Hans Poser

Technik bestimmt auf die mannigfaltigste Weise unser Leben und Zusammenleben. Obgleich sie von Platon und Aristoteles bis in das zwanzigste Jahrhundert in Einzelaspekten betrachtet worden ist, wurde sie erst in den letzten Jahrzehnten zu einem eigenständigen Gegenstand der Philosophie. Dennoch werden ihre philosophischen Probleme immer noch eher beiläufig behandelt. So geht es um die Klärung ganz zentraler und herausfordernder Aufgaben – von der menschlichen Schöpferkraft über eine Klärung, was ein technisches Artefakt ist, zum technischen Wissen, in all diesen Elementen verknüpft mit dem Verantwortungsproblem. Das Ziel ist eine Darstellung dieser faszinierenden philosophischen Fragen vor dem Hintergrund der Tradition.

This general exploration of discussions about the ontology of technical artifacts begins with a brief summary of views of Aristotle and Kant that have implications for contemporary proposals for an engineering ontology. It then argues for an extension of the dual natures analysis developed by Peter Kroes and others that would take into account causality, creativity, intentionality, and finality. This new proposal draws on the work of Karl Popper and especially Nicolai Hartmann. I emphasize, however, that this is only a proposal that remains to be elaborated.

Ontology is still an important area of metaphysics, but an ontology of technological artifacts is missing up to now. Technological artifacts are essentially connected with at least five processes: The process of its creation, development and realization, the process of use, and the process of depletion. In their processes, these objects follow completely different laws or law-like regularities, namely causality; biological rules of growing and replication; formal syntactical rules and social rules. So we need a very rich ontology. Therefor that one of Nicolai Hartmann will be helpful, because it depends on categories and uses not only a bottom up structure from matter up to spirit, but also an essential top town transformation, namely finality, comparable with Popper’s ‘downward causation’

Rudolf Carnap había publicado en el año 1928 su obra Pseudoproblemas en la filosofía, donde intentaba mostrar que la lucha entre idealismo y realismo carecía de sentido, al no ser posible de ninguna manera demostrar o refutar una de las dos posiciones. Poco después, en los años cincuenta del pasado siglo XX Ludwig Wittgenstein tuvo una gran repercusión al proponer como “solución” la idea de que los problemas de este tipo descansan sobre un hechizo de la mente, el cual se origina por una mezcolanza de diferentes juegos lingüísticos –descansando el uno sobre objetos físicos, el otro sobre sensaciones y estados anímicos.

Analogy as a scientific method has been criticized during the last decades; only for heuristic purposes it has been accepted. On the other side especially proportional analogies have a long tradition in European thought since Plato and Aristotle, for, as Aristotle puts it, analogies allow a connection between different and unbridgeable ontological areas. As examples for such connections the analogia entis of Thomas of Aquino and the Kantian Analogies of Experience are discussed. They give us hints for a new view of analogies, which during the Middle Ages were not only of heuristic value, but were accepted as a proof: Analogies do not only produce hypotheses, moreover, they build up new views of the world, they are the background of paradigms, for they create structures by introducing similarities and proportions.