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.

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[edit] History

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.

[edit] 20th century development

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 (although Heidegger could be seen as critical but open to technology; see Hubert Dreyfus and technology). 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 bestseller The Medium is the Message, as well as The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

[edit] Contemporary philosophy

Contemporary philosophers with an interest in technology include Jean Baudrillard, Albert Borgmann, Andrew Feenberg, Langdon Winner, Donna Haraway, Larry Hickman, Don Ihde, Paul Levinson, Carl Mitcham, Leo Marx, Gilbert Simondon, Jacques Ellul 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 [1]; these were Technology and the Good Life (2000), edited by Eric Higgs and American Philosophy of Technology (2001) by Hans Achterhuis.

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