Draft:Vincent Blok

Vincent Blok (born 30 July 1970, in Scheveningen) is professor at the Wageningen University, specialised in philosophy of technology, environmental philosophy and responsible innovation, scientific director of the 4TU Centre for Ethics of Technology , a collaboration of the four Technical Universities in the Netherlands, and project leader of the AI for Sustainable Food Systems laboratory, that researches the ethical, legal and social aspets (ELSA) of AI. In his research, Blok reflects on the meaning of contemporary disruptive events like digitalisation and global warming for the human condition and its environment from a continental philosophical perspective. He is also member of the boad of the Society for Philosopohy and Technology and associate editor of various academic journals, such as Philosophy & Technology, Journal of Responsible Innovation and Philosophy of Management. Blok's philosophy of technology has been described as "One of the most daring attempts to think through the general impact of technology".

Education
Blok studied philosophy with a.o Wouter Oudemans, Gerard Visser and Herman Philipse at Leiden University. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the philosophical method of Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger, under the supervision of Wouter Oudemans, and obtained his PhD in 2005. From 2006-2010, Blok was CEO of the Louis Bolk Institute, a research institute in the field of sustainable agriculture, nutrition and health care.

Theories and Methods
Blok works on the intersection between philosophy of technology and philosophical method. His dissertation, published in 2005, tried to answer the question how philosophers can reflect on the age of technology if their own way of doing philosophy is already affected by technology. To answer this question, he studied the philosophy of technology of Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger. In the following years, he wrote a monograph on the philosophy of technology of Ernst Jünger (2017). Subsequently, here wrote a monograph on Heidegger's philosophical method (2019), that "offers an impressive and, in all likelihood, sustainable contribution to the discourse on method in contemporary philosophy". Later he became more critical about Heidegger's conceptualization of the technological world as a reservoir of resources that is present for exploitation, as it overlooks the role of concrete disruptive innovations. At the same time, he was critical about the pure focus on artefacts and practices in many contemporary philosophies of technology. They miss that new artefacts like AI driven applications are embedded in a particular ontological structure of the World. In order to integrate both perspectives, he developed a concept of ecological hermeneutic phenomenology that considers both the physical level of new technologies - the innovation process leading to the emergence of new disruptive technologies - and the meta-physical level of the ontological structure of the World in which these technologies are embedded.

In this context, he also developed a philosophy of innovation to broaden the concept of technology and consider the process-dimension of technological evolution next to the outcome-dimension of innovation. He also opened a philosophical perspective on biomimicry as a new paradigm of sustainable technology in the Anthropocene, that contributed to the further development of philosophy of sustainable technology.

Books in English
- Blok, V. (2017), ''Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology. Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene'' (Routledge)

- Blok, V. (2019), Heidegger’s Concept of philosophical Method (Routledge)

- Blok, V. (2021), ''The Critique of Management. Toward a Philosophy and Ethics of Business Management'' (Routledge)

- Blok, V. (2023), Philosophy of Technology in the Digital Age. The datafication of the World, the homo virtualis, and the capacity of technological innovations to set the World free (Wageningen University)

Books in Dutch
- Blok, V. (2005), ''Rondom de vloedlijn. Filosofie en kunst in het machinale tijdperk. Een confrontatie tussen Heidegger en Jünger (''Aspect)

- Blok, V. (2022), ''Van wereld naar aarde. Filosofische ecologie van een bedreigde planeet'' (Boom, in Dutch).

Articles
Blok published numerous articles that are published open access and available via Academia or Researchgate