Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering: Historico-Philosophical and Critical Essays

Description

The rise of classic Euro-American philosophy of technology in the 1950s originally emphasized the importance of technologies as material entities and their mediating influence within human experience. Recent decades, however, have witnessed a subtle shift toward reflection on the activity from which these distinctly modern artifacts emerge and through which they are engaged and managed, that is, on engineering. What is engineering? What is the meaning of engineering? How is engineering related to other aspects of human existence? Such basic questions readily engage all major branches of philosophy — ontology, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics — although not always to the same degree. The historico-philosophical and critical reflections collected here record a series of halting steps to think through engineering and the engineered way of life that we all increasingly live in what has been called the Anthropocene. The aim is not to promote an ideology for engineering but to stimulate deeper reflection among engineers and non-engineers alike about some basic challenges of our engineered and engineering lifeworld. Dedication Contents Preface Acknowledgments Fragments in Search of an Introduction: Remarks on Engineering as a Theme in Philosophy PART ONE 1 Science, Technology, Engineering, and the Military 2 Ethics into Design 3 The Importance of Philosophy to Engineering 4 From Dasein to Design: The Problematics of Turning Making into Thinking (with J. Britt Holbrook) 5 Professional Idealism among Scientists and Engineers: A Neglected Tradition in STS Studies 6 Can Engineering Be Philosophical? 7 Convivial Software: An End-User Perspective on Free and Open Source Software 8 Comparing Approaches to Philosophy of Engineering: Including the Linguistic Philosophical Approach (with Robert Mackey) PART TWO 9 A Spectrum of Ideals in Engineering Ethics, Simplified 10 The Concept of Sustainability: Origins and Ambivalences 11 Engineering Ethics Education in the American Context: Retrospect and Prospect 12 Notes on Engineering Ethics in Global Perspective (with Gary Lee Downey and Juan Lucena) 13 Humanitarian Engineering (with David Muñoz) 14 A Philosophical Inadequacy in Engineering 15 The True Grand Challenge for Engineering: Self-Knowledge 16 From Engineering Ethics to Politics (with Wang Nan) PART THREE 17 Engineering Policy: Exploratory Reflections 18 Energy Constraints (with Jessica Smith) 19 Can Philosophy Be Engineering? 20 In Conclusion APPENDIX On Engineering Use and Convenience References Index About the Author