Books of or around philosophy and technology that I have read and which influenced me:
Joseph Dunne: Back to the Rough Ground
This book has become foundational to me. Joseph Dunne was led to write this book in response to a popular theory of education at one point, behavioural objective, essentially a highly “rational”, target-based, skill-based theory of teaching. Dunne felt at heart that it was wrong and wanted to explore the philosophical basis for his discomfort with it. His book enters “conversations” with 5 key philosophers, and finds the heart of the matter in Aristotle’s ideas on action and knowledge:
- practical versus theoretical knowledge
- techne versus phronesis
- goal-focussed versus political (societal) action
- poeisis vs praxis
- 5 philosophers:
- John Henry Newman
- R.G. Collingwood
- Hannah Arendt
- Hans-Georg Gadamer
- Jürgen Habermas
Carl Mitcham: Thinking Through Technolgy - The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy
In his own foundational book, Carl Mitcham sweeps through the history of philosophical thought surrounding technology (and, to a subordinate extent, engineering). He argues for a relationship between “Engineering philosophy of technology” and “Humanities philosophy of technology”: the engineers aren’t philosophical pros, but the philosophers aren’t practised in the world of engineering or technology
Gilbert Simondon: On the mode of being of technical objects
This thesis by the French philosopher of the 1950s was one of the first texts that I encountered when I first started to dip into the world of philosophy. Unfortunately, I can’t recreate the search terms I used back then (2012, I think): perhaps the algorithms have changed since then. But this work provided a useful first hurdle into the language of (translated) philosophy - it was baffling at first, but slowly I began to understand what he meant with terms like
concrete vs abstract ontology and ontogenesis transduction…
All rather baffling, but slowly it started to make sense - especially when returning to it having read rather more about it now!
Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants
Another relatively early read, prior to actually doing anything about my philosophical delusions. An enjoyable run through how technology has vastly improved the human lot; how more humanity speeds up the potential for more technology; how technology is (and this sounds almost esoteric) another form of being - although Gilbert Simondon beat him to that notion, Kelly’s book takes the evolution of the technological being right through to the beginning of the universe
Isabelle Stengers: The Invention of Modern Science
A survey of thinking about science (interesting because of the distinction between science and technology) - not really got far into this text so far
Peter-Paul Verbeek: What Things Do
Not read very far yet… A study into the philosophy of technology with a focus on technological artifacts, in contrast to ‘classical’ philosophy of technology, which was actually more focussed on society, alienation and ‘mass culture’
Don Ihde: Husserl’s Missing Technologies
An enjoyable survey of how Husserl’s initial model of phenomenology (i.e., how humans experience the activity they partake in, and how that experience guides the activity) focussed on the theoretical side of science, whilst seemingly missing completely the fundamental role that tools (or instruments) play in the development of sciences. Husserl’s Galileo had numbers and formulae, but no telescope.
James Suzman: Work - A History of How We Spend Our Time
Just started reading this, too: still at the phase of how and why nature seemingly wastes energy (when energy is abundant)
The Murder of Professor Schlick - The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle
December 2022 - Jan 2023
The Vienna Circle was a group of philosophers including Moritz Schlick (who was murdered, shot by a paranoid ex-student), Otto Neurath, Rudolph Carnap among others, which also brought such luminaries as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel into its orbit, who worked mainly on the principle of logical positivism, as set against metaphysics: this became a political and racial environment through their being set against the quasi-religious ideologies of fascism and Nazism (which made liberal use of myth and metaphysics), and the majority of their membership being Jewish.
It’s not an engineering-adjacent work, but the debates they had about verification, falsifiability, about the rootedness of our thinking in language and how, if at all, to escape that into pure logic and data… it raises interesting questions, and enriches my own thinking on engineering and technology.
Interesting to note, too, one key unifying factor within that Circle: their hatred of Heidegger (a major figure in P.-P. Verbeek’s What Things Do, mentioned above)
