- Instructor
- Dr. Michael J. Reno, Senior Lecturer of Philosophy
Classics, Philosophy, and Religion - Meets
- MWF 10:00–10:50, James Farmer Hall 106A
- Office
- 237 James Farmer Hall
- Office hours
- MWF 12:00–2:00, or by appointment
- mreno@umw.edu
- Term
- August 24 – December 4, 2026
Course Description
Technologies of various kinds mediate nearly all our relationships. From AI to social networks to bio-hacking, we are facing more choices not only about how to govern our relationships with other people, but also about how to view and modify our relationships with our own psyches and even our own bodies. In this course we will examine some philosophical issues raised by contemporary technologies. Our first task, however, is actually determining which of these topics and issues we want to discuss.
In the past, the questions were metaphysical and epistemological—having to do with what exists (what is technology? who are you? what kind of thing are you? what is the difference between the natural and the artificial?) and with what we know (what does a platform actually know about you? about us? does dependence on algorithms change the nature of knowledge itself? how can an algorithm perpetuate racism?). Some technologies prompted aesthetic questions (can a TikTok video be art? does art challenge or reproduce the rule of technological artifacts?), ethical ones (does our current energy system mean we are acting immorally toward future generations?), and political ones (given automation, do we need a new economic system, or can we alter this one to deal with automation's implications?). Many of the technologies and positions we discuss will raise questions proper to all of these areas at once.
In addition to raising these questions, we will engage the technologies themselves. Each week we read some theory—sometimes very general, sometimes about a very specific device or system—and also do our own research. Sometimes that means using a technology ourselves; other times it means relying on others' reports of and engagements with it. Each week the goal is to produce something informed both by the theory and by the specific technology in question. The process culminates in a self-directed final project that engages some contemporary technology critically. We will begin with some basic discussion about defining technology and then a difficult but rewarding piece by Heidegger called “The Question Concerning Technology.”
Course Goals
Students succeeding in this course will be able to:
- Examine and experiment with new software, hardware, and other technologies with a critical mind.
- Produce and express evidence, argument, and data using multiple media—writing and speaking, but also visual media.
- Use theoretical positions to understand and assess technologies and their social import, and reciprocally, use existing technologies to examine the plausibility of theoretical positions about technology.
Digital Intensive goals
These intersect with the general goals of courses designated Digital Intensive:
- Students will successfully locate and critically evaluate information using the Internet, library databases, and other digital tools.
- Students will use digital tools to safely, ethically, and effectively produce and exchange information and ideas.
- Students will creatively adapt to emerging and evolving technology.
Readings and Online Elements
I know this is a lot to deal with at once. I will be patient.
1. Everything lives on the course website: philtech2026.michaelreno.org.
Readings, prompts, and the schedule are posted here. The Docket is the running log of what we actually did and what is coming next—check it after class because it will tell you what's happening in the next class while summarizing what happened before.
2. Fill out the opening survey
Open the survey — eight questions, about four minutes. We start it in class on the first day; finish it by Friday, August 28. It asks what draws you to technology and what worries you about it. I use the answers to build the second half of the course—see the schedule below.
3. Get a domain
You will build a website for this course. That’s where you’ll put your blog posts and interact with your colleagues’ blogs. You will sign up through UMW Domain of One's Own. There are help guides and live help if this feels overwhelming, and an instructor from the Digital Knowledge Center will visit class to walk through it—you may want to wait for that visit before setting yours up.
4. Tell me where it is
Once your site is running, I will send out a survey for you to submit your blog and feed URL so I can syndicate your posts to the Student Feeds page. Your posts stay on your site; this site just gathers them.
Grading and Assignments
| Weight | Component |
|---|---|
| 30% | Weekly blog entries and replies |
| 15% | Attendance and class participation |
| 30% | Three mini-projects (10% each) |
| 20% | Final project |
| 5% | Final project presentation |
Weekly blog entries and replies — 30%
Each student keeps their own site through Domain of One's Own. You will write a weekly entry and comment on others' entries. I will usually give you a prompt on the Prompts page, but I may not—and you can always choose your own topic. The idea is an ongoing, public-facing journal about the theoretical and practical issues raised in the readings and discussions. We will talk more about this during the first week.
Attendance and participation — 15%
Come to class and have something to say, even if it is a question about the reading or about another student's post. We will make this a discussion as much as possible, and that requires your active involvement. It may also include in-class writing.
Mini-projects — 30% (10% each)
Most weeks we spend at least part of a class working on a specific activity tied to course themes. At least two weeks before each due date I post the assignment sheet, which gives a general guide to possible projects and what must be turned in. The idea is that you apply the theoretical material to a contemporary technology. A mini-project can be done with the technology in question, or can take the form of a more traditional write-up connecting the technology to our readings.
Final project — 25% total
Each student designs their own final project under general guidelines: 20% for the project in its final form, 5% for a short in-class presentation during the last two weeks. Other students give live feedback. Project ideas and guidelines will be posted here as we get closer.
Schedule
How this schedule works. The first four weeks are fixed: we start with Heidegger, because almost everything else in the course is a reply to him, an evasion of him, or an argument that he asked the wrong question. Everything after Week 4 is not set yet. I build it from what this class turns out to care about—from the opening survey, from your blog posts, and from the arguments we actually have. Units get named and dated on The Docket as we fix them. The candidate topics below are where I expect us to go, not a promise.
Unit I — What Is Technology? (Weeks 1–4)
| Date | Reading due | In class & due |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 — Defining technology | ||
| Mon 8/24 | Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950) — we read it together in class; nothing to do beforehand | Three things. We go over this syllabus. We read Bradbury, and you write on him for a few minutes. Then we start the opening survey. |
| Wed 8/26 | Val Dusek, “What Is Technology?” | Three definitions of technology. Domain of One's Own walk-through. |
| Fri 8/28 | Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”, pp. 3–6 | The instrumental and anthropological definition. Opening survey due. First blog post due Sunday. |
| Week 2 — Revealing and standing reserve | ||
| Mon 8/31 | QCT, pp. 6–12 — the four causes through bringing-forth (poiesis) | Causality, the silver chalice, and techne. |
| Wed 9/2 | QCT, pp. 12–18 — techne and revealing, challenging-forth, the Rhine (p. 16), standing-reserveAlongside: Hölderlin’s Rhine hymn · images of the river dammed · the August 2026 record-low reporting — links on The Docket. | The windmill and the hydroelectric plant. Standing reserve (Bestand). [DKC visit — TBD.] |
| Fri 9/4 | QCT, pp. 19–25 — Enframing (Ge-stell) named, and Enframing as a destining | Enframing, destining, and the question of freedom. Blog post due Sunday. |
| Week 3 — The danger and the saving power (no class Mon 9/7, Labor Day) | ||
| Wed 9/9 | QCT, pp. 25–28 — freedom, and the danger | The danger. Mini-project 1 assignment distributed. |
| Fri 9/11 | QCT, pp. 28–35 — the saving power, techne and the arts, the closing questionAlongside: Hölderlin, “Patmos” — the poem Heidegger is quoting at p. 28. Link on The Docket. | The saving power, and the turn to art. Blog post due Sunday. |
| Week 4 — Testing the apparatus | ||
| Mon 9/14 | Kate Soper, Nature, excerpt | Nature and artifice—what the word “natural” is doing. |
| Wed 9/16 | No new reading | Workshop: run the QCT apparatus on one live technology of your choosing. |
| Fri 9/18 | — | Mini-project 1 due. Survey results posted. We set Unit II together. |
Weeks 5–13 — Set with the class
Three or four units, chosen and sequenced from the survey and from the arguments we have in the first month. Each gets dated on The Docket at least one week ahead. These are the live candidates (will update after the survey).
- Attention, conspiracy, and the feed — Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine; alienation and information flood; conspiracy as an alternative-reality game.
- Generative AI and writing — Seymour, “We Are All Scripturient”; what writing is for when a machine does it competently; whether it matters that anyone reads you.
- Panoptic power and the racialized body — Foucault, “Panopticism”; Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology; Julia Angwin, Dragnet Nation.
- Race and the algorithm — Lundy Braun, Breathing Race into the Machine; Sandvig et al., “When the Algorithm Itself Is a Racist.”
- Automation, entertainment, and control — Marcuse, “The New Forms of Control”; Van Parijs and Vanderborght, Basic Income.
- AI and the economy — what automation does to work, and whether this is the same question Marcuse was asking or a different one. Readings TBD.
- Transhumanism and cyborgs — Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”; Savulescu on enhancement; Vivienne Ming, “Why I'm Turning My Son into a Cyborg”; Gillett, “Cyborgs and Moral Identity.”
- Therapy vs. enhancement, and bio-hacking — whether the distinction survives contact with actual practice, and what the sub-culture is actually after.
- Genetic modification — Comstock, “Ethics and Genetically Modified Food”; Shriver and McConnachie on modifying livestock for welfare.
- Energy, climate, and future generations — what we owe people who do not exist yet, and whether the energy system makes that question moot.
Want something that is not on this list? Say so—in class, in the survey, or in a blog post. Units have been added that way before.
Fixed points
These do not move, whatever we decide to read.
| Date | What |
|---|---|
| Fri 8/28 | Opening survey due |
| Fri 9/18 | Mini-project 1 due |
| Week of 10/19 | Mini-project 2 due (exact date on The Docket) |
| Week of 11/16 | Mini-project 3 due (exact date on The Docket) |
| Mon 11/23 | Final project work day — proposal and plan in hand |
| Mon 11/30 | Final project presentations begin |
| Wed 12/2 | Final project presentations |
| Fri 12/4 | Final project presentations — last day of class |
Days we do not meet: Labor Day, Mon 9/7 · Fall break, Mon 10/12 · Thanksgiving, Wed 11/25 and Fri 11/27.
Policies
Accommodation
People learn differently. Meet with me early on if you have a documented disability and require accommodation, or if you have learning styles you are not sure have been met in the past. I will do my best to adapt. If you wish to request specific accommodations you should also contact the Office of Disability Resources in Seacobeck 005, reachable at 540-654-1266. All information, whether discussed with me or with that office, is kept confidential.
Title IX
University of Mary Washington faculty are committed to supporting students and upholding the University's Policy on Sexual and Gender Based Harassment and Other Forms of Interpersonal Violence. Under Title IX and this Policy, discrimination based upon sex or gender is prohibited. If you experience an incident of sex- or gender-based discrimination, we encourage you to report it. While you may talk to me, understand that as a “Responsible Employee” of the University I must report to UMW's Title IX Coordinator what you share. Confidential resources are available.
Generative AI in this course
By default, you may use generative AI in this course, and in some weeks you will be asked to. BUT, some assignments I will explicitly ask you to refrain from AI use. In general, what you may not do is hand in its output as though it were your thinking. Two rules cover nearly every case: disclose what you used and what you used it for, in a line at the bottom of the post or project; and be able to account for every claim you turn in—if you cannot explain why a sentence is there, it does not belong to you and should not be submitted. Undisclosed use is an honor code matter. Beyond that, a course about technology in which we refused to touch the technology would be a strange course, and part of the work here is finding out, concretely, what these systems are good at and where they fail. If in doubt whether your AI use is OK and/or properly cited, ASK me!