Concept
Philosophy of technology
Overview
The philosophy of technology is a reflective inquiry into the assumptions, values, knowledge claims, and consequences embedded in human making and doing, especially when people design, use, and organize tools, systems, and processes. It examines what technology is (beyond mere tools), how technological artifacts are designed and used, and how technology differs from science and craft. The philosophy of technology deals with ethical, social, and political problems--major questions include whether technology is value-neutral; how responsibility for technological risks should be assigned; and how technologies shape human behavior, culture, power relations, and conceptions of knowledge and agency.
In the West, philosophical discussion of technology (or its Greek ancestor techne) dates back to ancient Greek philosophy. In premodern times, Chinese technology was not primarily organized around Greek techne or Promethean mastery over nature. Instead, it was embedded in relations between dao, qi, li, morality, heaven, and cosmic harmony. Chinese technical practices were therefore not simply “technology” in the modern Western sense, but part of a broader moral-cosmological order.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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A book without content is, as every one knows, not a book with empty leaves, but one of which the content is as good as none. We shall find as the last result on closer analysis, that by what is called content an educated mind means nothing but the presence and power of thought. But this is to admit that thoughts are not empty forms without affinity to their content, and that in other spheres as well as in art the…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Philosophy of technology is; the author is tied to Philosophy of technology in the knowledge graph.
There comes a time to a nation when mind applies itself to universal objects, when, for example, in seeking to bring natural things under general modes of understanding, it tries to learn their causes. Then it is said that a people begins to philosophize, for this content has thought in common with Philosophy. At such a time we find deliverances about all the common events of Nature, as we also find intellectual…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Philosophy of technology is; the author is tied to Philosophy of technology in the knowledge graph.
One is tempted to choose Plato. For in spite of the mystic and transcendental coloring of his thought, it was he who defined philosophy as the science of the State, or the most complete and organized whole known to man; it is no accident that his chief work is termed the "Republic." In modern times, we are struck by the fact that English philosophy from Bacon to John Stuart Mill has been cultivated by men of affairs…
John Dewey, German philosophy and politics
States what Philosophy of technology is; the author is tied to Philosophy of technology in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Philosophy of technology
Related ideas
- Francis Bacon
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Western philosophy
- Heraclitus
- Springer Science+Business Media
- John Dewey
- Karl Marx
- Physics (Aristotle)
- Ancient Greek philosophy
- Mozi
- Mencius
- Plato
- Philosophy Documentation Center
- Analects
- Aristotle
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Martin Heidegger
- Natural philosophy
- Benjamin Franklin
- Herbert Marcuse
- Biotechnology
- Timaeus (dialogue)
- Meno
- Bernard Stiegler
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of computer science.