Philosophy of technology

Philosophical discussion of questions relating to technology (or its Greek ancestor techne) dates back to the very dawn of Western philosophy.

A common theme in the Greek view of techne is that it arises as an imitation of nature (for example, weaving developed out of watching spiders).

[citation needed] The native German philosopher and geographer Ernst Kapp, who was based in Texas, published the fundamental book "Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik" in 1877.

[citation needed] Five early and prominent 20th-century philosophers to directly address the effects of modern technology on humanity include John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, Günther Anders and Hannah Arendt.

They all saw technology as central to modern life, although Heidegger, Anders,[7] Arendt[8] and Marcuse were more ambivalent and critical than Dewey.

Ellul views the modern technological world-system as being motivated by the needs of its own efficiency and power, not the welfare of the human race or the integrity of the biosphere.

[citation needed] Bernard Stiegler argued in his Technics and Time, as well as in his other works, that the question of technology has been repressed (in the sense of Freud) by the history of philosophy.

Stiegler shows, for example in Plato's Meno, that technology is that which makes anamnesis, namely the access to truth, possible.

Citing examples such as the analysis of writing and speech in Plato's dialogue The Phaedrus, Galloway et al. suggest that instead of considering technology as a secondary to ontology, technology be understood as prior to the very possibility of philosophy: "Does everything that exists, exist to me presented and represented, to be mediated and remediated, to be communicated and translated?

There are mediative situations in which heresy, exile, or banishment carry the day, not repetition, communion, or integration.