Event Date: March 27, 2018 - 12:00 to 13:30
Location: FSS 4004, 120 University Private
According to Dr Nolen Gertz, Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy, there is a tendency in technological production called the “leisure-as-liberation” model of technological design. In this lecture, he will outline how it has evolved from Aristotle to Marx, to today. In addition, Gertz aims to demonstrate how Nietzsche would criticize the idea that we could find liberation through leisure and will introduce Don Ihde’s postphenomenology in order to set up parallels between Nietzsche’s human-nihilism relations and Ihde’s human-technology relations. How can technologies mediate nihilism and how can nihilism mediate technologies? Dr Gertz will reflect on how rehabilitating the concept of responsibility can help us to move away from this nihilistic “leisure-as-liberation” model of technological design.
Nolen Gertz is Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Twente. He is the Coordinator of the 4TU Centre for Ethics and Technology’s Task Force on Risk, Safety and Security, and a Research Associate in Military Ethics at the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of The Philosophy of War and Exile (Palgrave 2014), and Nihilism and Technology which is forthcoming from Rowman and Littlefield International. He received his PhD in Philosophy from The New School for Social Research.