Colloquium Trinitarian Anthropology of Technology

Friday, November 24 - Saturday, November 25, 2023
Dekanatssitzungssaal of the Faculty of Theology (Karl-Rahner-Platz 1, 1. floor)

Please send registrations to: johannes.hoff@uibk.ac.at

How can technology be integrated into our life in such a way that it opens up the world to us in its complexity and depth, awakens resonances and inspires the shaping of a desirable future? While many contemporary philosophies of technology focus on the notion of autonomy and operate with a dualistic anthropology torn between memory (memoria) and autonomous will (voluntas) or 'data management' and 'user interests', the aim here is to recover the unifying center of human life.

In the philosophical tradition, this center is called 'intellectus' (nous). What we would call today lived, 'emotional intelligence' thus moves to the center. Our intellect, however, is always bound to technical prostheses that compensate for the everyday lack of living intuition and, in doing so, bring with them the danger of replacing living intelligence with mechanical procedures. Against this techno-philosophical background, the Augustinian-inspired trinitarian anthropology of the Middle Ages gains a new meaning: the modern triangle of nature-technology-culture appears here as a triangle of spirit nature (mens), technically shaped disposition (ars et scientia), and emotionally saturated will energy (voluntas, amor). Besides its heuristic function, this triangle has the character of a mystagogical principle: Our never ascertainable being, at the same time God-like and torn into three modes of being, requires a practice of "spiritual discernment" that guides us to distinguish between techniques of distraction and techniques of inner collection.

The starting point of the seminar and colloquium will be an essay by Prof. Dr. Johannes Hoff and Dr. Oliver Dürr of the University of Zurich (a further development of theses in Hoff's monograph "Verteidigung des Heiligen. Anthropologie der digitalen Transformation"). Speakers from the universities of Innsbruck, Zurich, Fribourg, Tübingen, Mainz, Vienna, Siegen, and Cambridge will each write responses to this text and engage in conversation with the authors and the students. These texts will later be published together with the essay by Hoff and Dürr in a special issue of the Zeitschrift für Theologie und Philosophie.

The public part of the colloquium will be held on Friday, Nov. 24 from 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.

This colloquium is partially funded by DiSC.