Green Bay, WI – Scholars at the Aquinas Institute announced the discovery today of a long lost Aristotelian treatise entitled Dē Technologiā (Latin) or Peri Techne (Greek) complete as well as a full commentary by St. Thomas Aquinas. Highly inexplicable in its content, continuing discussions about how technology works, as well its relationships to the soul, ethics, and politics, Dē Technologiā is already being decried as a hoax for its seeming historical anaphorisms, which have Aristotle discussing the acquisition of knowledge by means of “Googlan” and the effects of social interaction of some service called “Biblíonprosopon.”
We’re skeptical too, although Dr. John Mortensen, who originally discovered this long-lost text, insists on its authenticity. “We were surprised too,” he admitts, “Aristotle seems to be saying some things so pertinent to the modern age in this work, and to it alone, that many don’t believe me, but the text speaks for itself.” Although neither Dr. Mortensen nor the Aquinas Institute has as of yet released the entire text for the public to study, Mortensen shared several of Aristotle’s most interesting observations in the work. “First off,” he told IIT, “Aristotle says there is a virtue of the proper mean with regard to the volume of all-school emails one sends out. Most interestingly, though, Aquinas disagrees with Aristotle’s qualification that this mean is proportional to the responsibilities which might necessitate such activity alone. Aquinas, in his commentary on the work, says that the perfection with regard to the activity of emailing all your classmates at once depends also on one’s ethos and the number of such emails one has sent in the past. If you’ve sent a lot in the past, it would be virtuous for you to continue sending emails in like quantity. However, if you have not done virtue would entail writing a lot fewer, regardless of what your external circumstances might seem to require.”
Interestingly also, when Aristotle considers what the most perfect virtue with regard to technology as a whole might be, it’s phrased almost verbatim as WCC’s Technology Policy, something that even for us seems to be too much of a coincidence to accept as anything but one. Such is also the case with another interesting detail in the work, where Aristotle references “irkutskicetruckers.com” and “babylonbee.com” as an example of the usage of technology related to perpetuating the goods expressed in the Poetics (another of his works).
Dr. Mortensen also has not told anyone where or how he discovered Dē Technologiā and Aquinas’ commentary on it although the Aquinas Institute plans to release it on their website “in the near future.”