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Philosophy of technology in the age of the anthropocene. Theorizing and imagining the emerging geo-techno-logical condition ‘Das ist keine Erde mehr, auf den der Mensch heute lebt’ (Heidegger, Spiegel interview, p. 98).
Pieter Lemmens, PhD Radboud University Nijmegen Department of Philosophy and Science Studies 1. Introduction. The current climate and energy crises In this paper I want to examine briefly, and still very exploratively, what kind of conseqences the anthropocene, the new geological epoch we’re supposedly inhabiting for some time now according to some prominent geologists and earth system scientists, should have, for our thinking of technology and in particular our thinking of the human-technology relationship in general. Both are very basic questions of any philosophy of technology of course and so my aim here is to explore to some degree how I think philosophy of technology should integrate the anthropocene or the ‘anthropocenic event’ and all that it possibly implies in its thinking about technology, technological innovation, the relation between the human and technology and that between technology and nature. The anthropocene, the geological epoch in which the human has become the most important geological (f)actor, first of all marks the entrance of humanity into a phase in its history which will be characterized by huge changes in the earth's biosphere, i.e., in the global ecological system that has up until now silently and robustly supported its cultural-historical projects (Greer 2008, Martenson 2011). The two most important and well-known of these changes are global warming and the dwindling of fossil fuel resources, the depletion of oil as the principal source of energy driving our hyper-industrial and permanent innovation-oriented societies being of primary concern (Kunstler 2005, Heinberg 2005). As Langdon Winner has pointed out in his keynote lecture at the SPT 2013 conference in Lisbon on the future of philosophy of technology, most representatives of this discipline do not seem to show much concern or even attention for the fact that these changes imply that two of the most general conditions that they, like most inhabitants of our advanced industrial societies, take