Four Key Questions in Philosophy of Technology. On “Homo creator” by Hans Poser

Abstract

This article discusses Hans Poser’s new book “Homo creator” (2016). It aims to open the philosophy of technology to ontological, epistemological and ethical problems. The keynote of the book serves the conviction that the technical creativity builds the core of the engineering. Modal concepts as possibility, necessity, contingency and reality are used in a systematic way to characterize technology. Technological artifacts essentially depend on a special type of interpretation (“technical hermeneutics”). The central ontological problem consists in the fact that technology is based on new ideas, which at the beginning are a mere possibility, because the intended artifacts and processes never existed up to that moment. The author shows that conditions of the real world, cognitive, social and cultural conditions constitute the realm of the technological possibility and influence our culture (“life world”) from the very beginning.