The question concerning technology: The revelance of Thomas Aquinas' elaboration of Aristotle's description of the virtues of techne and phirhonesis.

摘要

The present dissertation argues that the contemporary questioning of technology, that which since the last quarter of the 19th century has prompted a debate concerning the question of what the essence of modern technology would be, has too eagerly assumed that it deals with an object unheard of before: modern technology, after all, is thought to be an exclusive phenomenon of modernity.; As a consequence of this assumption, it is accepted that previous accounts of man's technical activities---such as the inquiry on t3&d12;cn h in IV century B.C.E. Athens, or the analysis of ars in 13th century Western Europe, for example, which concerned the activities of artisans, artists, physicians, military strategists, as well as other skilled professionals---would have nothing relevant to say about the technology of the industrial age, that created by the engineer, and based on an intensive use of machines and on a knowledge of nature made possible by modern science.; Contrary to this view, we would claim that modern technology has in common with t3&d12;cn h and ars the fact that it can be related to what used to be called, in both the Classical and Medieval philosophy, man's intellectual virtues. And, thus, accounts such as those in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, VI, and in Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologioe, secunda secundoe partis, teach us that technology, however successful a productive activity it may be, is an incomplete virtue as long as it is not accompanied by excellence in practical activity, i.e, that which in Greek was called ϕrhoonuetasigmaiotasigma, and in Latin, prudentia.; By reviewing the basic features of the distinction between the productive, the practical, and the speculative virtues, this dissertation intends to show how this approach remains relevant in helping us to address the question of modern technology in its ambiguity of being an intellectual virtue which nonetheless is too easily transformed into a vice that focuses exclusively on means and forgets about ends.