Philosophy of technology examines how technology functions as a cultural, economic and political force, and investigates both technology's effects on human life and the nature of technological practice itself: its design processes, its forms of knowledge, and the ontological status of the artifacts it produces.
Facts
Disputed
Key DebateWhether technology is autonomous, developing by an internal logic no human choice can redirect, as Jacques Ellul argued, or remains genuinely steerable by social and political choices, as social-construction-of-technology theorists hold. 2 Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society argued technique follows its own autonomous logic; social-construction-of-technology theorists such as Wiebe Bijker replied that the bicycle and other artifacts show real social steering at every stage of design. Central QuestionIs a technological artifact a neutral means whose moral character depends only on how it is used, or does it inherently embody and enact values through its design? 1 Key DebateWhether technological artifacts are neutral instruments whose moral character depends solely on how they are used, or whether artifacts inherently embody and enact values through their design, functions and affordances. 1 Connections
Associated With
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology argues technology is never a merely neutral means.
Source The Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger)
Includes
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Sources
1. Philosophy of Technology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Introduction
It is largely by technology that contemporary society hangs together.
Power and Justice
The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.
Relation between Technology and Science
The scientist is concerned with how things are but the engineer with how things ought to be.
- In Category: Branches of Philosophy
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Informations.v. Philosophy of Technology
If philosophy is the attempt "to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term", as Wilfrid Sellars (1962) put it, philosophy should definitely not ignore technology.
Associated With: Karl Marx, entry: Philosophy of Technology, Section 3.2.4
The idea of analysing technology through the lenses of social power and justice goes back to Karl Marx, who, in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), famously wrote: "The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist."
Includes: Frankfurt School, entry: Philosophy of Technology, Section 3.2.4
One very influential stream of critical theory directly inspired by Marx is the so-called Frankfurt School born in the 1950s.
Includes: Being and Time, entry: Philosophy of Technology, Section 1
the grip that technology has on modern society is rather a symptom of something more fundamental, namely a wrongheaded attitude towards Being which has been on the rise for almost 25 centuries
View the Source Philosophy of Technology (Wikipedia)
IntroductionQuote, Introduction
A reflective inquiry into the assumptions, values, knowledge claims, and consequences embedded in human making and doing
The Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger)
Associated With: Martin Heidegger, Technology Studies reader, p. 2Quote, Associated With: Martin Heidegger, Technology Studies reader, p. 2
we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Key Debate
Heidegger denies that technology is ever a neutral means. Its essence is a mode of revealing, or enframing, that is itself nothing technological, so no user's intent can render an artifact morally neutral; regarding technology as neutral is, on his account, the very thing that blinds us to its essence.
A dissenting reading, from Martin HeideggerThe Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger)
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