Abstract
Perhaps the most accurate observation one can make about the philosophy of technology is that there really isn’t one. At least if we look at the writings of the two sorts of people who might be expected to have been interested in the topic — philosophers and engineers — we find little attention to questions about the character and meaning of technology in human life. For example, the six-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a recent attempt at a compendium of major questions in the traditions of philosophical discourse, contains no entry whatsoever under the category ‘technology.’ 1 Neither does that work contain enough material under possible alternative headings to enable anyone to piece together an idea of what a philosophy of technology might look like.
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Notes
T he Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards, editor-in-chief, 8 vols. (Macmillan Publishers, New York, 1967).
Bibliography of the Philosophy of Technology, Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, Eds. (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1973).
An excellent corrective to the general thoughtlessness about `making’ and `use’ is to be found in Carl Mitcham’s `Types of Technology’ in Research in Philosophy and Technology, Paul Durbin, ed. (JAI Press, Inc., Greenwich, Connecticut, 1978), pp. 229–294.
For examples of this phenomenon described historically, see Alfred D. Chandler’s The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1977).
J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1961), pp. 123152.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe, trans., third edition with English and German indexes (Macmillan, New York, 1958), p. 1le.
Hanna Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1972), p. 293.
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Vol. II: Willing (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1978).
Philosophical Investigations, p. 226e.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, vol. 5 (International Publishers, New York), p. 31.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated with a foreword by Martin Nicolaus (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, England, 1973), p. 325.
Ibid.
An interesting discussion of Marx in this respect is Kostas Axelos’ Alienation, Praxis and Techn¨¦ in the Thought of Karl Marx, translated by Ronald Bruzina (University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, 1976).
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, translated by Ben Fowkes with an introduction by Ernest Mandel (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, England, 1976), Ch. 15.
Philosophical Investigations, p. 49e.
In Collected Works, Vol. 5, p. 8.
Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Calculation to Judgment (Freeman, San Francisco, 1976), Ch. 4.
Richard Rabinowitz, `Soul, Character and Personality: The Transformation of Personal Religious Experience in New England, 1790–1860’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1977, unpublished).
Steven Zwerling, Mass Transit and the Politics of Technology: A Study of BART and the San Francisco Bay Area (Praeger, New York, 1974).
Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro (Beacon Press, Boston, 1971).
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958), Ch. IV.
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Winner, L. (1983). Technologies as Forms of Life. In: Cohen, R.S., Wartofsky, M.W. (eds) Epistemology, Methodology, and the Social Sciences. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 71. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1458-7_10
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