NUR04A Group 2:

Novie Bajaro
Jennifer Coching
Sheryl Dato
Easter Areola
Ronel Guarin

Science, Technology, and Society

Mrs: Maribeth Liwanag

Human Flourishing in Science and Technology

Reported by Novie Bajaro

Flourishing
-a state where people experience positive emotions, positive psychological functioning and
positive social functioning, most of the time," living "within an optimal range of human
functioning."

Human Flourishing
-an effort to achieve self-actualization and fulfillment within the context of a larger community
of individuals, each with the right to pursue his or her own such efforts.

-involves the rational use of one's individual human potentialities, including talents, abilities,
and virtues in the pursuit of his freely and rationally chosen values and goals.

Human civilizations and the development of science and technology.

Human person as both the bearer and beneficiary of science and Technology.

Bearer -a person or thing that carries or holds something.

Beneficiary -a person who derives advantage from something, especially a trust, will, or life
insurance policy.

Science and Technology

-must be treated as part of human life that needs reflective and meditative thinking
-must be examined for their greater impact on humanity as a whole

Reflective thinking
- Critical thinking and reflective thinking are often used synonymously. ... Dewey (1933)
 suggests that reflective thinking is an active, persistent, and careful consideration of a.
belief or supposed form of knowledge, of the grounds that support that knowledge, and
the further conclusions to which that knowledge leads.

Meditative thinking
-kind of thinking that thinks the truth of being, that belongs to being and listens to it.
-It means to notice, to observe, to ponder, to awaken an awareness of what is actually.
taking place around us and in us. Meditative thinking does not mean being detached.
from reality or, as Heidegger says, “floating unaware above reality”

Technology as a Mode of Revealing

MARTIN HEIDEGGER
-a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition of
philosophy.
-widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of
the 20th century.

HEIDEGGER’S VIEW ON TECHNOLOGY.

•He strongly opposes the view that technology is “a means to an end” or
“a human activity.”
•These two approaches, which he calls, respectively, the “instrumental” and
“anthropological” definitions, are indeed “correct”, but do not go deep enough; as he says,
they are not yet “true.”
•Heidegger points out, technological objects are means for ends, and are built and operated
by human beings, but the essence of technology is something else entirely.
•Since the essence of a tree is not itself a tree, he points out, so the essence of technology
is not anything technological.

What, then, is technology, if it is neither a means to an end nor a human activity?

•Technology, according to Heidegger must be understood as “a way of revealing” (Heidegger

1977, 12)
•Revealing is his translation of the Greek word alètheuein, which means ‘to discover’ – to
uncover what was covered over. Related to this verb is the independent noun alètheia,
which is usually translated as “truth,” though Heidegger insists that a more adequate
translation would be “unconcealment.”

’
 How can technology be ‘a way of revealing’?
What does this have to do with technology? What does Heidegger mean when he
says that technology is “a way of revealing”?
•Everything we perceive or think of or interact with “emerges out of concealment into.
unconcealment,by entering into a particular relation with reality, reality is ‘revealed’ in a
specific way. technology is the way of revealing that characterizes our time.

•Technology embodies a specific way of revealing the world, a revealing in which humans take
power over reality.

•While the ancient Greeks experienced the ‘making’ of something as ‘helping something to
come into being’ – as Heidegger explains. that modern technology is rather a ‘forcing into
being’.

•Technology reveals the world as raw material, available for production and manipulation.

WHY IS TECHNOLOGY NOT A HUMAN ACTIVITY?

•According to Heidegger, there is something wrong with the modern, technological
culture we live in today. In our ‘age of technology’ reality can only be present as a raw
material (as a ‘standing reserve’). This state of affairs has not been brought about by
humans; the technological way of revealing was not chosen by humans.
•Rather, our understanding of the world our understanding of ‘being’, of what it.
means to be’ - develops through the ages.
In our time ‘being’ has the character of a technological ‘framework’, from which
humans approach the world in a controlling and dominating way.
•Every attempt to climb out of technology throws us back in. The only way out for
Heidegger is “the will not to will”.
•We need to open up the possibility of relying on technologies while not becoming
enslaved to them and seeing them as manifestations of an understanding of being.

TECHNOLOGY AS POIESIS: Applicable to Modern

Technology?
Reported by Jennifer Coching

Poiesis means revealing or bringing something into existence that did not exist before. In etymologically
means “to make”. Poiesis as the blooming of the blossom, the coming- out of a butterfly from a cocoon,
the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt.
Defining technology according to Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was a 20th-century German philosopher, typically associated with existentialism. His
writings are notoriously difficult to read but plow through the dense discourse and you will find some
valuable insights. According to him, technology is one of those words that is so commonplace, yet it is
hard to define. Computers and smart devices are technologies, but so are books and notepads. The
definition of technology may span from simple tools and utensils to powerful machines and media.

Modern technology to Martin Heidegger

Modern technology or powerful machines are expedient ways of conquering the world because they
objectify nature and turn it into resource that can be quantified, calculated and rationed. In short, seeing
nature as the phenomena are part of to seeing it as a natural resource for everyday business. That is the
essence of modern technology: using powerful machines to turn everything into a consumable or
disposable resource.
Heidegger uses a technical word to name these things. He said: “Everywhere everything is ordered to
stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed, to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further
ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing, namely standing in reserve.”
Heidegger names these things revealed in modern technology as “standing in reserve.” Things as standing
in reserve are not “objects”. Objects, on the one hand, are things that “stand against us” as things with
autonomy. They are revealed mainly in human thinking and do not allow further manipulations. Things as
standing in reserve, on the other hand, are called to come forth in challenging and expediting. They are
reduced into the object lessness of modern technology. Nothing anymore “stands against us” as objects of
autonomy and wonder. Everything is regressed into an interlocking of things that yield what man wants
whenever he demands them to do so. Even nature is now revealed as standing in reserve and not anymore
objects of autonomy.

It is challenging since it is overly aggressive in activity. A mode of revealing never comes to an end and
happens on our own time. Challenges nature and demands resources for human consumption and storage.
The age of switches, standing reserve and stockpiling for its own sake.

QUESTIONING AS A PIETY OF THOUGHT?

Piety is the quality of being religious or reverent. It is a belief or point of view that is accepted with
unthinking conventional reverence.

Piety for Heidegger

Piety is obedience and submission. Be submissive in what his/her thoughts and reflections elicit. Who or
what we essentially in the world? Questioning to know the truth of who he/she is as a being in this world.
Questioning is a piety of thought. A process of knowing the truth of who we are as beings in this world.

Human beings and everything around us, are made of the same substance that constitutes the stars:
therefore, we are stardust. It is when we start questioning that we submit ourselves to our thoughts.
Questioning serves as the piety of thought because we keep asking out of curiosity, we keep on searching
and discovering in search for meaning of truth for us to have thoughts because all we can do in today’s
generation is to predict and to continually explore.

ENFRAMING: WAY OF REVEALING

IN MODERN TECHNOLOGY

The way of revealing in modern technology is an

enframing. This enframing that challenges forth and sets upon

nature is a way of looking at reality. In simpler terms, it is as

If nature is put in a box or in a frame so that it can be better

Understood and controlled according to people's desires. Poiesis

Is concealed in enframing as nature is viewed as an orderable

and calculable system of information.

In looking at the world, Heidegger distinguished between

calculative thinking and meditative thinking. In calculative

thinking, as mentioned earlier, one orders and puts a system

to nature so it can he understood better and controlled. In

meditative thinking, one lets nature reveal itself to him/her

without forcing it. One kind of thinking is not in itself better

than the other. The human person has the faculty for both and

would do well to use them in synergy. However, people also

want control and are afraid of unpredictability, so calculative

thinking is more often used. Enframing is done because people

want security, even if the ordering that happens in enframing is

violent and even if the Earth is made as a big gasoline station

from which we extract, stockpile, and put in standing-reserve,

ready to be used as we see fit.

HUMAN PERSON SWALLOWED

BYTECHNOLOGY

Reported by Sheryl Dato

Though it is true that the individual takes part in the

revealing of nature, limits must still be recognized. Humans

do not really call the shots on this Earth. If we allow ourselves

to get swallowed by modern technology, we lose the essence of

who we are as beings in this world. If we are constantly plugged

online and no longer have the capacity for authentic personal

encounters, then we are truly swallowed by technology. If we

cannot let go of the conveniences and profits brought about by

Processes and industries that pollute the environment and cause

climate change, then technology has consumed

our humanity.

Nevertheless, as expressed by the poet

Holderlin, “But where danger is, grows the saving power also.” The saving

power lies in the essence of technology as technology. Essence is

the way in which things are, as that which endures. Heidegger

further asserted that the “essence of technology is nothing

Technological” (1977). The essence of technology is not found in

the instrumentality and function of machines constructed, but

in the significance such technology unfolds.

He also expressed that the various problems brought

about by human's dependence on technology cannot be simply

resolved by refusing technology altogether. He stated:

Thus we shall never experience our relationship to

the essence of technology so long as we merely represent and pursue the technological, put up
with it, or evade it. Everywhere we reamain unfree and chained to technology, wether we
passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we
regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it , to which today we particularly like to
pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology (1977,p.1).

Art as a way out of enframing

How does art provide a way out of enframing?

- Art furnishes us with the way out of enframing by bringing us closer to poiesis and further away
from techne. This means that art activates human sensitivity if it even exists in an individual. The
embodiment in a device, as opposed to occurring through the mind or in the natural world and
seeing things the way they are is part of poiesis. It’s main goal is to make us realize that we need to
nurture and appreciate the importance of each innovated technology.
- Modern technology, on the other hand, challenges everything in its desire to prepare for the
future, in other words, it destroys and disrupts the natural world. It is now part of our life
causing it to be an enframing factor in it. To get away from it from time to time and indulge in
the arts reacquainted us to our past reality that is increasingly being forgotten today.
"The irresistability of ordering and the restraint of the saving power draw past each other like the
paths of two stars in the course of the heavens. . ."

The danger of technology's essence and the saving power inherent in it are joined, Heidegger tells us, in the
way stars are joined in a constellation: part of a whole, but separate entities. Enclosed as we are within our
enframing orientation to the world, what can we do to save ourselves from the consequences of enframing?
How can we nurture an alternative way of looking at things that will help us to change the ways of thinking
that drive technology and thus to evade some of the horrific dangers that inhere in technology?

Against an orientation that investigates all aspects of the world and assumes that the world can be grasped
and controlled through measurement and categorization, Heidegger upholds an alternative: art. He takes us
back to a moment in the history of the West before the onset of enframing, back again to ancient Greece,
where the concept of techne--which, as we have seen, is the source of our word "technology"--included both
instrumentality and the fine arts, that is, poiesis. Heidegger imagines a classical Greece in which art was not
a separate function within society, but unifying force that brought together religious life, political life, and
social life. The art of ancient Greek culture, according to Heidegger, expressed humanity's sense of
connectedness with all Being. Art was a kind of "piety;" it was the outgrowth of humanity's care--in the
sense of "stewardship"--of all existence.

In our own time, Heidegger suggests, the paradox of how "enframing" can hold within it a saving power can
be resolved by viewing the artistic or poetic orientation to the world as the alternative dimension of
"enframing." The poet looks at the world in order to understand it, certainly, but this reflection does not seek
to make the world into a "standing-reserve." For Heidegger, the poet takes the world "as it is," as it reveals
itself--which, for Heidegger, is the world's "true" form (remember that the Greek word for truth, aletheia,
literally means "revealing" or "unveiling").

"Truth" for Heidegger is a "revealing," the process of something "giving" or "showing" itself. Art is the realm
in which this "granting" of the world is upheld. Art's relationship with the world is, in Heidegger's view,
different from technology's in that art is less concerned with measuring, classifying, and exploiting the
resources of the world than it is with "taking part" in the process of coming-to-being and revealing that
characterize the existence.

We should not interpret Heidegger to be suggesting that we all go out and become artists, but rather that we
incorporate more of the artist's and poet's vision into our own view of the world. By doing so, we can guard
against the dangers of enframing, and enter into a "free"--constantly critical, constantly questioning--
relationship with the technology that is constantly making new incursions into our lives.
Human Flourishing as Reflected in Progress and Development
Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries
Reported by Easter Areola

Jason Hickel
Heads of state are gathering in New York to sign the UN’s new sustainable development
goals (SDGs). The main objective is to eradicate poverty by 2030. Beyonce, One Direction, and
Malala are on board. It’s set to be a monumental international celebration.
The main strategy for eradicating poverty is the same: growth.
Growth has been the main object of development for the past 70 years, despite the fact that
it is not working. Since 1980, the global economy has grown by 380%, but the number of people
living in poverty on less than $5 (£3.20) a day has increased by more than 1.1 billion. That’s 17
times the population of Britain.
Orthodox economists insist that all we need is yet more growth. More progressive types
tell us to shift some of the yields of growth from the richer segments of the population to the
poorer ones. Neither approach is adequate. Because even at current levels of average global
consumption, we’re overshooting our planet’s bio-capacity by more than 50% each year.
In other words, growth is not an option anymore – we’ve already grown too much.
Scientists are now telling us that we’re blowing past planetary boundaries at breakneck speed.
Right now, our planet only has enough resources for each of us to consume 1.8 “global
hectares” annually – a standardized unit that measures resource use and waste.
Economist Peter Edward argues that instead of pushing poorer countries to “catch up” with
rich ines, we should be thinking of ways to get rich countries to “catch down” to more
appropriate levels of development.
Some of the excess income and consumption we see in the rich world yields improvements
in quality of life that are not captured by life expectancy, or even literacy rates. Even if we look
at measures of overall happiness and wellbeing in addition to life expectancy, a number of low-
and midde-income countries rank highly. Costa Rica manages to sustain one of the highest
happiness indicators and life expectancies in the world with a per capita income one-fourth that
of the US.
 Perhaps we should regard such countries not as underdeveloped, but rather as
appropriately developed. And maybe we need to start calling on rich countries to justify their
excesses.
70% of people in middle- and high-income countries believe overconsumption is putting
our planet and society at risk. People sense there is something wrong with the dominant model of
economic progress and they hungry for an alternative narrative.
They use terms such as de-growth, zero growth or—worst of all—de-development, which
are technically accurate but off-putting for anyone who’s not already on board.
The idea of “steady-state” economics is a step in the right direction and is growing in
popularity, but it still doesn’t get the framing right. We need to reorient ourselves toward a
positive future, a truer form of progress. What is certain is that GDP as a measure is not going to
get us there and we need to get rid of it.
The west has its own tradition of reflection on the good life and it’s time we revive it.
Robert and Edward Skidelsky take us down this road in his book How Much is Enough? Where
they lay out the possibility of interventions such as banning advertising, a shorter working week,
and a basic income, all of which would improve our lives while reducing consumption.
Either we slow down voluntarily or climate change will do it for us. If we do not act soon,
all our hard-wn gains against poverty will evaporate, as food systems collapse and mass famine
re-emerges to an extent not seen since 19th century.
This is not about giving anything up. And it’s certainly not about living a life of voluntary
misery or imposing harsh limits on human potential. On the contrary, it’s about reaching a higher
level of understanding and consciousness about what we’re doing here and why.

GOOD LIFE
Reported by Ronel Guarin

Pursuit to Happiness

Everyone is in pursuit of the good life. We do certain things because we want to achieve a life
that will make us happy and content. By studying and working hard, we try to attain this goal for
ourselves and our loved ones, and the rest of humanity. People's definitions of the good life may
vary and differ in the particulars. In general, however, we recognize universal truths that cut
across our differences.
Everyone wants to the right thing, but how do we know what is right. Aristotle, an ancient Greek
philosopher, attempted to explain what good is by answering how humans should live and how
to find the highest good in life in the “Nicomachean Ethics.”

Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle state:
- Every art and human and human inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is
thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has been rightly declared as
that at which all things aim.
Eudaimonia
- Ancient Greeks concept of “living well and doing well.”
- From Greek word
o Eu – meaning “good.”
o Daimon – meaning “spirits.”
- Generally refers to the good life, which is marked by happiness and excellence.

Happiness
- Is the ultimate end goal of human action.
Example:
1. Choosing a healthy diet
2. Taking care of the environment

These two examples are activities that express virtues resulting in people’s well-being and
happiness.

Virtues
- Plays a significant role in the living and attainment of the good life.
- It’s the excellence of character that empowers one to do and be good.
- It is cultivated with habit and discipline as it is not a one-time deed, but a constant and
consistent series of action.

2 Kinds of Virtues
1. Intellectual virtue – gives birth and growth teaching, which requires experience and time.
2. Moral virtue – is a result of habit.
In Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle discusses eleven virtues: courage, temperance, generosity, magnificence,
magnanimity, right ambition, good temper, friendliness, truthfulness, wit, and justice.
Virtue is a mean by two extremes, and its exercise thus requires prudence to determine what
the mean is for specific circumstances.
Virtues are acquired by habituation. Acting virtuously is not the same as being virtuous, but
acting virtuously is the means to become virtuous.
The four requirements for virtue are that the person
(1) know what he is doing,
(2) intend the action for its own sake
(3) take pleasure in it
(4) do it with certainty and firmness.
When a person performs a virtuous action but does it in opposition to his desires, he is
content but not virtuous.
The onward progress of science and technology is also the movement towards the good life.
Science and technology are one of the highest expressions of human faculties. They allow us
to thrive and flourish in life if we so desire it. Science and technology may also corrupt a
person, but grounding oneself in virtue will help him/her steer clear of danger. They
eventually lead to the attainment of a Good Life.