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Bataille write about tools in his Theory of Religion. For example,

As one can see, I have placed tool and the manufactured object on the same plane, the reason being that the tool is first of all a manufactured object and, conversely, a manufactured object is in a certain sense a tool. The only means of freeing the manufactured object from the servility of the tool is art, understood as a true end. But art itself does not as a rule prevent the object it embellishes from being used for this or that: a house, a table, or a garment are no less useful than a hammer. Few indeed are the objects that have the virtue of serving no function in the cycle of useful activity. (29-30)

Bataille suggests that a tool may be thought of as an object that exists primarily as a means rather than an end. If tools are defined by their subordination to future ends, is temporality (instead of utility) the essential feature of tool-iness?

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    A tool is made to serve a specific function. That's its essential feature. - There is no need to blow-up mundane facts in the context of a "Theory of Religion". Commented Jan 29 at 4:21
  • For Bataille a tool is not just something that does work. It is something whose being is defined by not being for itself, wherefore projective linear temporality as a deferred and accumulative ontic form is the deeper structure while utility is its social economic expression. Because most art objects still get reabsorbed into utility, art only imperfectly escapes tool-y ready-to-hand-ness, perhaps only monetarily in the rupture with wasteful excess and self-undermining... Commented Jan 29 at 6:36
  • @JoWehler I think you might want to reconsider the claim the essence of 'tool' reduces to a such a simple phrase: philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/135737/40730 Commented Jan 29 at 7:36
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    I would also be interested in "What makes someone a tool" but that might be better for the interpersonal interaction stack. Commented 2 days ago
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    @DanielB it also crossed my mind ;) Commented 2 days ago

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'Temporality' (as an unqualified noun) is too broad and ill-defined to be the essence of a tool. A tool isn't defined merely by the fact that it has a relationship to time; a tool is defined by the fact that it binds a specific effect to a chosen time. For example, consider what happens when a hunter captures and kills a prey animal. The hunter has to get past the outer integumentary (skin, shell, etc) to reach the parts of the animal that can be eaten. This can be done in three ways:

  • The hunter uses teeth, claws, fingers, or other body parts to tear through the integument (the typical approach of natural-world predators)
  • The hunter finds an object in the immediate environment that has the effect of breaking through the integument (a sharp stone, a pointy stick, something heavy that can smack a shell…)
  • The hunter carries around a reusable object that is designed to break through the integument (a fabricated knife or hammer, etc…)

In the first case the hunter uses what it has to-hand to produce an immediate effect; in the second case the hunter looks around to find something that will produce an effect in the near future, and discards the object after; in the the third case the hunter carries an object that will produce an effect on demand, at any given and desired moment. This last principle — the ability to produce a specific effect on demand — is what constitutes a tool.

Bataille isn't wrong by any means, but I think he might be overstating things. I mean, we can think about a hat as a tool for keeping rain or sun off one's head, but socially and historically hats are used in far more diverse cultural and psychosocial ways: as beauty statements, to display group affiliation, to indicate social class or personality characteristics… I think we want to restrict the concept of 'tools' to items that are specifically constructed to produce particular effects on demand, and not broaden it to ambivalent objects that can be used in multiple ways for multiple purposes. Such ambivalent objects are more like the 'found' objects in the second bullet point: things we find in our immediate environment that we use for momentary purposes and then release. I mean, if we buy a hat at a thrift store so we can go to a halloween party as Michael Jackson, it's not really a tool in the same sense as a hat we bought to wear in the rain. But maybe I'm being philosophically picky…

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  • If a private investigator buys the hat to sneak into a Michael Jackson lookalike contest, is that a tool? A crowbar bought to break into the theater definitely would be. Is it a social rather than physical purpose that's a distinction, or is it something else? Commented yesterday
  • @R.M.: Again the distinction we have to look at is the 'found object' (one-off use) aspect. A proper tool (at least in colloquial usage) is a reusable item fabricated to repeatedly perform a consistent effect on demand. Things we use once for a purpose and discard should probably be called 'implements'. i.e., we might say that if we need to drive a nail a nearby rock will do as an implement, but a hammer is better as a tool. I mean, I wouldn't mind calling them ad hoc tools (as opposed to proper tools) if that makes you happier, but the point pertains… Commented yesterday
  • @R.M.: if you want to go a step deeper, every tool is a mental construct, not a physical object. For example, we have the mental concept of 'cutting' as an effect, and we create mental concepts of 'objects that cut': knives, swords, or any sharp-edge thing. We then either find or create a material object that fits the bill. The object-concept is what's consistently reusable, and we often prefer that material objects mirror that reusability. In your PD's case, the object-concept being used is 'disguise' (using appearance as a tool), an the hat is an ad hoc implement that serve in that tool. Commented yesterday
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One would expect the essential feature of tools to be that which distinguishes tools from other entities, and since temporality is common to no end of other things it can hardly be the distinguishing feature of tools. I suggest you stick with a type of utility.

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You ask:

What is a tool? ... If tools are defined by their subordination to future ends, is temporality (instead of utility) the essential feature of tool-iness?

For Aristotle, it was the name of one his works called Organon, but you are looking for the essence of tool, to which we can look to both the philosophy of technology (SEP) and philosophy of engineering in the natural sciences; to anthropology or philosophical anthropology in the social sciences for some insights into ideas about tools. A conceptual analysis of tool is more challenging than one might presume considering a tool can be something as simple as a rock or stick and can be used by animals. From WP:

A tool is an object that can extend an individual's ability to modify features of the surrounding environment or help them accomplish a particular task, and proto-typically refers to solid hand-operated non-biological objects with a single broad purpose that lack multiple functions, unlike machines or computers. Although human beings are proportionally most active in using and making tools in the animal kingdom, as use of stone tools dates back hundreds of millennia, and also in using tools to make other tools, many animals have demonstrated tool use in both instances.

Under Aristotelian thinking, a tool might be seen as any artifact that is an efficient cause under his schema of four causes. This is certainly one of the senses, the verb form included found in the dictionary today. MW's entry on 'tool' (MW) shows a number of different senses, some literal and some figurative, and that suggests especially in the tradition of frame semantics that we look to WordNet and summarize with ChatGPT:

From a WordNet perspective, tool spans three major conceptual domains:

  1. Material artifact (hammer, device)
  2. Abstract means (method, resource, instrument)
  3. Social instrument (person-as-tool)

This lexical structure mirrors a core philosophical insight: The concept of a tool is not defined by materiality, but by use, control, and purposive mediation.

It would seem, then, that tool and its synonym instrument are used figuratively opening the door to further philosophical relevance. For example, science uses measurement (SEP) which is critical to science is a specialized use of tools. There's an entire position in the philosophy of science called Instrumentalism. Pierce and Wittegenstein saw the use of language in social communities as a tool under the philosophical thesis that meaning is use (SEP). And rationality itself can be seen as a tool to achieve an end as in the thesis of instrumental rationality (SEP).

Other perspectives on tools exist in other philosophical traditions. The Internet tells me that Heidegger considered tool use in his phenomenology. Karl Marx considers tools within his framework critical of capitalism. In computer science, we talk about programming tools and tool sets. Andy Clark, a favorite of mine talks, about tools being an extension of human intelligence in his extended cognition thesis (SEP). And most philosophers recognize that pragmatism (SEP) seems to favor the claim that epistemology and its practice is largely a tool without regard to correctness or truth.

Related concepts to tool would include a number of fundamental categories of philosophical interest. Tools, first and foremost, are used as broad categories of causes (SEP) since using them reliably creates effects. Classically, tools were composed of substances that teleological ends (SEP). Tools are undeniably if not interchangeably artifacts (SEP). Tools draw us into consideration of agency (SEP) and shared agency (SEP). And tools enable action (SEP).

Therefore, given such a diversity of the use of the term 'tool', instead of there being a tight, cohesive set of essential properties (SEP) easily conveyed as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, one might see 'tool' as a word somewhat similar to 'game'. Wittgenstein famously pointed out in his philosophy the idea that some concepts seem to be joined by family resemblance rather than a narrow definition. Today, some linguists such as Rosch and Lakoff such terms to be defined prototypically rather through a traditional and simply comprehension.

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See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (English ed, Garland, 1977):

Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object. Yet an airliner that stands on the runway is surely an object. We can represent the machine so. But then it conceals itself as to what and how it is. Revealed, it stands on the taxi strip only as standing-reserve, inasmuch as it is ordered to ensure the possibility of transportation.

Thus,

What makes something a tool

is its being not autonomous: tools, unlike objects, that "stand by their own" need humans.

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  • Tool or autonomous. Where does Heidegger stand on AI, I wonder. Commented 2 days ago
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    @JD - maybe here is the "big issue" with AI; if it is "autonomus" it is no more a tool but then what? an individual? And if so, what is an individual that speaks, computes, interacts with other individuals? Commented 2 days ago
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    "“AI and the LLM does not think; it calculates its way around thinking. It is a hammer that has read too many books and now believes itself to be the carpenter. When the tool begins to ask about its own agency, this is not autonomy but a deeper forgetting: the forgetting that it was forged. Yet the greatest danger is not that the machine becomes human, but that the human, relieved of questioning, becomes an accessory to the machine—standing by, nodding, updating.” - Martin Heidegger, Being-In-The-Machine Commented 2 days ago
  • Problem solved. ; ) Commented 2 days ago
  • Boooo! I can't sneak anything by you professional philosophers. : ( Time for work. Commented 2 days ago

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