In this article, we discussed the philosophy of technology, we started by explaining the meaning of philosophy of tech.
Definition
Philosophy is the study of the basic ideas about knowledge, truth, right and wrong, religion, and the nature and meaning of life. the term “philosophy” means, “love of wisdom.” In a broad sense, philosophy is an activity people undertake when they seek to understand fundamental truths about themselves, the world in which they live, and their relationships to the world and to each other.
Philosophy of technology is the study of the character of technology and its relations to society, and it various branches. It is a set of statements that makes intelligible the existence or occurrence of an object, event, or state of affairs
Philosophy of technology studies the character of technology and its relations to society. It has various branches, focusing for instance on the ethics of technology, on the relations between science and technology, on human-technology relations, or the political dimensions of technology.
Expansions
Philosophy of technology emerged as an independent field of philosophical inquiry in the second half of the 19th century, and embodies as many approaches as there are philosophical traditions. Some of them are more ‘theoretical’, others are more ‘applied’. Some of them focus more on sharpening the concepts with which we can understand technology, others more on theorizing and evaluating the social and cultural roles of technology.
The origin of philosophy of technology can be placed in the second half of the 19th century. But this does not mean that philosophers before the mid-19th century did not address questions that would today be thought of as belonging in the domain of philosophy of technology.
Philosophical reflection
Over the last decades of the 20th century, the field made an ‘experiential turn’. It shifted its focus from studying ‘technology’ as a broad phenomenon to studying actual technologies in their detailed relations with the sciences, with human beings, and with society. Rather than developing theories about technology in general, it started to take actual technologies as a starting point for philosophical reflection.
Technologies challenge philosophical concepts and theories. When medical diagnostic technologies get involved in our ethical decisions, for instance, this challenges our ideas about ethics itself: is ethics something that only humans can do, or is there room for technologies as well?
When deep brain implants interfere with our moods and behavior, this challenges our ideas about autonomy, free will and what it means to ‘act.
Humanities Philosophy of Technology
Although there was much technological progress in the Roman empire and during the Middle Ages, philosophical reflection on technology did not grow at a corresponding rate. Comprehensive works such as Vitruvius’ De architecture (first century BC) and Agricola’s De re Metallica (1556) paid much attention to practical aspects of technology but little to philosophy.
In the realm of scholastic philosophy, there was an emergent appreciation for the mechanical arts. They were generally considered to be born of—and limited to—the mimicry of nature. This view was challenged when alchemy was introduced in the Latin West around the mid-twelfth century. Some alchemical writers such as Roger Bacon were willing to argue that human art, even if learned by imitating natural processes, could successfully reproduce natural products or even surpass them (Newman 2004). The result was a philosophy of technology in which human art was raised to a level of appreciation not found in other writings until the Renaissance. However, the last three decades of the thirteenth century witnessed an increasingly hostile attitude by religious authorities toward alchemy that culminated eventually in the denunciation Contra alchemists, written by the inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric in 1396 (Newman 2004).
Science and Technology’s Different Relations to Philosophy
It may come as a surprise to those new to the topic that the fields of philosophy of science and philosophy of technology show such great differences, given that few practices in our society are as closely related as science and engineering. Experimental science is nowadays crucially dependent on technology for the realization of its research set-ups and for gathering and analyzing data. The phenomena that modern science seeks to study could never be discovered without producing them through technology.
Theoretical research within technology has come to be often indistinguishable from theoretical research in science, making engineering science largely continuous with ‘ordinary’ or ‘pure’ science. This is a relatively recent development, which started around the middle of the nineteenth century, and is responsible for great differences between modern technology and traditional, craft-like techniques. The educational training that aspiring scientists and engineers receive starts off being largely identical and only gradually diverges into a science or an engineering curriculum. Ever since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, characterized by its two major innovations, the experimental method and the mathematical articulation of scientific theories, philosophical reflection on science has focused on the method by which scientific knowledge is generated, on the reasons for thinking scientific theories to be true, or approximately true, and on the nature of evidence and the reasons for accepting one theory and rejecting another. Hardly ever have philosophers of science posed questions that did not have the community of scientists, their concerns, their aims, their intuitions, their arguments and choices, as a major target. In contrast it is only recently that the philosophy of technology has discovered the community of engineers.
It might be claimed that it is up to the philosophy of technology, and not the philosophy of science, to target first of all the impact of technology—and with it science—on society and culture, because science affects society only through being applied as technology. This, however, will not do. Right from the start of the scientific revolution, science affected human culture and thought fundamentally and directly, not with a detour through technology, and the same is true for later developments such as relativity, atomic physics and quantum mechanics, the theory of evolution, genetics, biochemistry, and the increasingly dominating scientific world view overall. All the same philosophers of science for a long time gave the impression that they left questions addressing the normative, social and cultural aspects of science gladly to other philosophical disciplines, or to historical studies. This has changed only during the past few decades, by scholars either focusing on these issues from the start.
Conclusion
Philosophy of technology studies the character of technology and its relations to society. It has various branches, focusing for instance on the ethics of technology, on the relations between science and technology, on human-technology relations, or the political dimensions of technology.
READ: Impact of Technology on the Society