Philosophy of Technology

We live surrounded by tools, machines, systems and algorithms with such familiarity that we rarely ask what technology actually is. It tends to appear as a neutral set of means at the disposal of ends we freely choose: a hammer, a power plant, a smartphone are all supposedly “just tools” — good or bad depending on how we use them. The philosophy of technology begins precisely from the suspicion that this neutrality is a comfortable illusion. Since antiquity, but with unprecedented urgency from the twentieth century onward, a lineage of thinkers — from Aristotle to Heidegger, from Ellul to Mumford — has insisted that technology is not an indifferent means to human ends, but a way of being in the world that shapes in advance what we count as real, as nature, as truth, and even as human. ...

Albert Borgmann was born in Freiburg, Germany, on November 23, 1937, and grew up in the shadow of the gothic cathedral, the Black Forest, and the university where Husserl and Heidegger had taught. Still a student in Freiburg, he attended Heidegger’s lectures in 1957, an experience that would leave a lasting mark on his later reflection on technology. He later moved to the United States, where he earned an MA in German literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Munich, with a dissertation on Cardinal John Henry Newman. He briefly taught German literature at Illinois and philosophy at DePaul University and the University of Hawaii, before settling for decades at the University of Montana in Missoula, where he died on May 7, 2023, at the age of 85. ...

Andrew Feenberg Andrew Feenberg was born in 1943 in the United States. He earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego, in 1972 under Marcuse, whose direct student he was during the final years of the exiled German philosopher’s career. As a student, Feenberg was actively involved with the New Left, founding the journal Alternatives and taking part, alongside Marcuse himself, in the May 1968 events in Paris — Marcuse, who was in the city for a UNESCO conference on Marx, was recognized by students occupying the École des Beaux-Arts and invited to address the assembly; Feenberg, who accompanied him, witnessed the episode and would, decades later, co-write with Jim Freedman the book When Poetry Ruled the Streets (2001), on that movement. He taught philosophy at San Diego State University from 1969 to 2003, with visiting appointments at Duke, SUNY Buffalo, the Sorbonne, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the University of Tokyo, among other institutions. He later held the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where he directed the Applied Communication and Technology Lab (ACT Lab) until becoming professor emeritus. ...

Don Ihde Don Ihde was born in Hope, Kansas, on January 14, 1934, and died on January 17, 2024, just days after turning ninety. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Boston University in 1964 under Erazim Kohák, with a dissertation on Paul Ricœur’s phenomenological methodology. In 1969 he joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he helped found the Department of Philosophy in the early 1970s and remained for forty-three years, retiring in 2012 as Distinguished Professor. ...

Günther Anders Günther Anders was born Günther Siegmund Stern in Breslau (then Germany, now Wrocław, Poland) on 12 July 1902, the son of the psychologists William Stern and Clara Stern, pioneers of developmental psychology, and a cousin of the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. He received his doctorate in philosophy under the supervision of Edmund Husserl at Freiburg in 1923, having also studied with Heidegger — of whom, decades later, he became a trenchant critic, publishing in 1948 the essay “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy” (in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), in which he accused the existential analytic of Being and Time of ignoring the concrete materiality of human needs — toothache, hunger, sexual desire. Working as a journalist for the Berliner Börsen-Courier, he adopted the pen name “Anders” (“different” or “otherwise,” in German), which became his permanent name. In 1929 he married Hannah Arendt, whom he had met in Heidegger’s seminar; the marriage ended in an amicable divorce in 1937. With the rise of Nazism he fled Germany in 1933, passing through Paris and, from 1936, the United States, where he lived until 1950, when he returned to Europe and settled in Vienna, the city where he would live until his death on 17 December 1992. ...

Jacques Ellul Jacques Ellul was born in Bordeaux, France, on 6 January 1912, and died in Pessac, in the Bordeaux metropolitan area, on 19 May 1994. Trained in law, history, and sociology, he spent decades as professor of the History and Sociology of Institutions at the Faculty of Law and Economic Science of the University of Bordeaux. In 1932 he underwent what he described as a “very brutal, very sudden” religious conversion, an episode that led him to join the Reformed Church of France and to sustain, throughout his life, a body of work he insisted must be read dialectically as two poles of a single thought: the sociological analysis of modern technique and Christian theological reflection. During the Second World War he took part in the French Resistance; in 2001, seven years after his death, he was recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations” for having helped Jews escape Nazi persecution. ...

Lewis Mumford Lewis Mumford was born in Flushing, Queens, New York, on 19 October 1895, and died in Amenia, New York, on 26 January 1990. He studied at the City College of New York and at the New School for Social Research but never completed a formal degree — tuberculosis contracted in his youth interrupted his studies, and he later served as a radio electrician in the United States Navy during the First World War. A largely self-taught polymath, Mumford produced one of the twentieth century’s most influential bodies of work on the history of technics, the city, and architecture, while also serving as associate editor of The Dial and, for more than three decades, as architecture critic for The New Yorker. His intellectual formation owed more to Patrick Geddes — the Scottish urbanist and biologist whom Mumford called his “avowed master” — than to any academic institution; from Geddes he inherited a periodization of the phases of technics and a holistic approach integrating biology, sociology, and technology. He also absorbed from Thorstein Veblen a critique of absentee ownership and wasteful production, and from Peter Kropotkin and Ebenezer Howard the ideal of a cooperative, regionalist urbanism. ...