Séminaire The relevance of Ethics / La pertinence de l’éthique

The place of values in the world of technology

Andrew Feenberg, Professeur, Simon Frazer University, Vancouver, Canada Professeur invité à l’ENS-lsh. http://www.sfu.ca/ andrewf

Can modern philosophy account for the technological world in which values and facts routinely communicate and exchange places ? Technological designs realize the values that preside over their creation in the facts of devices and the daily lives of those who live with those devices. New values emerge as excluded voices demand changes in existing technology. Something like essences reappears in the environmental movement as concepts such as sustainability mobilize populations for the protection of "nature," not of course the disenchanted nature of physics or biology, but some other nature that was supposed to have disappeared from legitimate discourse centuries ago. Are we dealing here with mere confusion and, worse yet, regression to a magical worldview ? Or is the value-fact conundrum undergoing a fundamental sea-change now that technology intrudes on every dimension of human life ?

Facing the Bio-Info-Nano Convergence : philosophy, ethics or epistemology ?

Alain-Marc Rieu, Professeur, Université de Lyon - Jean Moulin, Faculté de philosophie, Institut d’Asie Orientale (CNRS), ENS-lsh. http://w3.ens-lsh.fr/amrieu/

Andrew Feenberg and Jean-Pierre Dupuy have respectively reshaped established problems concerning science and technology and their present evolution. The objective is to examine how these concepts and problems answer the questions raised by the ongoing BIN Convergence, the convergence of the three main fields of Research and Innovation, Biotechnology, Information Technology and NanoTechnology.