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Technology Philosophy
  What is Technology?
    Beigin
      It is commonly held that the term originated with the late nineteenth-century philosopher Ernst Kapp (Mitcham 1994: 20).
    90s Against Continental Tradition : Empirical turn
      Conceptually, the empirical turn foregrounded a need to be sceptical of tendencies towards pessimism, determinism and the reification of ‘Technology’ into some kind of autonomous agent
      methodologically, it promoted a more focused and pragmatic approach, against some of the potential pitfalls of more speculative and lyrical ways of thinking about technology evident in the continental tradition.
    Same mistake
      by turning a commitment to ‘transcendental’ method that has been prevalent throughout this tradition since Kant into metaphysical commitment to some form of reified ‘Transcendental’ realm.
    How to approach Technology Philosophy?
      Exceptional Technology
        imaginary technology
        failed technological practice
        a technological with an impossible aim
      The claim advanced in this book is simply this: for any picture of technology, there will be phenomena that show up as marginal and ‘exceptional’ to it, and these may be just as instructive for helping us make sense of our picture; indeed, in some circumstances, they may be more instructive.
  3 example & meaning
    Vannevar Bush’s ‘memex’
      ‘proto-ICT’
      it is a merely imagined technology, the well-documented legacy of which has led us to overlook crucial differences between it and the networked technologies it helped to inspire
      The point here is not to condemn Bush for failing to foretell the future; it is to draw attention to the limits of any contemporary inclination to think that he did.
      but that it was imagined under conceptual conditions that actively inhibited recognition of the kinds of emergent issues posed by networking
      is that issues of influence in actual processes of technological design, implementation and use can be much more complex and convoluted than any desire for a clear-cut conception of the ‘empirical’ as a historically stable category would have us believe.
      Instead, the case highlights the ongoing need to be attentive in a transcendental sense: to shifts in the conditions under which the limits of the empirical are imagined and reimagined
      This is because the memex rests on presuppositions that take the nature of human thought, subjectivity and memory to ultimately be of such a character. Whenever the memex is viewed as part of a narrative leading inexorably to our contemporary situation (as it often implicitly is), it may be that we are hearkening nostalgically after these presuppositions, and that we are ignoring emergent issues posed by the forms of ‘collective’ and ‘public’thought, subjectivity and memory that networked cultures make possible
    On the contrary, what the case studies of this chapter seek to show is that it is both possible and desirable to go much further in empirical and transcendental directions at once, in favour of a dynamic and thoroughgoing approach to philosophy of technology.
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