Tools, Minds and Machines: an excursion in the philosophy of technology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8034.2025.e100768Keywords:
Anthropology of Technology, Leroi-Gourhan, Marx, ProductionAbstract
Do machines make history? What does technique and technology consist of, since sometimes the content referred to in these entries seems to encompass the entire content of human activity? What result does the advance of the productive forces have on this activity? These questions guide the excursion – in the form of a literature review – around the treatment of the subject in European and North American philosophy. How was the boundary drawn between tools and machines? Between the skilled and the mechanically determined? Between the manufactured and the machine-made? Between the purely subjective and the purely objective? Between conceiving and executing? Going through the discourses that deal with these dichotomies suggests what the human being’s place might be in the multitude of manufacturing processes with which – with greater or lesser conscientiousness – they are involved.
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