Essays on the Philosophy of Technology II

Bernulf Kanitscheider's Humans and Future Communications Systems.

Nancy Kaplan's E-literacies: Politexts, Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print. (Kaplan's essay is a response in part to Neil Postman's book Technopoly.)

Murat Karamuftuoglu's A Deleuzoguattarian Framework for Understanding Information Systems: A Case of Document Retieval Systems.

Douglas Kellner's Crossing the Postmodern Divide with Borgmann or Adventures in Cyberspace.

Douglas Kellner's New Technologies, TechnoCities, and the Prospects of Democratization.

Douglas Kellner's Intellectuals, the New Public Spheres, and Techno-Politics  and  Globalization and the Postmodern Turn.

Michelle Kendrick's Cyberspace and the Technological Real and From Tool to Artifact: The New Cultural Study of Science.

Burt Kimmelman's  The Internet, Selfhood, and the (Re)textualizing of Experience.

Julie Thompson Klein's Notes toward an Epistemology of Transdiscipinarity.

Arthur Kroker's Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan and The Theory of the Virtual Class. See also Kroker's Deleuze and Guattari: Two Meditations

Thomas Kuhn: Thomas Kuhn: The Essentials (Pajares' synopsis of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in The Philosophers' Magazine.)

Kisho Kurokawa's Philosophy of Symbiosis.

TyAnna Herrington Lambert's Jurgen Habermas: Luddite Dragon or Defender of the Weak? Effects of Intertextuality on Meaning in Jurgen Habermas' Toward a Rational Society ( See also Steve Stickle's An Introduction to J. Habermas )

Jean Ladriere's The Technical Universe in an Ontological Perspective.

Rita Lauria's Virtual Reality: An Empirical-Metaphysical Testbed ( "This essay argues that a fundamental message of VR may be to illumine timeless philosophical inquiries concerning the nature of knowing and being and thus to direct our attention to what Aristotle called the eternal question. What is reality?"  See also the essay by Lombard and Ditton as well as the one by Biocca, both of which deal with the concept and experience of presence in VR.)

Theodor Leiber's On the Impact of Deterministic Chaos on Modern Science and Philosophy of Science: Implications for the Philosophy of Technology?

Karl Leidlmair's From the Philosophy of Technology to a Theory of Media

Hans Lenk's Advances in the Philosophy of Technology: New Structural Characteristics of Technologies.

Hans Lenk's Technological Responsibility and the Humanities.

Nina Lerman's, Arwen Mohun's, Ruth Oldenziel's Versatile Tools: Gender Analysis and the History of Technology.

Ted Lockhart's Technological Fixes for Moral Problems.

Matthew Lombard's and Theresa Ditton's At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence  ( The authors present an extensive explicationand discussion of the concept of presence which they define as " a mediated experience that seems very much like it is not mediated, a mediated experience that creates for the user a strong sense of presence." Although this is a good start, the definition in my opinion is problematic: it begs the question by using the concept of presence in order to define it.
See also related essays by Lauria and Biocca.)

Carmen Luke's Technological Literacy.

Yogesh Malhotra's Knowledge Management in Inquiring Organizations.

Sheila A. Malone's The New Performer: Data as Performer and Performance.

Frank Margonis' Introduction. Philosophical Pluralism: The Promise of Fragmentation  (Although it is not directly related to the philosophy of technology, this introduction to the 1996 volume of the Philosophy of Education Society Yearbook does give a good summary of the range of responses to current problems in education philosophy.)

Humberto Maturana's The Nature of Time ( One of the leading representatives of radical constructivism.)

Leo Marx's Does Technology Mean Progress?

Alec McHoul's Cyberbeing and ~space.

Marshall McLuhan: Web site on McLuhan which includes interviews,excerpts from books, and links; see also Larry Press' article McLuhan Meets the Net.

Phillip McReynolds' Between Technology and Technique: A Critique of Ihde's Technology and the lifeworld.

Klaus Mainzer's Computer Technology and Evolution: From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Life.

Metaphysics Research Lab's (Stanford University) Introduction to the Metaphysics Reasearch Lab.

Carl Mitcham's Notes toward a Philosophy of Meta-Technology. (For a review of Mitcham's book Thinking through Technology, see Richard A. Dreitrich's book review.)

Carl Mitcham's Notes for a Hypertext on the Emergence and Transcendence of Computer Ethics.

 Carl Mitcham's Thinking through Engineering and his Review of Frederick Ferre's Philosophy of Technology. See also Mitcham's short piece Why We Should Learn to Say No to Technology.

M. Carmen Sanchez Monserrate's  Prenatal Genetic Tests: Misconceptions and Their Implications.

Jesus Mosterin's Technology-Mediated Observation.

Elizabeth Murphy's Constructivism: From Theory to Practice.

Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (For a review, see Tomothy W. Luke's Digital Beings & Virtual Times: The Politics of Cybersubjectivity)

Cesar Cuello Nieto's Sustainable Development and Philosophies of Technology.

David F. Noble: David Noble on Technology The Chronicle of Higher Education's Live Colloquy; see also
Noble's essays on Digital Diploma Mills

 Todd Oppenheimer's The Computer Delusion ( July 1997 article in The Atlantic Monthly ).

OPT Design's  Philosophy Page and essay on the Philosophy of Technology  (This design company --
OPT stands for Ontological Paradigm Technique -- has its own philosophy pages!)

Carl Page's Symbolic Mathematics and the Intellect Militant: On Modern Philosophy's Revolutionary Spirit.

Kent Palmer's The Ontological Foundations of Autopoietic Theory (See Lloyd Fell on the terminology of autopoiesis.)

Paul Pangaro's Cybernetics: A Definition

Joseph C. Pitt's On the Philosophy of Technology, Past and Future.

Joseph C. Pitt's Philosophical Methodology, Technologies, and the Transformation of Knowledge.

Mark Poster's Postmodern Virtualities.

Neil Postman's Of Luddites, Learning, and Life ( See also Nancy Kaplan's essay What Neil Postman has to say...; this page includes a link to Kaplan's essay and contains excerpts from Postman's book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Scott London reviews Postman's Technopoly and The End of Education; see also
David Model's review of Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. There is also an Anti-Neil Postman Homepage. In addition, see Tad Beckman's review of Postman's Technopoly.)

Susanna Priest's The Ethics of Using Technology As a aMedium in Higher Education: Framing Questions for Empirical Investigation.        

William S. Pretzer's Technology Education and the Search for Truth, Beauty, and Love.

Ramon Queralto's Technology as a New Condition of the Possibility of Scientific Knowledge.

Werner Rammert's Relations That Constitute Technology and Media That Make a Difference: Toward a Social Pragmatic Theory of Technicization.

Ignacio Ramonet's The One Idea System. See also Ramonet's Geopolitics of Chaos (reviewed by Felix Stalder)

Friedrich Rapp's Philosophy of Technology After Twenty Years: A German Perspective and The Material and Cultural Aspects of Technology.

Emily R. Reich's Community and Civic Involvement of Feminist Activists on the Internet.

Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier  (See Geert Lovink's review of Rheingold's book.) 

Lars Risan's Artificial Life: A Technoscience Leaving Modernity?

Kevin Robins' and Frank Webster's Cybernetic Capitalism: Information, Technology, Everyday Life.

Guenter Ropohl's Philosophy of Socio-technical Systems.

Joseph Rouse's What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?

Mike Sandbothe's Media Temporalities in the Internet: Philosophy of Time and Media with Derrida and Rorty.

Beatriz Santana's Introducing the Technophobia/Technophilia Debate: Some Comments on the Information Age 

Jean-Michel Salanskis' Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht [Science Does Not Think] (The title is in German but the article is in English. It attempts to explicate Heidegger's famous -- or infamous -- phrase that science does not think.)

Ana Sanchez's A Dialogical Model of Persistent Patriarchalism.

Raphael Sassower's  Technological Responsibility for an Ecological Agenda.

Herbert L. Schiller's Media, Technology, and the Market: The Interacting Dynamic.

Richard E. Sclove's Technology, Society, and Democracy: New Problems and Opportunities
(A report to the General Program  of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation )

C. Allen Shaffer's Virtual Reality and Husserlian Phenomenology.

Dudley Shapere's Building on What We Have Learned: The Relations between Science and Technology.

Phil Shapiro's Review of Michael Heim's Electronic Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing ( Yale,1989 )

Serge Sharoff's Philosophy and Cognitive Science.

Richard Spinello's The Case for E-mail Privacy.

George Soros' The Capitalist Threat. (See Felix Stalder's review of Soros' The Crisis of Global Capitalism immediately below.)

Felix Stalder's review of D. F. Noble's The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man
and the Spirit of Invention; see also Stalder's review of Bruno Latour's book Pandora's Box: Essays on the
Reality of Science Studies and his review of George Soros' The Crisis of Global Capitalism; Stalder's essays include Digital Identities: Patterns in Information Flows , Natural Selection and the New Economy: Online Auction for Superior Genes and From Figure/Ground to Actor-Networks: McLuhan and Latour.

Stanford Electronic Humanities Review's Special Issue: Constructions of the Mind: Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities (This is a special issue of the Stanford Humanities Review on that topic and lists 19 articles ranging from such issues as AI as a philosophical project and AI and the structure of knowledge to AI research as art and cognitive science as philosophy.)

  Steve Stickle's An Introduction to J. Habermas.

  Kenneth Stokes' A Metatheoretical Discourse  ( This web site is a 6-volume hypertext on political economy; the first three volumes are available. In the author's words, " This book is about how we might better constitute metatheoretically the putative domain of human livlihood, and about how its foundations, framework, and concepts, might be defined and constructed anew." I include it here because it engages a wide variety of philosophical theories which also form a background for technology.)

Nick Sushkin's Learning Theories ( Summaries of Piaget's theory of learning, constructivism, and Gordon's cognitive style typology.)

Mark C. Taylor's Rhizomic Folds of Interstanding

Mark C. Taylor's and Esa Saarinen's Imagologies: Media Philosophy ( Excerpts from their book. See Stephen D. O'Leary's review of Imagologies as well as a review by Bas Raijmakers.)

George Teschner's The Humanities and Telecommunication.

Techne: Journal of the Society for Philosophy and Technology  (Volume 5, no 2)

Tekhnema: Journal of Philosophy and Technology ( Issue 5: Energy and Chance)

Paul Tomassi's  Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Technology.

Ladislav Tondl's Information and Systems Dimensions of Technological Artifacts.

Duane Truex's and Richard Baskerville's The Debate in Structural Linguistics: how it may impact the information systems field.

V. Turchin's and C. Joslyn's The Cybernetic Manifesto (this is part of the Principia Cybernetica website.)

Sherry Turkle's Seeing through Computers: Education in a Culture of Simulation.
(For a commentary on Turkle's new book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, see Sherry Turkle:
Surface, Surface, Everywhere... by the web site Transparency. The commentary is part of a larger piece called The Age of Simulation.)

Sherry Turkle's What Are We Thinking About When We Are Thinking About Computers?

Sherry Turkle's Virtual Reality and Its Discontents: Searching for Community in Cyberspace
and Who Am We? and also Constructions and Reconstructions of Self in Virtual Reality: Playing in
the MUDs.

J. van Brakel's Telematic Life Forms.

 Paul Virilio's Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm! ( See also Louise Wilson's interview with Paul Virilio and John Armitage's interview with Paul Verilio for CTHEORY; several essays on Virilio can be found at the
Enterprise website; see also Dialogues: a game of love and chance: a discussion with Paul Verilio by Jerome Sans.)

Ron Weber's The Link between Data Modeling Approaches and Philosophical Assumptions: A Critique.

Daniel R. White's and Gert Hellerick's Nietzsche at the Mall: Deconstructing the Consumer  ( A long essay containing the following sections: (1) The Church of the Consumer, (2) Decentering the Consumer Subject, (3) Learning and the Self-transformation of the Consumer (4) The Will to Power and the Will to Play, (5)New Forms of Empowerment, (6) Interlude: Nietzsche Goes to Hell (and so do we), (7) "We Gotta Get Out'a This Place"- The Animals, (7) Works Cited.)

Brent G. Wilson's The Postmodern Paradigm ( The main points are: 1) postmodern perspectives about the world underlie much constructivist writing, and 2) a postmodernist stance can offer positive, constructive critiques of instructional design practice; recommendations are offered for changing instructional design practice.)

  Langdon Winner's The Handwriting on the Wall: Resisting Techno-globalism's Assault on Education and his Cyberlibertarian Myths and the Prospects for Community

  Langdon Winner's Who will we be in cyberspace?

  Langdon Winner's Silicon Valley Mystery House. (" But if Silicon Valley is the model for cities of the future, exactly what is the future it holds in store? Which features of the place are the most salient? Will the place itself  matter at all? )

Janine Wong's and Peter Storkerson's Hypertext and the Art of Memory. This long essay includes the following sections: Abstract, (I) Introduction, (II) Hypertext and computers, (III) Hypertext and Litcrit, (IV) The Art of Memory, and Bibliographic references.

Russell James Woodruff's On the Value-Neutrality of Technological Objects.

Mark Wrathall's and Sean Kelly's Existential Phenomenology and Cognitive Science.

Dvora Yanov's Ecologies of Technological Metaphors and the Theme of Control.

William Yurcik's Information Warfare: Ethical Challenges of the Next Global Battlegroung.

Edward N. Zalta's The Theory of Abstract Objects (See also Zalta's companion Tutorial.)

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Last Revision:  June 18, 2001
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