CFP: Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie

Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie

Call for Papers JTPhil 2016

Submission Deadline: January 15, 2015
Languages: German, English, or French


1. Call for Proposals: All Sections
2. Call for papers: Special Topic “Cunning and Death”

Contributions on any aspect of the philosophy of technology and on the
special topic “Cunning and Death” can be submitted in German, English,
or French. Suggestions for the review and archive sections are also
welcome. The second yearbook 2016 will appear in the fall of 2015 and
anonymized submissions are therefore requested by January 15, 2015.
Articles should include an abstract. The length of articles should not
exceed 33,000 characters (incl. spaces, bibliography and notes) with a
700-characters abstract. Any information about the author should appear
on a separate cover page only. Further information about formatting can
be requested by sending a mail to:

[email protected]


1. Call for Proposals: All Sections

Technology appears as humanity’s last and perhaps best hope in much of
the contemporary discourse, whether it seeks to diagnose the problems of
our present age or to imagine what the future holds. The Jahrbuch
Technikphilosophie responds to this dynamic, contributes to its
reflection and discussion by providing a forum that has so far been
missing among German periodicals.

We are looking for contributions from the whole spectrum of perspectives
and on any theme in the philosophy of technology for the second volume
of the yearbook which will appear late in 2015. These include advanced
theoretical proposals that link the philosophy of technology to the
development of theory in philosophy more generally, as well as
reflections on the role of technology in daily life or the sciences,
contributions to STS-research, broadly conceived, as well as analyses of
the politics and ethics of technology. Though the majority of chapters
will be in German, submissions in English or French will be accepted.

Each yearbook feature a group of papers on a special topic (see below:
CfP “Cunning and Death”) but also a section for contributions submitted
on any aspect of the philosophy of technology. In addition, there are
reviews of recent publications and an “archive” featuring out-of-print,
forgotten, or unknown documents. Finally, there will be room to inform
and comment on current technological and technopolitical developments.


2. Call for papers: Special Topic “Cunning and Death”

Technology, cunning and death - a triangular construct which, in
philosophy as elsewhere, scrambles even the most carefully crafted of
coordinate systems. Technology – as an indirect mode, as a substitute
for violence by mediation, as a means of securing advantages in the face
of superior powers – is as tightly bound to (dubious or masterly?)
“cunning” as a form of reason as it is to the menace of death.

As with cunning Ulysses, to whom literature has attributed the term
“technite”, avoiding death may be a goal of both cunning and of the use
of technology. But then again, this goal may also serve to deliver
death: the theory of technology might prefer to speak about the
invention of the wheel, the hammer and the light switch, and yet one of
the basic forms of tools is the weapon. Can the use of technology be
conceived of other than within a setting of strategic – that is to say
cunning – rationality?

Yet it is not only those who lay traps, those who seduce and scheme, who
can forge an alliance out of technology, cunning and death. Alongside
the strategy of war, that of peace is present as an indirect mode and
thus stands generally for technology as a substitute for violence by
mediation.

Classical philosophy of technology characterizes technology as a
“detour” (Sachsse, Popitz et al.) or as a “ruse of reason” that “pushes
[material means] forward or in-between” (Hegel, Marx). This is also done
precisely in order to place the blame for harmful outcomes on such means
or else to exonerate the subjects, who wish to be responsible only for
the end purpose of a technology. As with Icarus and Daedalus, however,
the cunning of technology may play a trick on itself: inherent within it
is the logic of accepting incidents and accidents, commonly known as
“risks” – risks which have meant that modern societies have become a
whole new type of generator of responsibility. The future must deliver
on promises of security on whose hitherto unforeseeable redeemability we
have gambled, thanks to the ruse of prediction, with our current
technologies – for a potentially lethal prize. Even in a game, a
marginal case of technology, our capacity for cunning and our knowledge
of finiteness mutually drive each other ever onward: every game is a
global gamble on “The End”.

The overarching metaphor of the “lethality” of modern technology, coined
in the context of cultural (self-)critique, helps itself metaphorically
from this pool of images: according to some philosophies of technology,
we live in an age of technology that has a certain finality about it
and, what is more, has turned malicious. Here, a paradoxical Prometheus
might be a citizen, a consumer of technology, a beneficiary, but even
more so slave to and victim of an “apocalypse without a kingdom”
(Günther Anders) or a “thanatocracy” (Michel Serres). Perhaps this is
manifested especially in the field of biotechnology, where “life” as
well as a form of death that disintegrates into increasingly technogenic
intermediate states is managed.

The Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie 2016 delves into the problems associated
with new technologies of war as well as into the general cultural
diagnostics just outlined: lethality and cunning (or ruse) as
attributions that frame technicality per se, in a manner typical of our
times. We deliberately bring in the technicization of the boundary
between life and death here, as it inscribes itself into both registers.
In other words: our main focus encompasses a whole host of heterogeneous
areas of philosophy, from the practical (“cunning”/“lie”, “dying”,
“ethics of technology”) to the theoretical (“ruse”/“game”), from the
existential (“death”) to the political (“weapon”, “biopolitics”) and
through to epistemology (of the technical, of cultural crises/critique
of modernity, of “life”/“death”).

Readers can expect to find – rather than any direct connections between
three points – attempts at triangulating the extremes.