From Technological Skill to the Poetic Competence of the Imagination

Abstract

This lecture demonstrates how the phenomenological tradition or approach to the philosophy of technology has questioned and examined the understanding of modern technology as a neutral and applied science. The analysis begins with an ontological inquiry into the meaning of technology for man, as probed by Heidegger and Ortega, before proceeding to signal the relevance of finding links to other ways of looking at man’s practical action and, in doing so, to explain the similarity between technological rationality, with the humanizing power of the imagination, and creativity. In the end, it shows how Gaston Bachelard developed this link pursuant to the suggestive
idea of an inventive rationalism that should accompany both the scientific practice of the learned and the technological construction of phenomena by the engineer.