What does it mean to do philosophy of technology at a technical university?

Every year, graduate students in the 4TU universities take the course "Philosophies of Technology." Having completed this course in March 2025, Jordi Guerrero and Dmitry Muravyov, PhD Candidates at TU Delft, have decided to talk about their experience and understanding of what it entails to conduct philosophical scholarship in a technical university, as well as 4TU’s approaches to defining technology, design, and selecting technology as a research topic. You can also listen to a podcast version of this conversation or read this edited transcript.

Jordi Viader Guerrero: Hello, and welcome everyone to this podcast produced for the occasion of the 4TU Ethics Graduate Course Philosophies of Technology. I’m Jordi Guerrero; I am a PhD candidate in the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology section at TU Delft. I'm doing research on the philosophy of political philosophy of technological design practice, mostly concerned about how the user is conceptualized in the philosophy of technology literature. And with me here is Dmitry Muravyov, and I'll let him introduce himself.

Dmitry Muravyov: Hello, everyone. My name is Dmitry Muravyov. I'm also a PhD candidate in the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology section at Delft.

My research is about technological fallibility, so basically about how technologies break down, produce errors, fail in different ways, and what kind of ethical and political consequences this has. TU Delft is actually a part of the 4TU Federation. Jordi, do you mind telling our listeners a little bit about the 4TU Federation?

Jordi Viader Guerrero: Of course. Also, I just wanted to note that we are both part of the AI DeMoS lab, which is part of a larger AI initiative within TU Delft. This is also already part of the podcast. We are nested within a nest and a nest of different forms of academic organizations.

One of them is the 4TU Center for Ethics and Technology. We are producing this podcast for the occasion of a course called Philosophies of Technology, which is a part of the 4TU Ethics Graduate School, which, according to their own website, is a collaboration between four technical universities in the Netherlands. There is our own university, Delft University of Technology, but also Eindhoven University of Technology, Wageningen University, and the University of Twente.

Dmitry Muravyov: Indeed, as part of the 4TU Federation, there is also a 4TU Ethics ‘sub-federation.’ This is a combination of different philosophers of technology who work in these four technical universities in the Netherlands. It also has a graduate program for people like us who are PhD candidates or master’s students. Jordi and I both took the course called Philosophies of Technology, which is supposed to introduce us to different approaches and research directions in the philosophy of technology.

On the occasion of this course, we thought that it would be interesting to discuss different questions that relate to how we define technology as individual researchers and within this community, how it relates to design, and a bunch of other topics. So that's why we're here.

Jordi Viader Guerrero: Yeah. I just also wanted to add about the question of design and technology. So, something that's very specific about the 4TU Federation is that the different philosophy departments are not part of regular universities, as you would say.

Dmitry Muravyov: Right.

Jordi Viader Guerrero: I am air-quoting.

Dmitry Muravyov: And I'm nodding.

Jordi Viader Guerrero: They’re part of technical universities, so there’s an intention—or ambition—to do philosophy in proximity to design and engineering practices. I think that’s a crucial distinction, and it explains a lot about how 4TU views itself: how and why it wants to produce philosophy.

That said, maybe we can begin with the themes of the podcast itself. As Dmitry mentioned, we want to explore philosophical questions about what technology is, but also focus specifically on the 4TU concept. Let’s start with a personal, biographical question. Dmitry, how did you become part of the 4TU community?

Dmitry Muravyov: Yeah, before taking this position as a PhD candidate, I had no idea what 4TU was. My background is in social sciences and media studies, and I was broadly interested in technology studies. The key moment was when I was looking for a new job—or rather, a PhD opportunity—and this position seemed like a great fit. It blended politics, technology, and philosophy, though I didn’t focus much on the philosophy aspect at first because it was framed in a way that still felt relatable to my background.

Now that I think about it, that says something about 4TU and how we approach philosophy and technology in this context. That would be my initial take. And how was it for you? Because I know that you have already been in the Netherlands before that. Have you heard about the 4TU Federation before?

Jordi Viader Guerrero: Absolutely not. Like you, I was unaware of the existence of this federation or center. I have a bit of the opposite story from you.

I come from a more traditional philosophy background – bachelor’s and master’s in philosophy – but I’ve always been interested in media studies and technology. My focus was originally on cinema, seeing it as a technology, which led me toward technology more broadly.

When I saw this PhD position, I thought: Hey, I'm interested in technology. I also know there's money behind it in the sense that it's seen as socially and economically relevant to do things related to technology, more so than media or art. And then there's politics, there's philosophy.

But I didn't give much thought to the university or the context in which this would happen. I didn't give much thought to what it means to do philosophy within a technical university. The further I developed my PhD project, the more I realized this is a fundamental aspect of my research. What role does philosophy serve within this design and technology context? Then I realized that this had been thought out within the 4TU community and the 4TU center.

Dmitry Muravyov: We are not the first to ask this question!

Jordi Viader Guerrero: Exactly. That’s what I appreciated about this course – realizing there’s a whole community already engaged in this conversation (air quotes) about the relationship between philosophy and technology.

Dmitry Muravyov: Yeah. I also remember how, on the first day, Filippo Santoni de Sio, who is a professor at TU Eindhoven and one of the main organizers of the course together with Janna van Grunsven, introduced us to this context of the 4TU in a very interesting manner. He presented us with the idea that there is a particular, at least according to some people, 4TU way of doing philosophy of technology. For some reason, I've never thought about it this way before, and I thought it was super interesting.

This makes me curious: Given your experience and this course, how do you think we, as researchers and part of 4TU, define technology? What work do these definitions do, and for whom?

Jordi Viader Guerrero: Before diving into that deep question, I’d add a quick note about the “4TU approach.” When we say there’s a specific way of doing philosophy of technology here, I assume we mean applied ethics in tech, right?

That's at least my first instinct when I think about what the 4TU approach is. Basically, it's about taking different ethical theories and applying them to specific technological developments. In this way, philosophy can – and in many ways does – serve a social purpose, right?

We acknowledge that technologies play a huge role in society. Then, the role of philosophy would be to develop these theories and frameworks that might assist policymakers or designers to, well, to create better technological products. That is a good link to the question of how we as researchers define technology.

First, I'll start with the most philosophical aspect. Basically, if I think about philosophy and what philosophy does, it is asking these horrendously meta-questions. So, for me, one of the main starting points for the philosophy of technology is always asking that question.

It's about reopening that question again and again, never taking for granted what technology is, and, therefore, what we do with technology, and who gets to do what with technology. And I feel like the further you look into this question, the less clear the answers become, and the more you realize how diverse and contested this definition can be.

And at least for me, that's something we can play with, right? It's not necessarily something that... Well, it can lead to misunderstandings and disagreements, but I also think it basically gives us a larger scope – a playing field to do different things with our research. I feel like I'm talking in a very broad way, but what are your thoughts?

Dmitry Muravyov: No, I think – about what you've said about the 4TU approach – my impression after all these years would be that while ethics and applied ethics are definitely a big part of it... If you look at philosophy as an academic discipline worldwide, at least in how it's represented across different departments, ethics is generally everywhere and institutionally makes up a big part of philosophy.

So, I think it's fair to point out that there are also different people in the 4TU community working on non-ethical aspects of the philosophy of technology. But relating to what you said, what it makes me think is that often, with the 4TU approach to the philosophy of technology, we're focused on developing our thinking about technology.

However, one could argue that the philosophy of technology should also concern how we think, not just thinking about technology as an object we apply thinking to, but also thinking about thinking itself. That should be something we examine more.

Personally, when considering what definitions of technology emerge in our community, I think about a few things. First, there's often an extensive focus on emerging technologies. Partly, I think this relates to how academic knowledge production around these topics (at least in the Netherlands) is tied to a particular political economy of funding– the consortium model or collaborative forms of research.

This is perhaps an aspect we don't reflect on enough – that our conceptual models of technology often rely on a very particular, even narrow set of technologies (the emerging ones). That's my initial thought; I'm curious what you think about that.

Jordi Viader Guerrero: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned something really interesting about funding schemes. Filippo pointed out in the course that what 4TU did historically was create its own funding schemes – specific forms of funding. I don't remember the exact name...

Dmitry Muravyov: You could broadly call them responsible innovation frameworks.

Jordi Viader Guerrero: Exactly– frameworks that basically fit their own research. It sounds a bit Machiavellian when you say it that way, but that's how academia works, right? They did the smart thing by creating funding models that aligned with their research. We can also discuss 4TU as a funding mechanism – a model that has proven its value within the Dutch context.

Coming from Spain, I find this really impressive. We don't see that happening there, though it's something many researchers and politicians would love to replicate.

Dmitry Muravyov: Absolutely. And this has real epistemological implications for how we produce knowledge about technology. Not that what we're doing is bad, but sometimes I think someone should study more ‘boring’ technologies to increase our diversity of perspectives. Though I guess nobody wants to fund less exciting things.

Jordi Viader Guerrero: Exactly! Why aren't we studying... I don’t know... drawers? Which could actually be fascinating. But that doesn't fit the “emerging technologies” category. I was going to say digital technologies, but “emerging” is actually broader – it can include non-digital technologies, too.

Dmitry, I wanted to ask you: In the 4TU context, particularly regarding interdisciplinary collaborations, would you say philosophy is closer to design research than in other academic settings? Actually, let me rephrase the question properly – it's "What can philosophy and design do for each other, especially in terms of thinking about alternatives?" What do you think about the relationship between philosophy, design, and technology – particularly technological design – in this specific context where we're in close proximity to places where these practices are developed?

Dmitry Muravyov: This is indeed one of the distinctive aspects of 4TU's philosophy of technology approach that we take for granted, but it might not be obvious to external audiences. Most of us in our respective universities aren’t situated in faculties of arts and humanities but rather in separate faculties more closely aligned with social sciences, policy sciences, or similar fields.

This means we’re not regularly interacting with other humanities scholars – we don’t have cultural studies researchers, literary scholars, or linguists around us. Instead, we’re surrounded by engineers, designers, and technologists. This physical and institutional proximity to these practices forms the first important theme in this relationship.

Additionally, due to the nature of the project, which we are both involved in [AI DeMoS lab], we actively collaborate with designers. Before this position, I knew very little about design research as an academic discipline – it's not nearly as established in Russia, where I come from. But indeed, I've learned a lot here.

Within the 4TU community, I see what we might call a “trading zone” (Galison, 1997) emerging between philosophy and design – a mutual exchange where we import and export concerns between the disciplines. Sometimes, this involves borrowing conceptual frameworks to analyze or rethink our respective practices.

What I find particularly interesting – as opposed to philosophers merely providing post-hoc reflections on completed design processes – is the potential for more integrated collaboration. I know you're also deeply interested in questions about design alternatives. So, I'm curious: What do you see as philosophy's distinctive contribution in these cases? What makes philosophical thinking particularly valuable for reconceptualizing how design is approached?

Jordi Viader Guerrero: I was also thinking about this in relation to the other question about the ambitions or intentions of the 4TU community to have philosophical research faculties within technological universities.

First, I think the most basic thing is... I think the move that 4TU did, or like the 4TU approach, is saying to engineers and designers: “Hey, philosophers have something to say about technology.” Coming from a more philosophical background, I'm aware that there's been a lot of philosophizing about technology, either explicitly or implicitly. I'm thinking mainly about the critical theory tradition, which, in a way, even if it's very critical towards technological development, is a philosophy of technology.

Dmitry Muravyov: If I may jump right in, I think it's also impressive that the message is not only that we have something to say about technology, but also that we have something to say about technology to you that you will find somehow relevant.

Jordi Viader Guerrero: Exactly. You think about the philosophy of technology, and then you think: who is it speaking to? If you take the politically opposed examples – like Adorno and Heidegger – you can ask who philosophy is speaking to. Who reads this? Mostly, I would say arts and humanities people who have little to no say in technological design.

I think the 4TU move was to establish an alliance with designers. It sounds obvious, but it’s quite a huge institutional move. Deciding that their preferred interlocutors were designers and engineers, which, more often than not, is something the arts and humanities don’t do.

This has its positive side, but it's also a very political decision in the sense of deciding that the places where philosophy is relevant – where philosophy has the highest form of reflection (huge air quotes here) – should be addressed to these people because these people, designers, and engineers, have power.

They have power and, therefore, responsibility in the Spider-Man sense. I think Langdon Winner has a quote about how engineers are the moral legislators of the 20th century. And I do believe that, but then it clearly puts a huge epistemological, political, and moral focus on these two groups – or this intersection of designers and engineers.

This is what my research constantly questions. Why do we give political priority to these groups? Because if we think from democratic theory – or different democratic theories – we might argue that many other groups should have a say, right?

I don’t think that this idea actually contradicts the 4TU move. Because that move is saying: “Hey, this other group (philosophers) has something to say about your practice.” So then, to answer your question, I'd say following that move and making it more radical – opening the space of design and engineering to way more people – is something philosophy can bring to technological design practices.

Dmitry Muravyov: This also makes me think about how texts we write – or others in our community write – already contain this implicit conception of their reader. On a practical, realistic level, we all know that barely anyone reads our academic papers, which is obvious. But still, we often write them with sections like policy recommendations or design/engineering suggestions, even when not explicit.

There’s this understanding that the text could be read by an implicit subject – a policymaker, engineer, or designer, someone with the power to implement changes. Again, I’m not saying this shouldn’t be done (it’s perfectly fair), but it's fruitful to remark on this because we could also write different types of texts.

Texts that philosophically examine technology from alternative positions – from people outside engineering/design roles. I see two possible moves. First, pluralizing different types of engineering/design engagements through philosophy. Second, one can philosophically examine these subject positions, showing how the engineer/designer perspective isn’t the only valid one.

This brings me to our last question: Why study technology specifically? For context, in our course, we discussed texts where a common theme was that technology always relates to something else – economic or societal considerations. Why can’t technology be reduced to these other domains? Why is technology worth studying precisely? Any thoughts on this difficult question?

Jordi Viader Guerrero: I have thoughts about it because we’ve previously discussed it!

Dmitry Muravyov: Yeah, it's a spoiler, sorry.

Jordi Viader Guerrero: Before addressing that question, I want to go back to the previous topic. First, regarding who reads our papers – yes, we write these conclusions with policy or design/engineering recommendations, but let’s be honest: engineers will never read our papers.

(Shout out to any engineer actually reading philosophical papers!) But overall, as Filippo noted in the course, there’s this funny thing about the 4TU approach or the Delft ethics approach apparently being “world famous,” ... yet if you go to the mechanical engineering faculty here in Delft, nobody knows about it. Or not enough people do.

Even embedded in this context, we still face the impossibility of reaching those audiences precisely because they don’t need us to continue their work. This stems from our idealized practice of writing and reflecting about engineers/designers – we imagine them in this privileged position of power and moral decision-making.

But they are probably not in this position when you think about it. Take a computer engineer at Google (most likely a ‘he’) – they likely have little power to decide how major engineering products develop and little knowledge about project aims/purposes. This reveals how our exemplary situation (to quote Annemarie Mol) is an idealization of what design/engineering practice actually does (Mol, 2021).

Not that we’re unaware of reality, but we inherit these tendencies to conceptualize design/engineering as [a situation of idealized agency] rather than a complex space of institutional/economic interests - increasingly monopolized by specific companies. That random engineer, a single person? Probably can’t do much alone.

And that’s why I am also interested in grassroots organization and labor organizing. When engineers become workers, and if we're philosophizing for workers, we are doing something different.

Dmitry Muravyov: And to jump in on this, I think that issue is pertinent to our teaching, right?

You always have those skeptical students (usually a few guys) in the audience who say: “This whole ethics of technology is all well and good, but when I get to an actual workplace, when I just want to do my job and get my paycheck...”

So, there's this whole question of labor and division of labor – the reality that you're not actually in a position to make many of these decisions. It's indeed very difficult to reconcile.

Jordi Viader Guerrero: Yeah. And to be honest, I think I’m writing for philosophers, which is both good and bad.

Good because, well, we as philosophers are always portrayed as building castles in the sky or ivory towers. But I do think there's a case to argue that we as philosophers (as ‘experts,’ though I hate that term) should engage with others doing philosophy.

But it’s also bad, right? Because philosophy should have a place in the world – in society, whatever. If we want that, we should stop writing just for philosophers. We could take the 4TU approach of writing for engineers, but then we would encounter all these problems we’ve discussed.

Now, to finally tackle that question about what technology provides us – last week in the course, we were thinking about this idea... I wouldn’t call it a concept exactly... It’s Annemarie Mol’s concept of exemplary situation, isn’t it? Maybe you can define it better than I can – I'm putting you on the spot here.

Dmitry Muravyov: Yes. Mol’s idea of the “exemplary situation” – which she borrows from her teacher Lolle Nauta and describes in her book Eating in Theory – suggests that all philosophical or conceptual thinking is underpinned by particular implicit or explicit examples.

This troubles the distinction between theory and practice – the notion that theory emerges in our minds before being applied to the world. Instead, the concept shows that the theory is always already empirical in some way, whether we acknowledge it or not. That would be my way of describing it.

Jordi Viader Guerrero: It's a very useful concept. I'd contrast it with Philip Agre's idea of “critical technical practice” – the view that engineering/design practice is always already theoretical (Agre, 1998). They arrive at similar points from opposite directions.

This relates to teaching ethics to engineers/designers: all conceptualization is tied to empirical references, even unacknowledged ones. Change the reference, and your conceptual framework shifts. If we imagine engineers as idealized moral decision-makers, we develop very different theories than if we see them as workers in corporate systems just wanting their paychecks.

Regarding why we focus specifically on technology, why take this exemplary situation over others? – It's worth debating and contesting. My view is that technology is fundamentally social. Rather than seeing it as artifacts, we should see it as social relations that precede and consolidate around technology. Technology doesn’t exist independently of society.

But this raises the question: Why not study the factory rather than the machine? And I'd say we must study both – the social/economic relations and the technology. Because technology has this... extra thing. It can detach from original contexts and generate new social relations in different contexts. So, while there's no pure social determinism of technology, nor pure technological determinism, there's something emergent about technology itself, an excess that resists reduction.

What exactly is this “something”? I'm not sure – it borders on the mystical or metaphysical...

Dmitry Muravyov: I think that's very well put. By acknowledging the limitations of both social and technological determinism, we point toward this possible secret third thing!

My way of thinking about this recognizes that ‘technology’ as a concept is quite recent – historians show the term emerged in the 19th century as a substitute for older notions like “machinery” (Schatzberg, 2018). This matters because when we say ‘technology,’ we’re already connecting things together, creating a particular conceptual knot.

In philosophy, we tend to focus on the logos side of things – the science of engineering and related disciplines. But as you've highlighted with examples about social relations and labor organizing, these aspects risk falling outside our scope if we define the philosophy of technology too narrowly.

When we understand technology as something that binds separate entities together – sciences, practices, etc – into a certain knot, we should recognize this isn’t privileged access to reality. We probably might have started somewhere else. And this “somewhere else” might have been just the way to do it.

Ultimately, there may be no privileged position to untie this knot – and ‘technology’ might serve just as well as any other.

Jordi Viader Guerrero: Absolutely. As I've told you before, I really like your metaphor of technology as a knot we choose to untangle – whether that leads us to society, the symbolic, the economy, or whatever. Personally, I’m not too concerned about disciplinary boundaries. Whether I end up being called a political philosopher or a philosopher of technology, I’m fine with that.

My interest in technology isn’t about disciplinary divisions but because it's a knot that particularly speaks to me. And that's biographical too – we belong to a generation that grew up with rapid technological development, constantly immersed, and imbued with the belief that technology matters. It is not necessarily that technology is good, but that technology is important.

For example, an idea in the 4TU approach that I agree with, which connects it with many different critical approaches in the philosophy of technology, is that technology is not the application of science. If we look at the history of science and technology, we realize that for science to develop, it also needs technology. It’s not that science precedes technology, but for Galileo to make discoveries, he needed a telescope and practice around the telescope – techniques around the telescope. So, technology also actually constitutes science, and that provides a very different narrative of what science and technology are.

Science is not this discovery because of the ingenuity of the mind that later gets translated into material artifacts. But science is a craft and a technique developed through and with material artifacts.

Technology is not the end of things, but it’s maybe in the middle, a mediator of things. But then, when you start thinking about technology always being in the middle, you start seeing its links to many other different discourses in philosophy that have put other things in the middle – the state, religion, language... and suddenly technology occupies this space that so many other things have occupied in the history of philosophy.

And I just wonder where that takes us?

Dmitry Muravyov: I think about one thing in relation to all kinds of determinisms – especially these social/technological determinism discussions in technology studies, philosophy of technology, etc. In these determinisms, one often thinks about how something (say, technology or society) is original or is the origin of something we’re interested in. But perhaps we need a different argument – that there has never been an origin in the first place. We're always in the middle. And, perhaps, this is a good place to wrap up our conversation.

Jordi Viader Guerrero: Absolutely. “There has never been an origin.” Yes. Thank you so much, Dmitry.

Dmitry Muravyov: Yeah. Thank you, Jordi.

Jordi Viader Guerrero: And thank you to the audience – hopefully, it's more than one, and hopefully, there's an engineer!

References

Agre, P.E. (1998) ‘Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI’, in Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work. Psychology Press.

Galison, P. (1997) Image and logic: a material culture of microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mol, A. (2021) Eating in theory. Durham London: Duke University Press (Experimental futures).

Schatzberg, E. (2018) Technology: Critical History of a Concept. University of Chicago Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226584027.001.0001.