A reading project on the philosophy of tech
I’m thinking through a new reading project on the philosophy of technology. I want to focus on what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the “humanities” philosophy of technology as opposed to the “analytic” philosophy of technology, i.e., the stuff written by non-technologists. I’ve read some of this before, or feel like I’ve absorbed it by osmosis, but never in a sustained way, and not since becoming a technologist myself.
It’s the distance between the humanist and technical perspectives I’m curious about. The SEP article says that the humanists “treat [technology] as a ‘black box’, a unitary, monolithic phenomenon” and are pretty uniformly critical after around the 1870s. I’m not sure I buy that they treat it as a black box any more than engineers themselves do, though they clearly think it’s possible and worthwhile to give a general account. The question is really just: how grounded is their general account? how caricatured? For myself: especially now that I’ve developed some taste for the intellectual habits of an engineer, what parts of my experience do they capture or fail to capture?
Here’s my working canon, though it will take many, many months to get through these at the pace I’m able to sustain these days:
- Plato, Phaedrus
- Francis Bacon, New Atlantis
- Karl Marx, “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” (in Capital)
- Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization
- Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
- Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”
- Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life
- Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
- Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility
- Neil Postman, Technopoly
- Essays from Walter Benjamin, Langdon Winner, Donna Haraway, and Wendell Berry