Can Technology serve humanity?
Today we find ourselves amidst a rapidly-changing technological environment, in which our advances seem simultaneously to better the conditions of our living while threatening our human nature. Thus we both create and confront new problems daily.
It is not only that we often uncritically adopt technology, accepting it into our lives as a given improvement or necessity, but that we have fundamentally failed to understand what technology is. What we see—or what we fear—is an erosion of our humanity, a dissolution of ourselves.
This project aims to change that.
Essential to affecting such change is a restoration of technology to a properly human paradigm—that is, we must re-root technology in ποίησις (poiesis), which is to say, the properly creative vision which sees parts in subordinate relationship to wholes.
Coming soon
Artificial intelligence constitutes not merely a new class of tools or instruments, but a profound transformation of the semiotic environment in which human cognition, judgment, and social relations unfold.
This project aims at developing a semioethical framework for understanding and guiding the responsible development and use of AI. Semioethics begins from the recognition that all human cognition is mediated by signs, and that human beings uniquely possess metasemiosic awareness: we know that we use signs and can therefore take responsibility for how sign-relations shape our lives. Ethics, understood properly, concerns the formation of right “holdings-toward” reality—habits of judgment, attention, and action that orient persons and communities toward the good.
Details forthcoming
technological threat & opportunity
While few today live wholly unaware that technology often has negative impacts upon our lives, the depth to which we fall under its influence remains largely unnoticed. This deficient awareness follows from 1) vague definitions of technology; 2) the immediate comforts it provides us; and 3) fundamental misconceptions about our own human nature.
As such, our relationship with technology needs not only to improve, but to change in its very foundations.
Project Rationale
and aims
Theoretical Papers
Advancing Understanding
Practical initiatives to repair our relationship to technology depend upon a deepened understanding of both ourselves and the thinking, systems, and instruments by which we extend our capabilities. Thus, it is a major goal of the Humanitas Technica project to foster, develop, and collect theoretical contributions to better our understanding of this relationship.
Here you will find contributions from faculty and members alike. New additions will be made throughout the duration of the project.
The Soul and the Machine — A primer in Thomistic faculty psychology, this essay explains habits as ways the human being holds itself toward objects, cognitively and cathectically, over time. Against reductionist accounts of addiction and behavior, it interprets technology as an extension of psychic faculties, and proposes that technological environments shape moral and intellectual self-determination.
Author: Brian Kemple | Online | PDF
Disintegrating Sensation — This paper diagnoses contemporary fragmentation of sensibility produced by electric and digital media, where sight and sound detach from reality and culminate in AI-generated simulacra. Drawing on McLuhan and Thomistic accounts of inner sense, it distinguishes sensation from perception, and argues for recovering proportional integration as a condition for truth.
Author: Brian Kemple | Online | PDF
Reclaiming Communication from Information: Knowing in the Digital Age — This paper argues that digital media reduces communication to data transmission, obscuring meaning as a relational act. Tracing this model through modern science and cybernetics, it critiques informational speed and pattern-recognition culture, proposing instead that communication constitutes environments of real intelligibility essential for human survival in the digital age.
Author: Adam Pugen | Online | PDF
Semiosis in the Machine: Lost Natures and Artificial Intelligence — This article asks whether contemporary AI can truly interpret and therefore participate in semiosis at all. Using a Deelyan-Peircean account of signs and a distinction between autopoietic nature and artificial mechanism, it argues that machines simulate intelligence through degenerate triads and external constraints, warning against uncritical integration into human cognition.
Author: Brian Kemple | PDF
2024 seminar | The Difficulties of Technology
The Difficulties of Technology seminar examined how technologies—especially but not exclusively modern ones—shape human life at levels deeper than individual choice or policy. Over eight weeks, it explored technology as a formative influence, affecting the psyche, environment, biological life, culture, governance, communication, and the integrity of the human person. Rather than treating technological harms as isolated problems to be solved, the seminar framed technology as an enduring difficulty, stemming from human nature itself, requiring prudential judgment, the restoration of proper proportion, and habits whereby it is integrated into a well-lived human life. Drawing on philosophical, cultural, and practical analysis, it sought to clarify how technological power might be ordered toward genuinely human flourishing rather than allowed to dominate it.
Details | Syllabus
2025 seminar | The Opportunities of Technology
The Opportunities of Technology seminar examined technology not primarily as a source of danger, but as a field of genuine human possibility when rightly ordered. Building on classical and modern philosophical sources, the seminar explored how technē can be rooted in poiēsis—in practices of making that disclose meaning, support dwelling, and foster human flourishing. Across its eight weeks, the seminar addressed themes of building and dwelling, memory, time, economy, health, communication, and education, seeking to articulate how contemporary technologies might be integrated proportionately into personal, cultural, and institutional life rather than allowed to dominate it.
Details | Syllabus
Does digital technology alter our identities? Why (not)? How? And what can we do about it? Though a now-constant background to our existence, the nature and consequences of digital technology remains veiled, and lights are only beginning to shine through—giving us as yet an obscured and dim insight. Recent books have all provided some fruitful illumination. This panel aims to extend these explorations by asking specifically about the effects of digital technology on the development—or disintegration—of personal identity. In particular, we will focus on the questions of anonymity and pseudonymity, the (distortive) mirror of the digital environment and curated self-presentations, and the correspondent increase of divergent sexual attractions and gender identities.
15 November 2024 | Chicago, IL | Handout
In his “Philosophical Co-Operation and Intellectual Justice”, Jacques Maritain writes: “I am persuaded that if the perennial philosophy is to act again upon culture and humanity and to bear fruit in civilization, instead of becoming enclosed within the limits of a school where it would be content merely to transmit to a few rare minds the heritage of a wisdom grown perforce esoteric, the essential condition required for this change is that the environment within which this philosophy labors be itself purified by a rising of the contemplative life-force.”
What would it take, in the environment of today, to nourish this “contemplative life-force” (understanding this term somewhat more broadly than indicated by Maritain)? How might we cultivate centers of genuine intellectual pursuit in an age “distracted by distraction from distraction” and a society mired in a “life of the senses”? Often today, the digital environment provides not only endless sensory stimulation, but also an intellectual cacophony: endless voices weighing in on every issue, obscuring the heavy thoughts under a deluge of the superficial.
5 April 2025 | Ave Maria University | Handout
We are subject to a technologically-mediated fragmentation of our very souls. This fracturing is caused by an extrinsic formal causality affecting our intentional habits away from discernment of the truth. The advent, development, and integration of LLM technologies exacerbates this fragmentation a thousandfold. But neither Luddite rejection nor quiescent capitulation will affect a reintegration of the soul. Through this panel, we aim at identifying the fundamental shifts which are necessary at both a use and a design level to reform our technological paradigm in a manner fitting to and therefore complementary to the nature of the human soul.
31 October 2025 | Notre Dame University | Handout
seminars,
conferences,
Whitepapers
overview
understanding technology
Humanitas Technica is a multifaceted project that aims to re-cast the conversation concerning technology: not only for those in academic inquiry, but for everyone who uses technology, and especially those who create it. This project includes seminars, the publication of journals, books, and multimedia productions: audio lectures, podcasts, and videos. If we succeed in spreading this re-conceptualization, we may affect a proper resolution of technology to human existence.
Timeline
Though it may extend indefinitely, the initial projection for Humanitas Technica is from 2024 August–September 2026.
Conversation
At the heart of the project is an on-going conversation in which participants share their insights and engage in fruitful discussion.
Initiatives
Structuring the project are major initiatives, such as the 2024 seminar and participation in conferences and workshops.
Philosophy
The project undertakes to integrate perennial philosophical wisdom with technological acumen and practice.
