CfP: Special Issue on Technology, Journal of Continental Philosophy

Reflections on technology throughout the twentieth century primarily focused on instrumental or anthropological accounts of machines, analog technologies, and industrial automation. With the emergence of powerful new digital technologies, contemporary reflections on technology have expanded significantly. They now encompass not only machines and artifacts but also entire ways of thinking, existing, and engaging with the world.

In recent times, advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic automation, behavioral analytics, and cloud computation have intensified the relevance of the question of technology. This question pertains to its nature and the relationships we establish with it. The Journal of Continental Philosophy (https://www.pdcnet.org/jcp/Journal-of-Continental-Philosophy) invites contributions to a special issue that explores this question in various forms, including:
  • How have modern approaches to technology and technical knowledge transformed our understanding of human experience, interaction, and relations with the world?
  • To what extent does digitization and data modulation mediate our self-perception?
  • What is at stake for art, language, and aesthetics in the era of synthetic media?
  • Is genuine agency achievable in a data-driven world?
  • Can technological mediation be separated from corporate instrumentalism?
  • Does technology provide humans with a means to transcend anthropocentrism?
  • How does technology navigate its utopian and dystopian dimensions, its differentiations between the virtual and the real, the natural and the anthropological, or the phenomenological and the ontological?
Contributions addressing these questions are welcome, including scholarly articles (including translations), interviews, roundtable discussions, and works of literature.

Please submit your contributions and proposals by August 18, 2023, to jcp@westernsydney.edu.au.