Philosophy Seminars - Digital Technologies, Critique and Society
"Digital Technologies and the Public Use of Reason"
Speaker: Emre Şan
The speed of digital technologies' processes of organizing, naming, measuring, calculating, and coding reality far surpasses the flow of human symbolic exchanges. With the acceleration of everyday life forms, interpersonal social connections are replaced by communication between technical tools. On the other hand, the public sphere is being reprogrammed within a corporatized technological culture, and users' interests and habits are being datafied through demographic, economic, political, and cultural classifications, with predictions about our potential behavior being marketed. In this seminar, we will discuss the publicness of reason inherited from Enlightenment thought and examine the risks and opportunities of the public use of reason within the development of artificial intelligence, the societal use of intelligent machines, and automation technologies. The proper use of reason requires us to criticize technical systems that can take our faculties into guardianship. Just as using communicative and intelligent machines liberates minds with finite memories, like Icarus freed from the labyrinth thanks to artificial wings, if we forget the limits of machines, as Icarus did with his wax wings, we too may lose our faculties.
Emre Şan completed his undergraduate degree at Galatasaray University and his master's and doctoral studies at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. After completing his doctorate, he conducted post-doctoral research at the École Normale Supérieure. His book on contemporary phenomenology, published with a foreword by Renaud Barbaras and the Institut Universitaire de France award, was released by Mimesis in Paris in 2012. He has published articles in Turkish, French, English, and Spanish in national and international journals and book series, focusing on phenomenology, philosophy of technology, and image theory. He has been awarded the Prix Mercier, a biennial philosophy award from UCLouvain, and is currently a professor at Istanbul 29 Mayıs University.
* The seminar will be held in Turkish. To attend this seminar, you can create your registration by using the "Register" button on the page and receive your free event invitation. Registrations will open 1 week before the event date (05.12.2024, at 18:30) and the "Register" button will become visible. Participation is limited to a quota of 120 people.
** Participants who have completed the event registration and received their invitation are kindly requested to be at the venue at least 15 minutes before the event. The doors will be closed at the event starting time.