]

50 minutes ago, Nihil Obstat said:

You might be interested in reading Hans-Jorg Rheinberger's "Toward a History of Epistemic Things". Very interesting book.

Cool, I'll check it out. What's the main argument or discussion? Carl Mitcham has an amesome old book-length bibliography of the Philosophy of Technology. I recall seeing Avery Cardinal Dulles listed, an article on the Mass and television, I think.

Edited April 15, 2017 by Era Might

[Nihil Obstat]

3 hours ago, Era Might said:

Cool, I'll check it out. What's the main argument or discussion? Carl Mitcham has an amesome old book-length bibliography of the Philosophy of Technology. I recall seeing Avery Cardinal Dulles listed, an article on the Mass and television, I think.

For the parts I am familiar with, Reinberger talks about "technical objects" and "epistemic things" in the context of practice-based (as opposed to theory-first) science. Particularly the nature of the experimental system, and the ways in which, he argues, knowledge is obtained through the devising and executing of the experimental system itself, rather than the more classical hypothesis testing theoretical paradigm.

[Era Might]

18 hours ago, Nihil Obstat said:

For the parts I am familiar with, Reinberger talks about "technical objects" and "epistemic things" in the context of practice-based (as opposed to theory-first) science. Particularly the nature of the experimental system, and the ways in which, he argues, knowledge is obtained through the devising and executing of the experimental system itself, rather than the more classical hypothesis testing theoretical paradigm.

Hmmm, definitely sounds interesting. There's a really cool TV debate on YouTube, back when TV hosted those kinds of things, between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky. A discussion far above my intelligence, but I think one of Foucalt's main points was that any theory we construct of the world is, indeed, a construction, not reality. Foucalt was big on studying the social spaces we live in, like systems of punishment, because they create the world for us. Nobody lives in reality, as such. That sounds similar to the book you're referencing. I'll look it up.

[Nihil Obstat]

Different 'genres', but similar approach. One might argue that it is the influence of post-modernism on scientific theory.