Machine, Body And Culture

Humanoid robot'Sophia' is presented during the'Impact 2018' digital economy forum on June 13, 2018 in Krakow, Poland. Georges Canguilhem was a French philosopher and physician who worked on the question of technological and automaton bodies, confirming that the model of the human body is neither purely physical, nor purely mechanical, writing in "Machine and Organism": Indeed, the problem of the relations between machine and organism has generally been studied only in one direction: almost always, the attempt has been to explain the structure and function of the organism on the basis of the structure and function of an already-constructed machine. Only rarely has anyone sought to understand the very construction of the machine on the basis of the structure and function of the organism. Canguilhem looks to René Descartes who uses machines to explain bodies as matter born from technology which gave way to a tradition of philosophers and scientists using mechanical models to explain organisms. Canguilhem demonstrates how the human body during the Industrial Revolution was mediated as if it were a machine in the effort to make more efficient the labor process.