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Author: Carl Mitcham Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226825396 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 411
Book Description
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.
Author: Carl Mitcham Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226825396 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 411
Book Description
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.
Author: Adrian Daub Publisher: FSG Originals ISBN: 0374721238 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 160
Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "In Daub’s hands the founding concepts of Silicon Valley don’t make money; they fall apart." --The New York Times Book Review From FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual origins Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley's ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.
Author: David Wills Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 0816653453 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 282
Book Description
In this highly original book David Wills rethinks not only our nature before all technology but also what we understand to be technology. Rather than considering the human being as something natural that then develops technology, Wills argues, we should instead imagine an originary imbrication of nature and machine that begins with a dorsal turn-a turn that takes place behind our back, outside our field of vision. With subtle and insightful readings, Wills pursues this sense of what lies behind our idea of the human by rescuing Heidegger’s thinking from a reductionist dismissal of technology, examining different angles on Lvinas’s face-to-face relation, and tracing a politics of friendship and sexuality in Derrida and Sade. He also analyzes versions of exile in Joyce’s rewriting of Homer and Broch’s rewriting of Virgil and discusses how Freud and Rimbaud exemplify the rhetoric of soil and blood that underlies every attempt to draw lines between nations and discriminate between peoples. In closing, Wills demonstrates the political force of rhetoric in a sophisticated analysis of Nietzsche’s oft-quoted declaration that “God is dead.” Forward motion, Wills ultimately reveals, is an ideology through which we have favored the front-what can be seen-over the aspects of the human and technology that lie behind the back and in the spine-what can be sensed otherwise-and shows that this preference has had profound environmental, political, sexual, and ethical consequences. David Wills is professor of French and English at the University of Albany (SUNY). He is the author of Prosthesis and Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction as well as the translator of works by Jacques Derrida, including The Gift of Death.
Author: F. Rapp Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9789027704337 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 262
Book Description
The highly sophisticated techniques of modern engineering are normally conceived of in practical terms. Corresponding to the instrumental function of technology, they are designed to direct the forces of nature according to human purposes. Yet, as soon as the realm of mere skills is exceeded, the intended useful results can only be achieved through planned and preconceived action processes involving the deliberately considered application of well designed tools and devices. This is to say that in all complex cases theoretical reasoning becomes an indispensable means to accomplish the pragmatic technological aims. Hence the abstracting from the actual concrete function of technology opens the way to concentrate attention on the general conceptual framework involved. If this approach is adopted the relevant knowledge and the procedures applied clearly exhibit a logic of their own. This point of view leads to a methodological and even an epistemological analysis of the theoretical structure and the specific methods of procedure characteristic of modern technology. Investigations of this kind, that can be described as belonging to an ana lytical philosophy of technology, form the topic of this anthology. The type of research in question here is closely akin to that of the philosophy of science. But it is an astonishing fact that the commonly accepted and carefully investigated philosophy of science has not yet found its counterpart in an established philosophy of technology.
Author: Michael E. Gorman Publisher: Psychology Press ISBN: 1135625123 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 379
Book Description
At the turn of the 21st century, the most valuable commodity in society is knowledge--particularly new knowledge that may give a culture, company, or laboratory an adaptive advantage. Knowledge about the cognitive processes that lead to discovery and invention can enhance the probability of making valuable new discoveries and inventions. Such knowledge needs to be made widely available to ensure that no particular interest group "corners the market" on techno-scientific creativity. Knowledge can also facilitate the development of business strategies and social policies based on a genuine understanding of the creative process. Furthermore, through an understanding of principles underlying the cognitive processes related to discovery, educators can utilize these principles to teach students effective problem-solving strategies as part of their education as future scientists. This book takes the reader out onto the cutting edge of research in scientific and technological thinking. The editors advocate a multiple-method approach; chapters include detailed case studies of contemporary and historical practices, experiments, computational simulations, and innovative theoretical analyses. The editors attempt a provocative synthesis of this work at the end. In order to achieve true scientific and technological progress, an understanding of the process by which species are transforming the world is needed. This book makes an important step in that direction by leading to breakthroughs in the understanding of discovery and invention.
Author: B.J. Fogg Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann ISBN: 9781558606432 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 318
Book Description
B.J. Fogg proposes conceptual examples of possible new technologies, discusses ethical implications of persuasive computing and offers theoretical insights into persuasion processes.
Author: Raj Karamchedu Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 0387235523 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 203
Book Description
It's Not About the Technology is about a phenomenon most dreaded by high-technology industry executives: a failure at the execution leading to a missed market window. High-tech executives agree that a critical factor that drives the company to such a failure is the breakdown of interaction between marketing and engineering. This book is predicated on the notion that the success of execution lies neither in the technology nor in the market strategy. On the contrary, it is shaped by the context of an individual, whether an engineer or a marketer. From this viewpoint, successful execution in a high-tech company is manifest in a confluence of 3 contexts: the technological, the customer and the economic contexts. This book tackles the big questions of how to develop the basic craft of the thinking required in high-tech companies. Drawing from basic economic principles and practical experience in the semiconductor business, it breaks new ground in our understanding of the complexities of high-tech execution.
Author: Thomas P. Hughes Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022612066X Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 237
Book Description
To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In Human-Built World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its creative potential. Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an "ecotechnology" that works with, not against, ecological systems. From the "Creator" model of development of the sixteenth century to the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has offered. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology could be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment; Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing mechanization of American life. Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have existed side by side, demonstrating the fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In Human-Built World, he offers the highly engaging history of these contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in fact no less than an embodiment of human values.
Author: Doug Hill Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 082035029X Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
There's a well-known story about an older fish who swims by two younger fish and asks, "How's the water?" The younger fish are puzzled. "What's water?" they ask. Many of us today might ask a similar question: What's technology? Technology defines the world we live in, yet we're so immersed in it, so encompassed by it, that we mostly take it for granted. Seldom, if ever, do we stop to ask what technology is. Failing to ask that question, we fail to perceive all the ways it might be shaping us. Usually when we hear the word "technology," we automatically think of digital devices and their myriad applications. As revolutionary as smartphones, online shopping, and social networks may seem, however, they fit into long-standing, deeply entrenched patterns of technological thought as well as practice. Generations of skeptics have questioned how well served we are by those patterns of thought and practice, even as generations of enthusiasts have promised that the latest innovations will deliver us, soon, to Paradise. We're not there yet, but the cyber utopians of Silicon Valley keep telling us it's right around the corner. What is technology, and how is it shaping us? In search of answers to those crucial questions, Not So Fast draws on the insights of dozens of scholars and artists who have thought deeply about the meanings of machines. The book explores such dynamics as technological drift, technological momentum, technological disequilibrium, and technological autonomy to help us understand the interconnected, interwoven, and interdependent phenomena of our technological world. In the course of that exploration, Doug Hill poses penetrating questions of his own, among them: Do we have as much control over our machines as we think? And who can we rely on to guide the technological forces that will determine the future of the planet?
Author: Don Ihde Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 9780816638468 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
New technologies suggest new ideas about embodiment - our 'reach' extends to global sites through the Internet; we enter cyberspace through the engines of virtual reality. 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. 'Bodies in Technology' begins with an analysis of embodiment in cyberspace, then moves on to consider ways in which social theorists have interpreted or overlooked these conditions. An astute and sensible judge of these theories, Don Ihde is a uniquely provocative and helpful guide through contemporary thinking about technology and embodiment, drawing on sources and examples as various as video games, popular films, the workings of e-mail, and virtual reality techniques. Charting the historical, philosophical, and practical territory between virtual reality and real life, this work is an important contribution to the national conversation on the impact technology-and information technology in particular-has on our lives in a wired, global age.
Author: Carl Mitcham
Author: Carl Mitcham
Author: Adrian Daub
Author: David Wills
Author: F. Rapp
Author: Michael E. Gorman
Author: B.J. Fogg
Author: Raj Karamchedu
Author: Thomas P. Hughes
Author: Doug Hill
Author: Don Ihde