1 History of Technology

A generation ago, before the much-noted “empirical turn” in philosophy, it was unlikely that an assessment of the philosophy of technology would have prominently featured the history of technology. Put simply, there were relatively few common concerns, since historians of technology rarely engaged in the sort of questions that animated philosophers of technology. Consulting the published volumes of Research in Philosophy and Technology and Technology and Culture three decades ago suggests two divergent scholarly communities, separated by research methods and background assumptions, and pursuing largely independent investigations. At the time, historians of technology were insisting on technology being an ontologically and epistemologically separate category from science, and vigorously insisting that technology is not merely applied science, while philosophers were ready and more comfortable with sweeping normative assessments about the essential characteristics of technology and its impact on society. In the debates on technological determinism, philosophers of technology and historians of technology were nearly as far apart as possible: while historians of technology adamantly refuted any and all claims of technological determinism, philosophers of technology were as a discipline the most enthusiastic in exploring and embracing the notion that technology determines social and cultural change and that technology develops more or less autonomously of social and cultural influences (Winner 1977; Misa 2004b). In this climate, there was not so very much that the two specialist fields held in common. In the last ten years or so, however, there has been increasing mutual interest in philosophy and history of technology (Achterhuis 2001; Ihde 2004). It has not been that a hybrid discipline such as the history of philosophy of science has emerged, but rather that some historians and some philosophers have discovered common interests and common concerns. The essays in this volume are testimony to this shared mutual interest, although the individual topics they explore do not really exhaust the range of shared topics and emergent themes (see Misa et al. 2003). The commissioned essays examine the cultural contexts of technology, notably in the specific contexts of Japan, Islam, China and the West, as well as examining the problem areas of defining technology and assessing military technology. These essays develop some of the shared concerns and concepts that are emerging between these two fields. Accordingly, this essay will provide a summary of their main findings but also attempt a wider assessment of 9781405146012_4_001.qxd 2/4/09 16:26 Page 7