Date of Award
2014
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Philosophy
First Advisor
Ethics and Political Philosophy
Second Advisor
Copyright © 2014 Bryan Kibbe
Third Advisor
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Abstract
My thesis is that the concept and practice of repair, properly understood and circumscribed, can serve to: (1) specify a responsibility to care for individuals who are cognitively dependent on particular configurations of technologies and suffer cognitively significant harms following damage to various technologies, and (2) to act as a standard by which to regulate the design, implementation, and selection of technologies available for human use and appropriation. I begin (Chapters One and Two) by providing a critical investigation of the concept and practice of repair. In Chapters Three and Four, I set forth a proposal to consider what I term "cognitive-agentic repair" as the mindful mending of agentic skills/autonomy competency by way of those constitutive cognitive processes that are extended/situated in objects and arrangements of objects that constitute particular material spaces and places (home, workplace). As such, I argue that when either intentional or unintentional harms are committed against individuals who are cognitively situated in the world, there is a prima facie responsibility to attempt the specific act of cognitive-agentic repair so as to support the possibility of personal autonomy. To justify this ethical responsibility, I advance an account of human persons that is grounded in both feminist philosophy and recent work in the cognitive sciences on the hypotheses of extended and embedded cognition. I then move to consider how my account of repair can constructively inform the design, implementation, and selection of particular technologies by acting as a regulative standard. This analysis is divided into two parts: (1) a theoretical construction that utilizes work in the philosophy of technology to distinguish the pattern of those technologies that would facilitate cognitive-agentic repair (Chapter Five) and (2) a practical application to telemedical/telehealth technologies (Chapter Six).
Recommended Citation
Kibbe, Bryan, "Mindful Mending: The Repair of Thought and Action Amidst Technologies" (2014). Dissertations. 1093.
https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1093
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2014 Bryan Kibbe
