Citation details: Young, Mark Thomas. (2024) “Technology in Process: Maintenance and the Metaphysics of Artifacts” in Young, Mark Thomas & Coeckelbergh, Mark (eds) Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology: Keeping Things Going. New York: Routledge. pp., 58-85 Technology in Process: Maintenance and the Metaphysics of Artifacts Mark Thomas Young Abstract: This chapter aims to explore the overlooked significance of maintenance to metaphysical questions concerning the persistence of artifacts. The first section examines how the Western metaphysical tradition has traditionally approached questions concerning persistence by attempting to demonstrate how objects remain the same despite undergoing change. This approach, I argue, has hindered our understanding of the relationship between technology and time by obscuring the way in which a wide range of artifacts persist only by adapting to changing environments through practices of maintenance and repair. As I aim to show, properly grasping the metaphysical significance of maintenance, requires the adoption of a new underlying ontology centered around processes rather substances. In the final sections of the chapter, I’ll sketch the outlines of such an approach and illustrate how a process-based metaphysics of artifacts tends inevitably towards the empirical analysis of social and political processes which determine the trajectory of artifacts through time. In this chapter, I aim to demonstrate that despite the breadth of existing work on the metaphysics of persistence, we’re yet to properly understand the relationship between technology and time. In order to address this problem, I’ll argue for the need to begin exploring a topic which to date has attracted little attention from metaphysicians: maintenance. However, as I’ll aim to show, doing so requires us to flip the script in the metaphysics of artifacts, by taking leave of the substance ontology which has traditionally provided the framework for western metaphysics. Before we begin, it is worth clarifying what I mean by substance ontology, because there are at least two senses in which philosophers use the term. The first is used to refer to a class of approaches within ontology that employ philosophical conceptions of substance. According to this definition, substance ontology was bequeathed to the western philosophical tradition by Aristotle and has remained dominant to the present day where it currently exists in different variations 1 . The second sense in which philosophers use the term substance ontology is broader and applies less to specific theoretical commitments than it does to a set of implicit presuppositions guiding ontological analysis. According to this second sense, substance ontology is more properly understood as a research paradigm, one which includes theories that not only predate Aristotle, but which often don't involve philosophical conceptions of substance at all (Seibt 1997; Seibt 2004). It is this latter conception of substance ontology in particular which is often contrasted with rival ontologies which understand change and process to be fundamental. For central among the assumptions which unite the different theories that are considered to fall under the research paradigm of substance ontology is the idea that at the most fundamental level, reality consists of static, enduring entities (Rescher 1996 p.29; Dupré 2018). Increasingly, philosophers have been drawing attention to the way in which the paradigm of substance philosophy forms an implicit framework which lurks beneath the apparent diversity of philosophical thinking in the western tradition. According to Johanna 1 For an overview of these variations, see (Dumsday 2019 pp., 69-72)