I present the arguments of Gabriel Marcel which are intended to overcome the potentially negative impact of technology on the human. Marcel is concerned with forgetting or rejecting human nature. His perspective is metaphysical. He is concerned with the attitude of the "mere technician" who is so immersed in technology that the values which promote him as an authentic person with human dignity are discredited, omitted, denied, minimized, overshadowed, or displaced. He reviews the various losses in ontological values which curtail the full realization of the human person in his dignity. The impact of technology leads too often to a loss of the sense of the mystery of being and self, authenticity and integrity, the concrete and the existential, truth and dialogue, freedom and lover, humanity and community, fidelity and creativity, the natural and the transcendent, commitment and virtue, respect of the self and responsiveness to others, and especially of the spiritual and the sacred. Thus, the task of the philosopher is to be a watchman, un veilleur, on the alert for a hopeful resolution of the human predicament.

Today we live in a society in which hazards can no longer be regarded as mere side-effects of progress. How much more serious the problems we face today are is understood not only by seeing the magnitude of material or biological crises (such as environmental disruption), but also by discerning what we may call our 'epistemic and moral inability' — a crisis in our ability to cope with uncertainty both in science and morality. The purpose of this paper is to trace the origin of this crisis, and to problematize it as a defect of the form of human self-understanding in contemporary scientific-technological culture with the help of Hannah Arendt's reflection on human activities.

This paper is a discussion of the role played by the ideals of the Enlightenment in the invention and assessment of artifacts like the electric battery. The first electric battery was built in 1799 by Alessandro Volta, who was both a natural philosopher and an artisan-like inventor of intriguing machines. I will show that the story of Volta and the battery contains three plots, each characterized by its own pace and logic. One is the story of natural philosophy, a second is the story of artifacts like the battery, and the third is the story of the loose, long-term values used to assess achievement and reward within and outside expert communities. An analysis of the three plots reveals that late eighteenth-century natural philosophers, despite their frequent celebration of 'useful knowledge,' were not fully prepared to accept the philosophical dignity of artifacts stemming from laboratory practice. Their hesitation was the consequence of a hierarchy of ranks and ascribed competence that was well established within the expert community. In order to make artifacts stemming from laboratory practice fully acceptable within the domain of natural philosophy, some important changes had yet to occur. Still, the case overwhelmingly shows that artifacts rightly belong to the long and varied list of items that make up the legacy of the Enlightenment.

This paper deals the place of technology in contemporary culture, and the relationship between science and morality. A definition of technique as a social process has to emphasize the fact that technique means developing and enabling different fabricated material systems; it is also the action of environment transformation according to human necessities. The area of culture is not limited to classical values, conceived with traditional meanings, arts and human sciences, but also covers the values of the natural and technical sciences as well as the whole set of values implied by technique and technology. Far from being a marginal component of culture, technology interacts internally with philosophical fields such as epistemology, ontology, value theory, and ethics. It also partly overlaps partly with other fields. I suggest that science should not be considered as free of value and neutral from a moral viewpoint both because the scientist makes valuable judgments during scientific activity and because the applications of science have moral value and raise moral problems. There is thus a need for moral control that would deter the scientists from evildoing. The need for wisdom and a clear scientific attitude in our contemporary technical civilization is emphasized.

This paper is divided into four sections. The first provides a survey of some significant developments which today determine philosophical dealings with the subject of 'time.' In the second part it is shown how the question of time and the question of media are linked with one another in the views of two contemporary philosophers: Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. In section three, the temporal implications of cultural practices which are developing in the new medium of the Internet are analyzed, and finally, related to my main theses.

This paper uses the theory of technoscience to shed light on the current criticisms against the emerging science of Artificial Life. We see that the science of Artificial Life is criticized for the synthetic nature of its research and its over reliance on computer simulations which is seen to be contrary to the traditional goals and methods of science. However, if we break down the traditional distinctions between science and technology using the theory of technoscience, then we can begin to see that all science has a synthetic nature and reliance on technology. Artificial Life researchers are not heretical practitioners of some pseudoscience; they are just more open about their reliance on technology to help realize their theories and modeling. Understanding that science and technology are not as disparate as was once thought is an essential step in helping us create a more humane technoscience in the future.

Contemporary technology in the form of electronically managed interactive telecommunications is compatible with the goals and values of the humanities. For Marx, machine-work tended toward being mechanically routine, repetitive, deskilled, and trivialized. In the case of discourse, the same criticism has been made of computerized communication. Immediacy is not authorial presence, but the experience of textuality that is maximized by participation in interactive communication. Bulletin board technology inverts the relationship between the degree of communicative interaction and the number of communicants. It is both mass communication and individualized participation. From the point of view of a theory of discourse, the bulletin board system is unique in that the ratio between the number of participants and the individualized nature of the interaction is directly proportional. One person's voice does not inhibit or repress the voice of another. It is the technological embodiment of the ideal speech situation of Habermas which allows for the maximum of democratic participation and which, by allowing everyone to have a voice, allows for the greatest amount of dissensus and dialectic.

Virtual reality is more than only high tech. We encounter this phenomenon in everyday media worlds and economy. The sign dominates the signed. Philosophy can describe this phenomenon by means of a different ontological analysis following Poppers theory of the three worlds and can prepare new ontological categories for knowledge of acting.