Job Opening: PhD in Philosophy of digital technologies and the disruption of the lifeworld (2024)

Do you want to follow your passion for philosophy of (digital) technology in a PhD study in our Philosophy group? Are you an openminded thinker who likes to collaborate with other researchers in an ambitious research program on the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies? ThePhilosophy Groupat Wageningen University seeks a talented PhD candidate for a PhD on World constituting technics: Digital technologies and the disruption of the Lifeword.

Socially disruptive technologies (SDT’s) like digital technologies (for example, AI, digital twins, social media etc.) raise societal concerns, which can be observed in concerns about surveillance capitalism, instrumentalization of production and consumption, datafication of all domains of human and non-human life etc. We can frame these concerns in terms of the social disruption of the lifeworld – i.e. the meaningful environment of everyday life experience in which we are at home and live and act together. The disruption of the lifeworld by digital technologies first of all suggests that there are general patterns that SDT’s like digital technologies have in common, and secondly that they not only have an impact on the users or consumers for instance, but have a broader impact on the lifeworld in which we live and act. The first objective of this PhD project is to reflect on the general patterns emerging from 21st century SDT’s. The second objective of this PhD project is to reflect on the socially disruptive impact of digital technologies on the datafication and denaturalization of the lifeworld, i.e. the framing of the world in terms of datasets and algorithmic computation determines increasingly human and non-human living and acting in the world and changes for example the experience of social relations, human-animal relations, and the experience of the meaning of life. To articulate a proper concept of the disruption of the lifeworld by digital technologies, the project critically build on contemporary debates in continental philosophy of technology and philosophy of innovation to develop a concept of World constitutive technics.

This PhD position will be part of the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies programme, a ten year long international research programme of seven academic institutions in the Netherlands that has started in January 2020. This programme has a combined budget of € 27 million, and is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Gravitation funding scheme for excellent research, and by matching funds from the participating institutions. The duration is from January 2020 to December 2029. The programme has the aim of achieving breakthrough research in at the intersection of ethics, philosophy, technology / engineering and social sciences, and to position its consortium at the top of its field internationally. A key objective is to investigate how new technologies challenge moral values and ontological concepts (like “nature”, “human being” and “community”), and how these challenges necessitate a revision of these concepts. The programme includes four research lines, “Nature, life and human intervention”, “The future of a free and fair society”, “The human condition” and “Synthesis: Ethics of Technology, Practical Philosophy, and Modern Technology-Driven Societie”. For a full description of the programma and its research line:www.esdit.nl