Stortplaats Aarde?

This study is an attempt to explore the role things play in the lives of humans and in society. The aim of the thesis is to change our relation with things, or else the earth will become a giant dump. The first chapter describes the phenomenological tradition of the philosophy of technology. The most important critique to be made of the classical approach is that the philosophers reduce technology to its conditions of possibility and thereby fail to connect with concrete technological artifacts. The second part of the study presents the essential ideas of contemporary philosophers of technology. By analyzing their works it turns out that ‘things’ mediate the relation between humans and their world on all sorts of levels. The theories provide a framework for thinking from the perspective of things and for a vision on technology that Verbeek in What Things Do calls a "postphenomenological perspective”. The thesis then shows how this new perspective can be of practical value. In order to take things seriously, we must not only change our perspective on things, but our behavior as well.