Technology, in all its forms, has had and continues to have an indisputable impact on society and culture. Philosophy of technology seeks to understand this impact and the meaning of technology for society and culture. Although its origins can be traced back to the Greeks, it wasn’t until the late 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century that it gained ground as a philosophical discipline. Now more than ever it is considered an essential philosophical enterprise. ‘The Budapest Workshop on Philosophy of Technology’ was a lively and successful event that sought to discuss, reflect on and apply this branch of philosophical inquiry to both historical and contemporary examples. Importantly, the contributors’ methodological approaches were influenced by, although not limited to, Michael Polanyi’s term ‘post-critical’. Moving beyond the rigidity of past approaches, the selected essays were driven by two lines of inquiry, what has been the historical role of technology in social and scientific change? And, how can a ‘post-critical’ approach enhance and extend our understanding of philosophy of technology? This edited volume begins by exploring the role of technology in social and scientific developments from a historical perspective, before moving towards a discussion of philosophy of technology from a ‘Post-Critical’ epistemic stance. Free from the constraints of previous methodologies, the third part of this work engages with the term ‘Post-Critical’ in its broadest sense. The contributors to this section consider the phenomenology of the body and the influence of technology on our lives. Finally, the four concluding chapters of this book apply this philosophical approach to a wide range of contemporary problems from Decision Support Systems to Crisis Communication.

Technology, in all its forms, has had and continues to have an indisputable impact on society and culture. Philosophy of technology seeks to understand this impact and the meaning of technology for society and culture. Although its origins can be traced back to the Greeks, it wasn’t until the late 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century that it gained ground as a philosophical discipline. Now more than ever it is considered an essential philosophical enterprise. ‘The Budapest Workshop on Philosophy of Technology’ was a lively and successful event that sought to discuss, reflect on and apply this branch of philosophical inquiry to both historical and contemporary examples. Importantly, the contributors’ methodological approaches were influenced by, although not limited to, Michael Polanyi’s term ‘post-critical’. Moving beyond the rigidity of past approaches, the selected essays were driven by two lines of inquiry, what has been the historical role of technology in social and scientific change? And, how can a ‘post-critical’ approach enhance and extend our understanding of philosophy of technology? This edited volume begins by exploring the role of technology in social and scientific developments from a historical perspective, before moving towards a discussion of philosophy of technology from a ‘Post-Critical’ epistemic stance. Free from the constraints of previous methodologies, the third part of this work engages with the term ‘Post-Critical’ in its broadest sense. The contributors to this section consider the phenomenology of the body and the influence of technology on our lives. Finally, the four concluding chapters of this book apply this philosophical approach to a wide range of contemporary problems from Decision Support Systems to Crisis Communication.

This volume features 16 essays on the philosophy of technology that discuss its identity, its position in philosophy in general, and the role of empirical studies in philosophical analyses of engineering ethics and engineering practices. This volume is published about fifteen years after Peter Kroes and Anthonie Meijers published a collection of papers under the title The empirical turn in the philosophy of technology, in which they called for a reorientation toward the practice of engineering, and sketched the likely benefits for philosophy of technology of pursuing its major questions in an empirically informed way. The essays in this volume fall apart in two different kinds. One kind follows up on The empirical turn discussion about what the philosophy of technology is all about. It continues the search for the identity of the philosophy of technology by asking what comes after the empirical turn. The other kind of essays follows the call for an empirical turn in the philosophy of technology by showing how it may be realized with regard to particular topics. Together these essays offer the reader an overview of the state of the art of an empirically informed philosophy of technology and of various views on the empirical turn as a stepping stone into the future of the philosophy of technology.

Technology has extended its reach to the human body, not just in a literal sense, through implants, transplants and technological substitutes for biological organs, but in a more figurative sense too. Technological infrastructure and the institutions of a technified society today determine what perception is, how we communicate and what forms of human relationship with the natural world are possible. A fundamental new conception of technology is urgently needed. Technology can no longer be seen as a means for efficiently attaining pre-established ends. Rather, it must be seen as a total structure which makes new forms of human action and human relationship possible, while limiting the possibilities of others. In Invasive Technification, acclaimed German philosopher Gernot Böhme offers a reading of technology that explores the many dimensions in which technology presents challenges for modern human beings. It is a book about the preservation of humanity and humane values under the demanding conditions of a technically advanced civilisation and makes a major contribution to the contemporary philosophy of technology.

As science becomes more deeply embedded in a complex technological infrastructure, has this changed the relationship between the sciences and the various technologies that support them? As our technologies help shrink our world, can we restrict our ethical concerns or must we find a way to face the fact that we are now one world? What do new forms of architecture say about whom we are? Is the design process the new epistemological paradigm? The answers to all of these is "yes" according to Joseph C. Pitt (VirginaTech). Doing Philosophy of Technology presents an updated and integrated overview of the most important thinking from this prominent philosopher of technology. Throughout his career Joseph C. Pitt has defended the view that to say anything meaningful about the value of a technology one must know something about that technology and how it functions in the world. This starting point leads naturally to a pragmatist philosophical stance, since it is the real world consequences of introducing a technology that must be the basis for any further normative judgements. In the book we find an extended set of arguments that challenge the idea that there are eternal philosophical issues that transcend the impacts that technologies make on human beings and their world. Rather, it is claimed that as our technologies transform our world they transform us and the kinds of questions we find important to answer.

A leading philosopher of technology calls for the democratic coordination of technical rationality with everyday experience. The technologies, markets, and administrations of today's knowledge society are in crisis. We face recurring disasters in every domain: climate change, energy shortages, economic meltdown. The system is broken, despite everything the technocrats claim to know about science, technology, and economics. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that today powerful technologies have unforeseen effects that disrupt everyday life; the new masters of technology are not restrained by the lessons of experience, and accelerate change to the point where society is in constant turmoil. In Between Reason and Experience, leading philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg makes a case for the interdependence of reason—scientific knowledge, technical rationality—and experience. Feenberg examines different aspects of the tangled relationship between technology and society from the perspective of critical theory of technology, an approach he has pioneered over the past twenty years. Feenberg points to two examples of democratic interventions into technology: the Internet (in which user initiative has influenced design) and the environmental movement (in which science coordinates with protest and policy). He examines methodological applications of critical theory of technology to the case of the French Minitel computing network and to the relationship between national culture and technology in Japan. Finally, Feenberg considers the philosophies of technology of Heidegger, Habermas, Latour, and Marcuse. The gradual extension of democracy into the technical sphere, Feenberg argues, is one of the great political transformations of our time.

This important collection of essays by Andrew Feenberg presents his critical theory of technology, an innovative approach to philosophy and sociology of technology based on a synthesis of ideas drawn from STS and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. According to critical theory of technology, technologies are neither neutral nor deterministic, but are encoded with specific socio-economic values and interests. Feenberg explores how they can be developed and adapted to more or less democratic values and institutions, and how their future is subject to social action, negotiation and reinterpretation. Technologies bring with them a particular "rationality," sets of rules and implied ways of behaving and thinking which, despite their profound influence on institutions, ideas and actions, can be transformed in a process of democratic rationalization. Feenberg argues that the emergence of human communication on the Internet and the environmental movement offer abundant examples of public interventions that have reshaped technologies originally designed for different purposes. This volume includes chapters on citizenship and critical theory of technology, philosophy of technology and modernity, and Heidegger and Marcuse, two of the most prominent philosophers of technology.