What Will Happen to Humanity in a Million Years? Gilbert Hottois and the Temporality of Technoscience
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19563152 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Massimiliano Simons (0000-0001-8751-9152, Maastricht University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 58-58 |
| Publication date | 2025-06-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Philosophy & Technology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2210-5433 • E-ISSN: 2210-5441 |
| Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s13347-025-00887-4 |
| PMID | 40313712 |
| OpenAlex | W4409945769 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 32 |
This article provides an overview of the philosophy of Gilbert Hottois, who is usually credited with popularizing the concept of technoscience. Hottois starts from a metaphilosophy of language that diagnoses twentieth-century philosophy as fixated on language at the expense of technology. As an alternative, he developed a philosophy of technoscience that reinterprets science as primarily an intervening and technical activity rather than a contemplative and theoretical one. As I will argue, Hottois articulates the nature of this technicity through a philosophy of time, reflecting on the specific temporality of technoscience as distinct from human history. This temporality of technoscience provoked the need for ethical reflection, since technoscience is constantly changing and transforming the world. This led to Hottois’s engagement with bioethics, in which he sought to develop a framework capable of “guiding” technoscience. Aiming to avoid both total symbolic closure and total technical openness, this guidance is concerned with the preservation of diversity, especially the human capacity for ethics, ethicity. This idea of guidance was later taken up by Dutch philosophers such as Hans Achterhuis and Peter-Paul Verbeek, inspiring their empirical turn in the philosophy of technology. What remains missing in this framework, however, is Hottois’s critical analysis of the different temporalities at work in technology and culture
Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Humanity · Philosophy of biology · Philosophy of science · Philosophy of technology · Sociology · Technoscience · Temporality · Theology · History of Science and Medicine · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations · Philosophy · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
The Empirical Turn
What Things Do
Technosystem
Environmental Values
Moralizing Technology
Exploring Techno-Moral Change
Knowledge and power
The Imperative of Responsibility
Representing and Intervening
French Philosophy of Technology
Jean-François Lyotard and Postmodern Technoscience
Two Problems of the Biological Philosophy of Technology
The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology
Playing God
Taking Care of the Symbolic Order. How Converging Technologies Challenge our Concepts
If and Then
Obstetric Ultrasound and the Technological Mediation of Morality
The Social Construction of What
Rethinking time in response to the Anthropocene
L'essence double du langage selon Gilbert Hottois
Living in Time
| Highly cited | No |
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