ABSTRACT
Hermeneutic Technology Assessment needs to confront the challenge of whether it merely seeks to contextualize and understand technological programs and visions, or whether it can take the approaches of Gadamer or Riceour directly to technical works, unmediated by texts. A second challenge is to identify the critical, if not normative moment in the hermeneutic process of questioning oneself in the horizon of the technical work as a world. To meet these challenges, the outlines of a general program are brought to four machines which shadow their artefactual counterparts – ranging from Lewis Mumford‘s megamachines that built the pyramids to the soft machines of nanotechnology.
