Technology and Values: Essential Readings - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1405149000 ISBN 13: 9781405149006

Verlag: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

This anthology features essays and book excerpts on technology and values written by preeminent figures in the field from the early 20th century to the present. It offers an in-depth range of readings on important applied issues in technology as well.

• Useful in addressing questions on philosophy, sociology, and theory of technology
• Includes wide-ranging coverage on metaphysics, ethics, and politics, as well as issues relating to gender, biotechnology, everyday artifacts, and architecture
• A good supplemental text for courses on moral or political problems in which contemporary technology is a unit of focus
• An accessible and thought-provoking book for beginning and advanced undergraduates; yet also a helpful resource for graduate students and academics

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Craig Hanks is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University-San Marcos, where he is past-chair of the Institutional Review Board. He was previously at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and was Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He specializes in philosophy of technology and applied philosophy, and has taught courses on engineering ethics, environmental ethics, biomedical ethics, and philosophy of technology. He is author of Refiguring Critical Theory (2002) and editor of Inner Space/Outer Space: The Humanities, Technology and the Postmodern World (1993); his monograph, Technological Musings: Reflections on Technology and Values, is forthcoming.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Technology and Values is a comprehensive anthology featuring essays and book excerpts written by pre-eminent figures in the field. With writings spanning the early twentieth century up to present day, this is a collection of in-depth readings on key technological issues – everything from biomedical and environmental concerns to the everyday use of computers and other forms of technology.

A one-of-a-kind resource tool, it is specifically designed to help readers make the important connections between abstract themes and concrete applications for both the individual and society. Accessible to the undergraduate, yet thorough enough for graduates and academics, this is an ideal text for courses in technology and society, philosophy of technology, and numerous other technology-related classes.

A one-of-a-kind resource tool, it is specifically designed to help readers make the important connections between abstract themes and concrete applications for both the individual and society. Accessible to the undergraduate, yet thorough enough for graduates and academics, this is an ideal text for courses in technology and society, philosophy of technology, and numerous other technology-related classes.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Technology and Values

Essential Readings

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2008 Craig Hanks
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4051-4900-6

Chapter One

Toward a Philosophy of Technology

Hans Jonas

Hans Jonas (1903-93) was a German-born philosopher who fled Germany in 1933 to escape the Nazi regime. After many years in Palestine/Israel, and briefer periods in England and Canada, he spent 1955-76 as a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Jonas was a student of Heidegger's, and he shares with Heidegger the view that technology is "the focal fact of modern life." In this piece, Jonas invites us to consider technology according to three dimensions: the "formal dynamics," the "material content," and the importance of valuation. The first is a consideration of technology according to its internal logic, a consideration of technology as a whole. The second is technology in use, and includes not only the history of particular artifacts (consider Henry Petroski's wonderful book The Pencil (1989)) but also the phenomenology of everyday interactions with technology (for example, see Douglas Browning's essay in chapter 22). The third dimension is where we take a critical distance on our tools and lives and ask where we are going and why. This is the aspect of understanding technology that most directly draws on the tradition of Western Philosophy that started with Socrates. In his book, The Imperative of Responsibility, Jonas argues that because of both the temporal reach and the power of contemporary technologies, traditional ethical theories are insufficient. Drawing on examples that range from nuclear war to human biotechnologies, he notes that we have the capacity to unleash broad ranging changes in our world, the full impacts of which will not be known for generations. This concern about the scope of our technological capabilities is a feature that Jonas' work shares with that of Lowrance (chapter 3). Because of this, we have obligations to know and to exercise caution that are new in human history.

Are there philosophical aspects to technology? Of course there are, as there are to all things of importance in human endeavor and destiny. Modern technology touches on almost everything vital to man's existence - material, mental, and spiritual. Indeed, what of man is not involved? The way he lives his life and looks at objects, his intercourse with the world and with his peers, his powers and modes of action, kinds of goals, states and changes of society, objectives and forms of politics (including warfare no less than welfare), the sense and quality of life, even man's fate and that of his environment: all these are involved in the technological enterprise as it extends in magnitude and depth. The mere enumeration suggests a staggering host of potentially philosophic themes.

To put it bluntly: if there is a philosophy of science, language, history, and art; if there is social, political, and moral philosophy; philosophy of thought and of action, of reason and passion, of decision and value - all facets of the inclusive philosophy of man - how then could there not be a philosophy of technology, the focal fact of modern life? And at that a philosophy so spacious that it can house portions from all the other branches of philosophy? It is almost a truism, but at the same time so immense a proposition that its challenge staggers the mind. Economy and modesty require that we select, for a beginning, the most obvious from the multitude of aspects that invite philosophical attention.

The old but useful distinction of "form" and "matter" allows us to distinguish between these two major themes: (1) the formal dynamics of technology as a continuing collective enterprise, which advances by its own "laws of motion"; and (2) the substantive content of technology in terms of the things it puts into human use, the powers it confers, the novel objectives it opens up or dictates, and the altered manner of human action by which these objectives are realized.

The first theme considers technology as an abstract whole of movement; the second considers its concrete uses and their impact on our world and our lives. The formal approach will try to grasp the pervasive "process properties" by which modern technology propels itself - through our agency, to be sure - into ever-succeeding and superseding novelty. The material approach will look at the species of novelties themselves, their taxonomy, as it were, and try to make out how the world furnished with them looks. A third, overarching theme is the moral side of technology as a burden on human responsibility, especially its long-term effects on the global condition of man and environment. This - my own main preoccupation over the past years - will only be touched upon.

The Formal Dynamics of Technology

First some observations about technology's form as an abstract whole of movement. We are concerned with characteristics of modern technology and therefore ask first what distinguishes it formally from all previous technology. One major distinction is that modern technology is an enterprise and process, whereas earlier technology was a possession and a state. If we roughly describe technology as comprising the use of artificial implements for the business of life, together with their original invention, improvement, and occasional additions, such a tranquil description will do for most of technology through mankind's career (with which it is coeval), but not for modern technology. In the past, generally speaking, a given inventory of tools and procedures used to be fairly constant, tending toward a mutually adjusting, stable equilibrium of ends and means, which - once established - represented for lengthy periods an unchallenged optimum of technical competence.

To be sure, revolutions occurred, but more by accident than by design. The agricultural revolution, the metallurgical revolution that led from the neolithic to the iron age, the rise of cities, and such developments, happened rather than were consciously created. Their pace was so slow that only in the time-contraction of historical retrospect do they appear to be "revolutions" (with the misleading connotation that their contemporaries experienced them as such). Even where the change was sudden, as with the introduction first of the chariot, then of armed horsemen into warfare - a violent, if short-lived, revolution indeed - the innovation did not originate from within the military art of the advanced societies that it affected, but was thrust on it from outside by the (much less civilized) peoples of Central Asia. Instead of spreading through the technological universe of their time, other technical breakthroughs, like Phoenician purple-dyeing, Byzantine "greek fire," Chinese porcelain and silk, and Damascene steel-tempering, remained jealously guarded monopolies of the inventor communities. Still others, like the hydraulic and steam playthings of Alexandrian mechanics, or compass and gunpowder of the Chinese, passed unnoticed in their serious technological potentials.

On the whole (not counting rare upheavals), the great classical civilizations had comparatively early reached a point of technological saturation - the aforementioned "optimum" in equilibrium of means with acknowledged needs and goals - and had little cause later to go beyond it. From there on, convention reigned supreme. From pottery to monumental architecture, from food growing to shipbuilding, from textiles to engines of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wiley-Blackwell
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1405149000
• ISBN 13: 9781405149006
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 560
• Herausgeber: Hanks Craig
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Wiley-VCH GmbH; product_safety@wiley.com; ; Boschstrasse 12; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland