Philosophy of technology
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The philosophy of technology is a philosophical field dedicated to studying the nature of technology and its social effects.
Considered under the rubric of the Greek term techne (art, or craft knowledge), the philosophy of technology goes to the very roots of Western philosophy. In his Republic, Plato sees techne as the basis for the philosophers' proper rule in the city. In the Nicomachean Ethics (Book 6), Aristotle describes techne as one of the four ways that we can know about the world. The Stoics argued that virtue is a kind of techne based upon a proper understanding of the universe.
Whereas 19th Century philosophers such as Karl Marx were philosophically interested in tools and techniques, the most prominent 20th century philosophers to directly address modern technology were John Dewey and Martin Heidegger. Both saw technology as central to modern life, although (to speak roughly) Dewey was optimistic about the role of technology, Heidegger pessimistic. Dewey's work on technology was dispersed throughout his corpus, while Heidegger's major work on technology may be found in The Question Concerning Technology.
In the 1960's, Marshall McLuhan became a major radical voice in the field, with such works as The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
Major contemporary philosophers of technology include Jean Baudrillard, Albert Borgmann, Andrew Feenberg, Donna Haraway, Larry Hickman, Don Ihde, Paul Levinson, Carl Mitcham, Gilbert Simondon, and Bernard Stiegler.
While a number of important individual works were published in the second half of the twentieth century, Paul Durbin has identified two books published at the turn of the century as marking the development of the philosophy of technology as an academic subdiscipline with canonical texts. These were Technology and the Good Life (2000), edited by Eric Higgs and American Philosophy of Technology (2001) by Hans Achterhuis. [1]
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[edit] Books
- Hans Achterhuis American Philosophy of Technology (2001)
- Jan Kyrre Berg-Olsen and Evan Selinger. Philosophy of Technology: 5 Questions. New York: Automatic Press / VIP, 2006.[2]
- Borgmann, Albert. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. 1984. University of Chicago Press.
- Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. 1964. Vintage Books.
- Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology. 1999. Routledge Press.
- Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. 1977. Harper and Row.
- Hickman, Larry. John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology. 1992. Indiana University Press.
- Eric Higgs, Andrew Light and David Strong, Technology and the Good Life Chicago University Press, (2000).
- David M. Kaplan, ed., "Readings in the Philosophy of Technology." 2004. Rowman & Littlefield.
- Manuel de Landa War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. 1991.
- Levinson, Paul. Mind at Large: Knowing in the Technological Age. 1988. JAI Press.
- Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1984. University of Minnesota Press.
- McLuhan, Marshall.
- The Gutenberg Galaxy. 1962. Mentor.
- Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964. McGraw Hill.
- Mitcham, Carl. Thinking Through Technology. 1994. University of Chicago Press.
- Simondon, Gilbert.
- Du mode d'existence des objets techniques. 1958. (French)
- L'individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (l'individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information), 1964. Paris PUF (French)
- Stiegler, Bernard, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. 1998. Stanford University Press.
- Winner, Langdon. Autonomous Technology. 1977. MIT Press.
[edit] Journals
- Ends and Means
- NetFuture - Technology and Human Responsibility
- Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology
[edit] Blogs
Foresighter Blog: Philosophy, Technology and the Future
