Principal Investigator:

Dr. Johannes F. M. Schick

Executive Summary

The associated project “Culture, Practice, Technology: On the Foundation of International Anthropology of Technology in the Durkheim School” systematically relates anthropology and the philosophy of technology to each other on the basis of analyses from the history of science. The philosophical-historical reconstruction of the genesis and development of the Durkheim School’s category project and its impact on Europe’s intellectual history is combined with the systematic-epistemological interest in how social, technical and semantic formations shape thought. In doing so, I focus on the interpenetration of epistemology, theory of technology and anthropology as postulated by the Durkheim School, its systematization  in the formation of the sciences in the 20th century and its radicalization in the more recent Science and Technology Studies (STS). 

The research project addresses the longue durée of the symmetrisation of supposedly “primitive” and modern worlds, of the analogue and the digital, of society and nature, and of man and technical objects. The fundamental insight of the Durkheimians remains of systematic importance: the technical activity is simultaneously a classificatory one, i.e. a social division expressed in the concrete practices of humans. The genesis of the categories of the human mind is both a question that concerns social coexistence as well as the technical. Techniques, be they purely bodily, mechanical or digital, help determine how categories are experienced and shaped. Our spatial and temporal horizons of experience have also undergone fundamental transformations due to technical changes in the last 100 years - the smartphone being a case in point.

The interpenetration of epistemology, anthropology and technology is the essential feature of the Durkheim School's category project and provides an important contribution to the current philosophy of technology. Moreover, the impact of the category project in epistemology continues from the rationality debate of the 1960s and 1970s to contemporary approaches in Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Consequently, the category project is being rediscovered as a philosophical enterprise.