Essays on the Philosophy of Technology I

                            Authors: A through J (listed below)
                     Click here for: Authors K through Z

Evandro Agazzi's and Hans Lenk's Introduction: Proceedings of a Meeting of the International Academy of the Philosophy of Science, Karlsruhe, Germany, May, 1997.

Theodor Adorno's Culture Industry Reconsidered ( from Adorno's book "The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture.")     

Adelaida Ambrogi Alvarez's Sociological Studies and Philosophical Studies: Twenty Years of Controversy.

Agustin A. Araya's Experiencing the World through Interactive Learning Environments.

John Armitage's Resisting the Neoliberal Discourse of Technology: The Politics of Cyberculture in the Age of Virtual Class.

American Association for Artificial Intelligence's Home Page. (Links to AI resources)

Albert A. Anderson's Why Prometheus Suffers: Technology and the  Ecological Crisis.

Dr. Alan Aycock's Virtual Play: Baudrillard Online and "Technologies of the Self:" Foucault and Internet Discourse.

Babette Babich's The Essence of Questioning After Technology: Techne as Constraint and the Saving Power.

Joanne Baldine's Is Human Identity an Artifact? How Some Conceptions of the Asian and Western Self Fare during Technological and Legal Development.

Jean Baudrillard's America (Excerpts) and  A Conjuration of Imbiciles.

Jean Baudrillard on the New Technologies -- an interview with Claude Thibaut.

Jean Baudrillard's Disneyworld Company and Vivisecting the 90s: An Interview with Jean Baudrillard. For other essays by Baudrillard, see Alan Taylor's site Baudrillard on the Web.

Richard Beardsworth's From a Geneology of Matter to a Politics of Memory: Stiegler's Thinking of Technics.

Tad Beckman's Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics (Although this essay deals with environmental ethics, it treats also what Heidegger sees as the essence of technology.)

Information Technology in Humanities Scholarship: Achievements, Prospects, Challenges (American Council of Learned Societies )

Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

  Frank Biocca's The Cyborg's Dilemma: Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments
(This extensive essay focuses on how the body feels "present" in virtual environments. For an additional essay on
  the concept of presence, see Lombard and Ditton below.)

Sven Birkerts' The Electronic Millennium (Selected Fragments) and Is Cyberspace Destroying Society? An Online Conference with Sven Birkerts. See also Wen Stephenson's The Message Is the Medium: A Reply to Sven Birkerts and The Gutenberg Elegies and Birkerts' reply to Stephenson. Two reviews of Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies by Dean Blobaum and Susan Lewis-Wallace, see also Cliff Becker's interview with Sven Birkerts.

  David Blacker's Philosophy of Technology and Education: An Invitation to Inquiry. ( See Mark Selman's response to Blacker's essay.)

  Albert Borgmann's Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millenium (This an excerpt from the Introduction to Borgmann's book.)
 
  Albert Borgmann: The journal Techne has devoted volume 6, issue1 to Borgmann's philosophy of technology; the guest editor for the issue is Phil Mullins. Contributors to the issue include Eliseo Fernandez, Myron Tuman, Charles Ess, Phil Mullins, Peter-Paul Verbeek, Hans Achterhuis. Borgmann also responds to these essays.

For other reviews, see Sundeep Sahay and Gregory K. Raschke; for an interview/dialogue with both Borgmann and N. Katherine Hayles on humans and machines, see interview/dialogue. For an article on Borgmann, see Douglas Kellner's Crossing the Postmodern Divide with Borgmann or Adventures in Cyberspace. For a review of Borgmann's 1984 book Technology and the Character of Contemorary Life, see Lawrence Design.  

  Alfred Borgmann's Society in the Postmodern Era

  Aleksandar Boskovic's Virtual Places: Imagined Boundaries and Hyperreality in Southeastern Europe.

   Nick Bostrom's (et al)  The Transhumanist FAQ (A good website for answers to basic questions about
the philosophy of transhumanism and about the intersection between humanism and electronic technologies.)

  Rosie Braidotti's Cyberfeminism with a difference  A long essay which includes the following table of contents: introduction to postmodernity, post-human bodies,  the politics of parody, the power of irony, feminist visions on science fiction,  the cyber imaginary,  the need for new utopias, and notes.

J. van Brakel's Telematic Life Forms.

Marcus Breen's Information Does not Equal Knowledge: Theorizing the Political Economy of Virtuality.

Philip Brey's Philosophy of Technology Meets Social Constructivism

Bertram C. Bruce's Writing with Digital Technologies: How New Media Transform Our Literacy Practices  and  Dewey and Technology and  Educational Technology (encyclopedia entry).

Bertram C. Bruce's Educational Reform: How Does Technological Affect Educational Change?

Bertram C. Bruce's and Shihkuan Hsu's The Missing Borders: Pedagogical Reflections from Distance Education.

Donald M. Bruce's Polly, Dolly, Megan, and Morag: A View from Edinburgh on Cloning and Genetic Engineering.

Stanley R. Carpenter's When Are Technologies Sustainable?

Randy Chafy's Exploring the Intellectual Foundation of Technology
Education: From Condorset to Dewey.

Daniel Chandler's Technological or Media Determinism  A long essay which includes the following sections: (1) contents page, (2) introduction, (3) technology-led theories, (4) reductionism, (5) mechanistic models
(6) reification, (7) technological autonomy, (8) the 'technological imperative, (9) technology as neutral or non-neutral, (10) universalism, (11) techno-evolution as 'progress,' (12) theoretical stances, (13) deterministic language, (14) conclusion, (15) references and related readings, (16) relevant links.

Andrzej Chmielecki's What Is Information?

Leigh Clayton's Are There Virtual Communities?

Alberto Cordero's On the Growing Complementarity of Science and Technology.

  Colleen Cordes' As Educators Rush to Embrace Technology, a Coterie of Skeptics Seeks to be Heard ( The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1-16-98. Join the debate on this issue provided by The Chronicle.)

  James Courtney's, David Croasdell's, and David Paradice's Lockean Inquiring Organizations: Guiding Principles and Design Guidelines for Learning Organizations.

  Richard Coyne's Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age. ( This is a review of Coyne's book by Pete Ferreira.)

Richard Coyne's The Embodied Architect in the Age of Information (Inaugural Lecture, Feb.16,1999);
See also Coyne's (et al) Computers in Practice: A Survey of Computers in Architectural Practice as well as Coyne's Modelling with Attitude (large file). A Table of Contents of Coyne's new work Technoromanticism.

John December's Blinded by Science? ( Editor's Page, CMC Magazine.)

Daniel C. Dennett's Postmodernism and Truth and  Making Tools for Thinking.

Daniel C. Dennett's Artificial Life As Philosophy and  The Role of Language in Intelligence.

John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916). ( This is the complete text,all 26 chapters of Dewey's book are here.)

  John Dewey's The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology and also another article The Psychology of Effort.

John Dewey's The Theory of Emotion. (1) Emotional Attitudes and part 2 The Theory of Emotion. (2) The Significance of Emotions.

John Dobson's and Mike Martin's The Ontology of Enterprises and Information Systems.

Hubert L. Dreyfus'   Highway Bridges and Feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on How to Affirm Technology ( Scroll down a little bit for the essay; Dreyfus is also mentioned in  Colleen Cordes' article above.)

Hubert L. Dreyfus' Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Mental Representation: The Relevance of Phenomenology to Scientific Explanation. Intelligence without Representation.

A review of Hubert Dreyfus' What Computers Still Can't Do by John McCarthy (Book Review) which includes several sections.

Hubert L. Dreyfus' Coping with Things in Themselves: Heidegger's Robust Realism as well as his and Stuart Dreyfus' From Socrates to Expert Systems: The Limits and Dangers of Calculaive Rationality.

 Peter Drucker's Knowledge Work and Knowledge Society: The Social Transformations of This Century. ( Drucker's Edwin L.Godkin Lecture in 1994 at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.)

Peter Drucker's The Age of Social Transformation.

Paul T. Durbin's Advances in Philosophy of Technology? Comparative Perspectives.

Samuel Ebersole's Media Determinism in Cyberspace
 This web site includes the following interesting chapters: (1) Preface(2) Introduction, (3) Definitions, (4) A Brief History of Technology (5) Early Philosophers of Technology, (6) Man the Prosthetic god, (7) The Neutrality of Technology, (8) The Technological Dilemma, (9) Philosophical Assumptions in Cyberspace, (10) Conclusions, (11) References.

Frank Edler's On Contemporary Philosophies of Technology.

Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (An exerpt from Ellul's book; for three reviews of Ellul's book,
see Paula Mathieu and Ken McAllister , Susan A. Santo and also David S. Gallinat)

Paul Ernest's Social Constructivism as a Philosophy of Mathematics: Radical Constructivism Rehabilitated

Essays on Constructivism and Education ( Collected by the Maryland Collaborative for Teacher Preparation.)

Andrew Feenberg's  Summary Remarks on My Approach to the Philosophical Study of Technology. (Good summary)  See also Modernity Theory and Technology Studies: Reflections on Bridging the Gap.

(For  responses to Feenberg, see Ian Thomson's What's Wrong with Being a Technological Essentialist? A Response to Feenberg and Andrew Light's Technology, Democracy and Environmentalism -On Feenberg's Questioning Technology.

Andrew Feenberg's  Marcuse or Habermas: Two Critiques of Technology.

Andrew Feenberg's From Essentialism to Constructivism: Philosophy of Technology at the Crossroads.
   
Andrew Feenberg's Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Democracy.      

Andrew Feenberg's Heidegger, Habermas, and the Essence of Technology

Lloyd Fell's  A few clues about autopoiesis terminology ( Terminology relating to the position of  radical constructivism  held by Ernst von Glasersfeld, Humberto Maturana, Gordon Pask, and George Kelly.)

Frederick Ferre's Philosophy and Technology After Twenty Years and On Replicating Persons: Ethics and the Technology of Cloning.

Frederick Ferre's Philosophy of Technology (Prentice Hall, 1988. Ferre's book is reviewed here by Carl Mitcham)

Pete Ferreira's Heidegger and Technology Links.

Patrick N. Foster's Classifying Approaches to and Philosophies of Elementary-School Technology Education.

 Luciano Floridi's Information Ethics: On the Philosophical Foundation of Computer Ethics.
This longer paper includes the following sections: 1. The Foundationalist Problem, 2. Macroethics and Computer Ethics,
3. A Model of Macroethics, 4. From Computer Ethics to Information Ethics, 5. Information Ethics as an Object-oriented and Ontocentric Theory, 6. The Properties of the Infosphere, 7. The Normative Aspects of Information Ethics: FourMoral Laws, 8. Information Ethics as a Macroethics, 9. Case Analysis: Four Negative Examples, 10. Conclusion.

Jonathen Friday's Who's Afraid of an On-line Society?

Bill Gates' The Road Ahead and excerpts from his Business @ the Speed of Thought.

Denis Gaynor's Democracy in the Age of Information: A Reconception of the Public Sphere.

Bernard A. Gendreau's The Cautionary Ontological Approach to Technology of Gabriel Marcel.

 James M. Giarelli's On Reading the New Scholarship on John Dewey

Henry Giroux's Doing Culural Studies: Youth and the Challenge of Pedagogy and  Animating Youth: The Disnification of Children's Culture.

Ernst von Glasersfeld's Cybernetics and the Art of Living ( One of the leading representatives of radical constructivism.)

Paul Gorner's Heidegger, Phenomenology, and the Essence of Technology

Vitali Gorokhov's  A New Interpretation of Technological Progress.

Ruth Guthrie's and James Pick's Teleworking Ethics.

Patrick Hamlett's Science, Technology, and Society Links ( This is the links page from the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at North Carolina State University.)

Donna Harraway's The Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s or A Socialist Feminist Manifesto for Cyborgs.
(For a reply, see William Grassie's Cyborgs, Trickster, and Hermes.)

Katalin G. Havas' Contradictions in the Principles of Ethics and Contemporary Technology.

N. Katherine Hayles' The Materiality of Informatics. For an excerpt from Hayles' new work How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, see Prologue.

N. Katherine Hayles' Stimulating Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us.

Robert Heilbroner's Visions of the Future: The Distant Past, Yesterday Today, and Tomorrow (This is a review of Heilbroner's book as part of the book announcement by Oxford University Press.)

Michael Heim's Homepage  (This page lists many of Heim's online articles.)

Michael Heim's The Nerd in the Noosphere.

F. Heylichen's, C. Joslyn's and V. Turchin's What Are Cybernetics and  Systems Science?  ( Part of the web site Principia Cybernetica.)

Larry A. Hickman's Techne and Politeia Revisited: Pragmatic Paths to Technological Revolution (Hickman's essay is a response in part to Langdon Winner's essay Techne and Politeia.)

Hideyuki Hirakawa's Coping with the Uncertainty beyond Epistemic-Moral Inability: Rethinking the Human Self-Understanding with Hannah Arendt's Reflection on Vita Activa.

Imre Hronszky's Technological "Paradigms:" Cognitive Traditions and Communities in Technological Change.

Kurt Huebner's Philosophy of Modern Art and Philosophy of Technology.

Humanitas' editorial statement: Rethinking It All.

Don Ihde's Philosophy of Technology, 1975-1995  ( For a summary of Chapters 1 and 2, see Dr. Michael Svatos' course handout.)  and also his essay Why Not Science Critics?   

Don Ihde's Whole Earth Measurements  (" What I wish to do in this paper is to look at both 'classical' phenomenology (Husserl in particular) and at Heideggerian hermeneutics regarding the theme, 'environmental phenomenology,' and show that both approaches are to be found wanting with respect to the Greenhouse Effect phenomenon.")

Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious ( This is an abstract of Jameson's work by Joseph C. Krajkovich; for an essay on Jameson, see Sean Homer's Fredric Jameson and the Limits of Postmodern Theory.)

P.K. Jamison's Contradictory Spaces: Pleasure and the Seduction of the Cyborg Discourse.

Janus Head's editorial statement: Scientia Media (Brent Dean Robbins, Claire Cowan-Barbetti, and Victor Barbetti.)

 Scott D. Johnson's A Framework for Technology Education Curricula Which Emphasizes Intellectual Processes.

Stephen Johnston's, Alison Lee's and Helen McGregor's Engineering as Captive Discourse.

Quentin Jones' Virtual-Communities, Virtual Settlements & Cyber-Archeology: A Theoretical Outline.


                                Continue to Authors K through Z

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Last Revision:  April 8, 2002
Please send comments or additional resource materials to Frank Edler fedler@mccneb.edu