Netherlands

This course concentrates on a number of philosophical approaches that help us understand the relationship between media and technology and our lived experience. Media theory and whether specific technologies and media, like writing and print, provoke structural changes in patterns of thought, action and experience are discussed. The course also deals with the critical philosophies of technology in the Marxist tradition, the hermeneutic tradition and the feminist tradition as well as contemporary debates about ethics, labor, and the environment. These topics encourage us to think about how, to paraphrase the historian Melvin Kranzberg, media and technology are neither good nor bad nor are they neutral. A variety of different media and technical artifacts, including AI, health care technologies, books, social media, the alphabet, and education are considered. This course requires that students have completed an upper division course in the humanities as a prerequisite. Prior knowledge of philosophy is recommended.