The 
Theatre 
of 
Engineers

Hui Yuk (1)

1 Center for Cultural Studies Department of Computing

This 
paper 
is 
a 
reflection
 on
 what
 Tim
 Berners‐Lee
 calls
 'philosophical
 engineers'
 and
 propose
 that
 one
 should
 place
 this
 term
 in
 a
 broader
 philosophical
 discourse, 
proposed
 here
 as
 a
 theatre
 (theatron).
 This
 paper
 wants
 to
 show
 that
 within
 the
 theatre
 of
 engineers, 
the
 material
 transformation
 of
 the
 stage
 demands
 new
 way
 of
 acting
 today, 
which
 goes
 beyond
 what
 Berners‐Lee's
 philosophical 
engineering 
(Berners‐Lee
 takes
 a
 limited
 understanding
 of
 philosophy
 here, 
 as
 physics
 was
 considered
 to
 be
 practical
 philosophy).
 Craftsmen,
 the
 first
 generation
 engineers, 
have
 been
 philosophical
 in
 the
 beginning,
described
 by
 Aristotle
 in
 the
 four
 causes. 
Making
 is
 poetic
 (poesis), 
the
 forms
 come
 out
 of
 matter
 through
 touch
 and
 vision.
The
 age
 of
 Enlightenment
 depicted
 by
 Denis
 Diderot
 in
 Encyclopaedia 
serves
 as
 a
 transition
 to
 the
 age
 of
 mechanical
reproduction, 
which
 foreground
 the
 emergence
 of
 modern
 engineers,
 who
 makes
 special
 crafts: 
machines
 which
 produce
 crafts. 
In
 such
 a
 transition,
 we
 see
 the
 shift
 in
 the
 roles
 of
 the
 engineers
 in
 its
 ancient
 form
 to
 the
 present
 model
 through
 the
 mediation
 of
 machines, in which we see the drift from the poetic bringing-forth of matter through forms to a rational engineering principle, form over matter, ontologies over things.

Keywords: philosophical engineering

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Philosophy; Cognitive science; Computer science

Hui Yuk. The 
Theatre 
of 
Engineers: Materialism
 on 
an 
uncanny
 stage

.. Atelier Philosophie et Ingénierie. Le formel face à l'histoire, la technologie et la matérialité (IC2011), May 2011, Chambéry, France. pp.2. ⟨hal-00610784⟩