Humanities in/towards Technoscientific Civilization – Part I

Abstract

The paper focuses on the issue of current and possible paths of development of the humanities, including the unceremonious question of why a society of technoscience and data-driving economy should continue to support our (humanities) institutes. The assumption of this question is the requirement of the applicability of knowledge and the priority of applied science (in the model of Research&Development&Innovation), usually taken into account in contemporary (global) science policy. Therefore, a serious (comprehensive) answer is needed here, starting from the question of what the humanities are (more broadly – human sciences), what they mean and why they mean in terms of their scientific status (i.e. subject, method and purpose), through three dimensions of methodological reflection (i.e. theory, methodology and institutionalization), to the question of what they may be in the near future – in the light of contemporary research on science and technology, in particular the philosophy of technology and the deep history. The author draws attention here to the tropes of the programs of “deep and technological humanities” and “preventive humanities” in relation to the 20th century tradition of the humanistic approach to science and technoscience and to the current European science policy (today especially towards the issue of artificial intelligence in the context of the “technological moment of the Anthropocene”). In this text, which is the first part of an intended series, a special point of reference are the considerations of the philosopher and historian Lewis Mumford in his works: Technics and Civilization (1934) and The Myth of the Machine (1967, 1970).