In this extraordinary introduction to the study of the philosophy of technology, Andrew Feenberg argues that techonological design is central to the social and political structure of modern societies. Environmentalism, information technology, and medical advances testify to technology's crucial importance. In his lucid and engaging style, Feenberg shows that technology is the medium of daily life. Every major technical changes reverberates at countless levels: economic, political, and cultural. If we continue to see the social and technical domains as being seperate, (...) then we are essentially denying an integral part of our existence, and our place in a democratic society. Questioning Tecchnology convinces us that it is vital that we learn more about technology the better to live with it and to manage it. (shrink)

John Dewey's Gifford Lectures, given at Edinburgh in 1929.

John Dewey's Gifford Lectures, given at Edinburgh in 1929.

Thoroughly revised, this new edition of Critical Theory of Technology rethinks the relationships between technology, rationality, and democracy, arguing that the degradation of labor--as well as of many environmental, educational, and political systems--is rooted in the social values that preside over technological development. It contains materials on political theory, but the emphasis has shifted to reflect a growing interest in the fields of technology and cultural studies.

Bruno Latour was once asked : "Do you believe in reality?" This text is an attempt to answer this question.

A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and ...

What does it mean to think about technology philosophically? Why try? These are the issues that Carl Mitcham addresses in this work, a comprehensive, critical introduction to the philosophy of technology and a discussion of its sources and uses. Tracing the changing meaning of "technology" from ancient times to our own, Mitcham identifies the most important traditions of critical analysis of technology: the engineering approach, which assumes the centrality of technology in human life and the humanities approach, which is concerned (...) with its moral and cultural boundaries. Mitcham bridges these two traditions through an analysis of discussions of engineering design, of the distinction between tools and machines, and of engineering science itself. He looks at technology as it is experienced in everyday life--as material objects (from kitchenware to computers), as knowledge ( including recipes, rules, theories, and intuitive "know-how"), as activity (design, construction, and use), and as volition (knowing how to use technology and understanding its consequences). By elucidating these multiple aspects, Mitcham establishes criteria for a more comprehensive analysis of ethical issues in applications of science and technology. This book will guide anyone wanting to reflect on technology and its moral implications. (shrink)

In this book Bruno Latour brings together these different approaches to provide a lively and challenging analysis of science, demonstrating how social context..

This lucidly written book examines the social and political significance of the natural sciences through a detailed and original account of science as an interpretive social practice.

Discusses the ethical implications of modern technology and examines the responsibility of humanity for the fate of the world.

Francis Bacon (15611626) wrote that good scientists are not like ants (mindlessly gathering data) or spiders (spinning empty theories). Instead, they are like bees, transforming nature into a nourishing product. This essay examines Bacon's "middle way" by elucidating the means he proposes to turn experience and insight into understanding. The human intellect relies on "machines" to extend perceptual limits, check impulsive imaginations, and reveal nature's latent causal structure, or "forms." This constructivist interpretation is not intended to supplant inductivist or experimentalist (...) interpretations, but is designed to explicate Bacon's account of science as a collaborative project with several interdependent methodological goals. (shrink)

In controversies about technology and society, there is no idea more pro vocative than the notion that technical things have political qualities. At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions of efficiency and pro-ductivity, not merely for their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority. Since ideas of this kind (...) have a persistent and troubling presence in discussions about the meaning of technology, they deserve explicit attention... (shrink)

Die von Jens Timmermann besorgte Neuausgabe innerhalb der Philosophischen Bibliothek bietet den vollständigen Wortlaut der beiden Originalausgaben von 1781 und 1787. Der Kantische Text wurde unter Wahrung der Interpunktion und sprachlicher Eigenheiten sehr behutsam an die heutigen orthographischen Regeln angeglichen. Die semantisch bedeutenden Korrekturvorschläge späterer Herausgeber (nicht nur der Akademie-Ausgabe) sind, wo sie nicht in den Text Aufnahme gefunden haben, am Fuß der Seite verzeichnet. Alle wesentlichen Unterschiede zwischen den Originalausgaben sind durch Kursivdruck hervorgehoben, größere Abweichungen ganzer Textstücke - etwa (...) in der Einleitung und im Kapitel über Phaenomena und Noumena - wurden synoptisch gegenübergestellt, so daß Art und Umfang der Umarbeitung unmittelbar abgelesen werden können. Die durchgängig neu bearbeitete Studienausgabe folgt in den Grundprinzipien der seit 1926 in Forschung und Lehre maßgeblichen Ausgabe von Raymund Schmidt, die hiermit abgelöst wird. Sie wird ergänzt durch eine umfangreiche Bibliographie von Heiner Klemme sowie durch einen ausführlichen Personen- und Sachindex. (shrink)

This 1983 book is a lively and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of natural science, organized around the central theme of scientific realism. It has two parts. 'Representing' deals with the different philosophical accounts of scientific objectivity and the reality of scientific entities. The views of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Putnam, van Fraassen, and others, are all considered. 'Intervening' presents the first sustained treatment of experimental science for many years and uses it to give a new direction to debates about (...) realism. Hacking illustrates how experimentation often has a life independent of theory. He argues that although the philosophical problems of scientific realism can not be resolved when put in terms of theory alone, a sound philosophy of experiment provides compelling grounds for a realistic attitude. A great many scientific examples are described in both parts of the book, which also includes lucid expositions of recent high energy physics and a remarkable chapter on the microscope in cell biology. (shrink)

This ambitious and important book, first published in 2001, provides a truly general account of Francis Bacon as a philosopher. It describes how Bacon transformed the values that had underpinned philosophical culture since antiquity by rejecting the traditional idea of a philosopher as someone engaged in contemplation of the cosmos. The book explores in detail how and why Bacon attempted to transform the largely esoteric discipline of natural philosophy into a public practice through a program in which practical science provided (...) a model that inspired many from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Stephen Gaukroger shows that this reform of natural philosophy was dependent on the creation of a new philosophical persona: a natural philosopher shaped through submission to the dictates of Baconian method. This book will be recognized as a major contribution to Baconian scholarship, of special interest to historians of early-modern philosophy, science, and ideas. (shrink)

Introduces contemporary American philosophy of technology through six of its leading figures. The six American philosophers of technology whose work is profiled in this clear and concise introduction to the field—Albert Borgmann, Hubert Dreyfus, Andrew Feenberg, Donna Haraway, Don Ihde, and Langdon Winner—represent a new, empirical direction in the philosophical study of technology that has developed mainly in North America. In place of the grand philosophical schemes of the classical generation of European philosophers of technology, the contemporary American generation addresses (...) concrete technological practices and the co-evolution of technology and society in modern culture. Six Dutch philosophers associated with Twente University survey and critique the full scope and development of their American colleagues’ work, often illustrating shifts from earlier to more recent interests. Individual chapters focus on Borgmann’s engagement with technology and everyday life; Dreyfus’s work on the limits of artificial intelligence; Feenberg’s perspectives on the cultural and social possibilities opened by technologies; Haraway’s conception of the cyborg and its attendant blurring of boundaries; Ihde’s explorations of the place of technology in the lifeworld; and Winner’s fascination with the moral and political implications of modern technologies. American Philosophy of Technology offers an insightful and readable introduction to this new and distinctly American philosophical turn. Contributors are Hans Achterhuis, Philip Brey, René Munnik, Martijntje Smits, Pieter Tijmes, and Peter-Paul Verbeek. (shrink)

Die Kritische Theorie gilt als Theorie der Frankfurter Schule. So wie sie von Max Horkheimer in seinem klassischen Aufsatz über Kritische und traditionelle Theorie in den dreißiger Jahren ausgearbeitet wurde, ist sie allerdings eine kritische Theorie der Gesellschaft, nicht der Natur und der Technik. Der Grund dafür ist darin zu suchen, daß die Kritische Theorie gerade in Absetzung von der positivistisch verstandenen Naturwissenschaft konzipiert wurde und daß ferner die Entwicklung von Technik im Sinne der Produktivkräfte als eine unabhängige Randbedingung der (...) gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung gesehen wurde. Eine Ausnahme innerhalb der Frankfurter Schule bildet Herbert Marcuse, der die Themen Naturbeherrschung und Technikentwicklung in seinen Arbeiten ausdrücklich behandelt. Der vorliegende Band versucht nun, Technik und Natur ausdrücklich in den Einzugsbereich der Kritischen Theorie zu bringen. Anlaß dazu sind die fortschreitende Technisierung der menschlichen Lebensverhältnisse, die Technisierung der Natur, die wir selbst sind, nämlich des Leibes, wie auch die Tatsache, daß die für uns relevante äußere Natur bereits weitgehend anthropogene Natur ist. Das verlangt nach einer kritischen Theorie der Technologieentwicklung, nach einer kritischen Behandlung der menschlichen Natur innerhalb der Gesellschaftstheorie, und schließlich nach einer Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnisse. Ansätze dazu werden aus dem Bereich der Sozialökologie, der feministischen Theorie des Körpers und der Theorie von Informatisierungsprozessen vorgeführt. Das Interesse dabei ist, diese Ansätze in die Tradition der älteren Kritischen Theorie einzubringen. Deshalb arbeiten mehrere Beiträge die Vorgeschichte der Behandlung der Themen Technik und Natur in der Kritischen Theorie auf. Aus dem Zentrum der Kritischen Theorie verbannt, finden sich ihre Spuren eher am Rande, nämlich im Zusammenhang der Ästhetik. Es gilt heute, was seiner Zeit unter den Stichworten Nicht-Identität oder Eingedenken der Natur im Subjekt nur angedeutet werden konnte, ins Zentrum theoretischer Bemühungen zu rücken. (shrink)

In this book, a leading philosopher of technology explores the meaning of bodies in technology—how the sense of our bodies and of our orientation in the world is affected by the various information technologies.

Inviting a reappraisal of the status of scientific knowledge, Andrew Pickering suggests that scientists are not mere passive observers and reporters of nature.

This essay attempts a restatement of the relationship between art and science in terms of “making” and “knowing.” It first surveys the various ways art and science were related in the early modern period, arguing that one result of the new naturalistic representation was the emergence of a new visual culture that reinforced appeals to eyewitness and firsthand experience and in some cases fostered a new examination of European culture. At the same time, art, understood as the work of the (...) human hand in imitating nature, came to be viewed as one of the central characteristics that distinguished European society from the past. Moreover, artist/artisans helped constitute the aims and methods of the study of nature during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, articulating a new kind of authority for nature and providing the artworks that engendered a culture of nature study and collection. Thus art and artisans were fundamental motors of the Scientific Revolution. More attention to the visual culture of early modern Europe, including religious and devotional imagery, and seeking out intersections between making and knowing, as some art historians studying techniques have begun to do, will add to our understanding of the relationship between art and science in the early modern period. (shrink)

Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences--and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences--from anatomy to crystallography--are those featured in (...) scientific atlases, the compendia that teach practitioners what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity--or truth-to-nature or trained judgment--is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to anyone interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity-- and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically. Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She is the coauthor of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 and the editor of Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, How Experiments End, and Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, and other books, and coeditor of The Architecture of Science. (shrink)

Ihde's book breaks new ground and... makes an important debate accessible." —Robert Ackermann Instrumental Realism has three principal aims: to advocate a "praxis-perception" approach to the philosophy of science; to explore ways in which ...

In the wake of the emergence and rapid development of nanoethics there swiftly followed fundamental criticism: nanoethics was said to have become much too involved with speculative developments and was concerning itself too little with actually pending questions of nanotechnology design and applications. If this diagnosis is true, then large parts of nanoethics are misguided. Such fundamental criticism must surely either result in a radical reorientation of nanoethics or be refuted for good reasons. In this paper, I will examine the (...) critics’ central arguments and, building on this scrutiny, formulate an answer to these alternatives. The results lead to conclusions which allow explaining and unfolding the thesis of this paper that instead of speculative nanoethics we should better speak of and develop explorative philosophy of nanotechnology. (shrink)

Why was it that Francis Bacon, trained for high political office, devoted himself to proposing a celebrated and sweeping reform of the natural sciences? Julian Martin's investigative study looks at Bacon's family context, his employment in Queen Elizabeth's security service and his radical critique of the relationship between the Common Law and the Monarchy, to find the key to this important question. Deeply conservative and elitist in his political views, Bacon adapted Tudor strategies of State management and bureaucracy, the social (...) anxieties and prejudices of the late-Elizabethan governing elite, and a principal intellectual resource of the English governing classes - the Common Law - into a novel vision and method for the sciences. Bacon's axiom that 'Knowledge is Power' takes on far-reaching implications in Martin's challenging argument that the reform of natural philosophy was a central part of an audacious plan to strengthen the powers of the Crown in the State. (shrink)

Since the late 1980s, the neglect of experiment by philosophers and historians of science has been replaced by a keen interest in the subject. In this volume, a number of prominent philosophers of experiment directly address basic theoretical questions, develop existing philosophical accounts, and offer novel perspectives on the subject, rather than rely exclusively on historical cases of experimental practice. Each essay examines one or more of six interconnected themes that run throughout the collection: the philosophical implications of actively and (...) intentionally interfering with the material world while conducting experiments; issues of interpretation regarding causality; the link between science and technology; the role of theory in experimentation involving material and causal intervention; the impact of modeling and computer simulation on experimentation; and the philosophical implications of the design, operation, and use of scientific instruments. (shrink)

Western philosophers have traditionally concentrated on theory as the means for expressing knowledge about a variety of phenomena. This absorbing book challenges this fundamental notion by showing how objects themselves, specifically scientific instruments, can express knowledge. As he considers numerous intriguing examples, Davis Baird gives us the tools to "read" the material products of science and technology and to understand their place in culture. Making a provocative and original challenge to our conception of knowledge itself, _Thing Knowledge _demands that we (...) take a new look at theories of science and technology, knowledge, progress, and change. Baird considers a wide range of instruments, including Faraday's first electric motor, eighteenth-century mechanical models of the solar system, the cyclotron, various instruments developed by analytical chemists between 1930 and 1960, spectrometers, and more. (shrink)

The ‘publicity requirement on moral rules’ refers to the idea that moral rules must be suitable for public acknowledgement and acceptance. The idea is that moral rules must be suitable for being ‘widely known and explicitly recognized’, suitable for teaching as part of moral education, suitable for guiding behaviour and reactions to behaviour, and thus suitable for justifying one’s behaviour to others. The publicity requirement is now most often associated with John Rawls, who traces it back through Kurt Baier to (...) Kant.1 Ideal Code, Real World, my book defending rule-consequentialism, accepted the publicity requirement.2 In this issue of Ratio, Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer attack the publicity requirement.3 Here is my reply. Is moral rightness is a matter of the application of principles or rules that must be suitable for public acceptance? No, answered Henry Sidgwick, holding that perhaps the principles that determine moral right and wrong should be kept secret, because publicizing these principles would not maximize utility.4 Since I think that forms of consequentialism that are not purely utilitarian may be more plausible than forms that are purely utilitarian, let me make the point in terms of consequentialism instead of utilitarianism. The standard form of act-consequentialism is maximizing and ‘global’, i.e., direct about everything.5 This act-consequentialism includes, among the acts to be evaluated by their consequences, instances of espousing principles, teaching morality, blaming, feeling indignation, feeling guilt, and punishing. According to this form of act-consequentialism, an act that maximizes good consequences might be one that others should blame and even punish, since blaming and punishing the agent of the good-maximizing act might also for some reason maximize good consequences. Likewise, on this standard form of actconsequentialism, it may be right to do what it would be right neither to advocate openly nor even to recommend privately. (shrink)

... AND PROFITABLE INVENTIONS AND DISCOVERIES; THE BEST STATE OF THAT PROVINCE”: TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE DURING FRANCIS BACON'S STAY IN FRANCE* Luisa ...

Written by some of the world's leading academics and professionals in the field, this collection of essays brings together two complementary views on child development - the role of society and the role of cognitive growth.