doi.org
Technology—A Matter of Care: Some Comments on the “Thingly Turn” in the Philosophy of Technology - published on September 18, 2026
The “empirical turn” in the philosophy of technology, identified by philosophers in the late 1990s, evolved in a specific direction during the 2000s, when proponents of two major currents in the discipline—postphenomenology and analytic philosophy—set out to develop a “philosophy of technical artifacts.” How can we explain this “thingly turn” in the philosophy of technology, as Peter-Paul Verbeek has termed it? My aim here is to situate this recent shift in the discipline in the long term, by showing that it brings us back to the ancient Greek questioning of technè—a questioning which, I shall try to show, tied technè closely to care. Thus, a “philosophy of technical artifacts” can bring the philosophy of technology into closer dialogue with the ethics of care.
