From Essentialism to Constructivism: Philosophy of Technology at the Crossroads

What Heidegger called "the question of technology" has a peculiar status in the academy today. After World War II, the humanities and social sciences were swept by a wave of technological determinism. If technology was not praised for modernizing us, it was blamed for the crisis of our culture. Whether interpreted in optimistic or pessimistic terms, determinism appeared to offer a fundamental account of modernity as a unified phenomenon. This approach has now been largely abandoned for a view that admits the possibility of significant "difference," i.e., cultural variety in the reception and appropriation of modernity. Yet the breakdown of determinism has not led to quite the flowering of research in philosophy of technology one might hope for. On the one hand, mainstream philosophy, which was never happy with the intrusion of technological themes, sticks happily to its traditional indifference to the material world. Where the old determinism overestimated the independent impact of artifactual on social reality, the new social-scientific approaches appear to have so disaggregated the question of technology as to deprive it of philosophical significance. It has become matter for specialized research.1 And for this very reason, most professional philosophers now feel safe in ignoring technology altogether, except of course when they turn the key in the ignition. On the other hand, those few philosophers, notably Albert Borgmann, who continue the earlier interrogation of technology have hesitated to assimilate the advances of the new technology studies. They remain faithful to the determinist premises of an earlier generation of founders of the field, such as Ellul, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School. For these thinkers