International Workshop Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology
This workshop aims to explore why contemporary philosophical approaches to technology tend to seek close proximity to phenomenology, and what this proximity means and entails. Although the role of technologies in contemporary life is carefully analyzed in various ways, what remains undiscussed is how such careful attention must be qualified as having a phenomenological...
Communication professional
Communication professional for the multi-university, ten-year international research programme “Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies”, responsible for the external communication of the Esdit programme, and also a role in internal communication. “Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies” (Esdit) is an international research programme of seven academic institutions in the Netherlands. It has a combined budget of...
Interview with the 4TU.Ethics Alumni – Melis Bas
Welcome to the second blogpost of the 4TU.Ethics Alumni Network series! For our second blogpost, we’re interviewing Melis Bas, 4TU.Ethics graduate and Senior Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. A bit about Melis Melis started her academic journey by doing a bachelor’s degree in international relations in Turkey. She then did a master’s in...
Statement 4TU.Ethics against use of technology for violence
The 4TU Centre for Ethics and Technology is distraught by the brutal violence against innocent people in Iran, Ukraine, and many other places in the world. In our mission we state that we envision “..a world in which technology is developed and used for benefit of humanity and the preservation of our planet. It is a world in which ethical considerations concerning human rights, well-being, global and inter-generational justice, the social good are systematically included in practices of technology and engineering.”
This is an ideal vision indeed. Throughout human history, technology has been applied to suppress and to attack innocent people, either in warfare or by violent regimes towards their own people. Notwithstanding this repeating history, we are always shocked again, for example now in the ways how the Iranian regime is suppressing Iranian citizens by means of digital technologies (including tracking protesters with spyware on their mobile phones and using facial recognition technologies to identify protesters) and in the drone attacks by the Russian army on Ukrainian technological infrastructures, necessary for all citizens to survive. We cannot but reject such violence. Human rights should be served by technological developments, not violated. We call on all governments and engineers to resist such use of technology.
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