Since the middle of the 20th century there has been a significant debate about the attribution of capacities of living systems, particularly humans, to technological artefacts, especially computers—from Turing’s opening gambit, to subsequent considerations of artificial intelligence, to recent claims about artificial life. Some now argue that the capacities of future technologies will ultimately make it impossible to draw any meaningful distinctions between humans and machines. Such issues center on what sense, if any, it makes to claim that gadgets can actually think, feel, act, live, etc. I outline this debate and offer a critique of its persistent polarization. I characterize two of the debate’s major camps (associated roughly with Turing and Searle); argue that the debate’s structure (including key assumptions inherent to each camp) precludes resolution; and, contend that some central clashes within the debate actually stem from an inadequately drawn distinction between claims about the capacities of artifacts and claims about the proper criteria for assessing such attributions. I offer a different perspective in which I: challenge some central elements of the debate that contribute to its perennially irresolvable state; hold that the debate needs to be placed more squarely in sync with how we in fact treat the attribution of such capacities to humans themselves; and, offer (unlike the other two camps) a foothold for making moral assessments of such proposed technologies.

The Internet, as it exists today, is an outgrowth of the late 1960’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. During the 1980’s, the National Science Foundation established a high-speed, high-capacity network called NSFnet connecting many universities and government agencies. Finally, with the creation of the World Wide Web and the development and diffusion of inexpensive, reliable and easy to use public Internet access, electronic information technologies connect an increasingly large portion of the population. As a result, the communities with which we are all familiar, communities based on geographic proximity, have changed. These sorts of changes raise many interesting but difficult questions. This paper focuses on two of those questions. First, what does the increasing use of and reliance on electronically mediated communications portend for our understanding of human communities, and second, what sorts of socio-political concepts and relationships best characterize the new “virtual community”?

In information security research, perceived security usually has a negative meaning, when it is used in contrast to actual security. From a phenomenological perspective, however, perceived security is all we have. This paper develops a phenomenological account of information security, in which a distinction is made between revealed and reveiled security instead. Linking these notions with the concepts of confidence and trust, the paper provides a phenomenological explanation of the electronic voting controversy in the Netherlands.

Are citizens of contemporary technological society authors of their own lives? With Alasdair MacIntyre (contemporary Aristotelianism), Bruno Latour (Science and Technology Studies) and Albert Borgmann (Philosophy of Technology), we discuss the shortcomings of traditional liberalism in terms of its ability to answer this question. MacIntyre argues that biological vulnerabilities and social interdependencies establish meaningful parameters within which reason and willing emerge. But MacIntyre ignores technologies as a third parameter. Latour defines humans as nodes in a socio-technical network, in which technologies are actors on par with humans. However, Latour adopts a purely external perspective, ignoring human intentions, desires, and reasons. Borgmann argues that although freedom of choice is severely restricted, sometimes one can still resist the rule of technology. But Borgmann denies the pluralism of modern societies. Although all three schools have their shortcomings, combined, they provide us with a valuable palette of insights on human agency in a technological culture.

In spite of the popularity of computer ethics, ICTs appear to undermine our moral autonomy in several ways. This article focuses on the ‘delegation’ of our moral agency to machines. Three stages of delegation are distinguished: implementation of moral values and norms in the design of artefacts, delegation of moral means to machines, and delegation of both moral means and goals to machines. Second, it is argued that the ‘outsourcing’ of moral agency does not necessarily lead to the undermining of our moral autonomy, but might enhance it as well.

In this article, I will investigate the ways in which Ambient Intelligence, the technological paradigm of the near future proposed by the European Union and the electronics multinational Philips, will affect the ways in which individuals construct and express their identities. The Ambient Intelligence vision predicts a world in which technologies will deliver personalized services in a proactive (rather than a responsive or interactive) fashion. I argue that this brings about a change in the way we interact with these technologies, which in turn has an effect on the way we construct and express identities in relation to such technologies. In a world of Ambient Intelligence, I will argue in this article, technological artifacts may come to function as ‘reference collectivities’, comparable to human reference groups. Due to their proactivity, their level of autonomy and self-reliance and our personalized interactions with them, these technologies will come to function as ‘others’, rather than as ‘quasi-others’.

In this paper I contest Ian Hacking’s claim that astronomers do not experiment. Riding on this thesis is a re-evaluation of his view that astronomers are less justified than other natural scientists in believing in the existence of the objects they study, and that astronomers are not proper natural scientists at all. The defense of my position depends upon carefully examining what, exactly, is being manipulated in an experiment, and the role of experimental effects for Hacking’s experimental realism. I argue that Hacking’s experimental realism is not adequately defended, and even if we accept it in good grace, the case can be still made that astronomers experiment by Hacking’s account.

In recent years, Hubert Dreyfus has put forward a critique of the social and cultural effects of the Internet on modern societies based on the value of what he calls “the background” of largely tacit and unarticulated social norms. While Dreyfus is right to turn to the “background” in order to understand the effects of the Internet on society and culture, his unequivocally negative conclusions are unwarranted. I argue that a modified account of the background – one more attuned to what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “social fields” – can lead to sounder and more illuminating conclusions.

This paper approaches the ‘Drexler-Smalley’ debate on nanotechnology from a neglected angle – the common denominator of ‘the frontier’ as a metaphor for scientific exploration. For Bensaude-Vincent, the debate exemplifies the clash of ‘two cultures’ – the ‘artificialist’ and biomimetic’ schools. For us, the portrayal of nanosphere as ‘new frontier’ stymies the prospect of genuine inter-cultural debate on the direction of molecular engineering. Drawing on Brandon, the‘dominium’ impulse of European imperialism is contrasted to the ‘communitas’ tradition of Native America. Proposing a single label – hybridist – for both schools, we juxtapose to this approach the holistic disposition of indigenous North American science.

The author of The Philosophy of Invention, Henry Dircks (1806–1873), was an English civil engineer, inventor and historian of technology. The Philosophy of Invention is a forgotten classic of the philosophy of technology, and its author a forgotten pioneer. This new discovery will correct the disciplinary consensus in the philosophy of technology.

This article presents an overview of discussions in the philosophy of technology on epistemological relations between science and technology, illustrating that often several mutually entangled issues are at stake. The focus is on conceptual and ideological issues concerning the relationship between scientific and technological knowledge. It argues that a widely accepted hierarchy between science and technology, which echoes classic conceptions of epistêmê and technê, engendered the need of emancipating technology from science, thus shifting focus to epistemic aspects of engineering design and design methodology at the cost of in-depth philosophical analysis of the role of scientific research in the engineering sciences. Consequently, the majority of current literature on this topic in the philosophy of technology presents technology as almost completely divided from and independent of science, thereby losing sight of the epistemic relations between contemporary scientific practices and technology.

Through an analysis of the appeals to human dignity used by bioconservatives to criticize transhumanist proposals for aggressive development of human enhancement technologies, I identify an implicit tension within such appeals that renders them internally incoherent and ultimately unpersuasive. However, I point the way to a more compelling objection to radical human enhancement available to bioconservatives, a version of the argument from hubris that employs an Aristotelian account of prudential virtue in order to challenge the normative content of the liberal transhumanist vision. The vulnerability of the transhumanist project to this argument is underscored by Ortega y Gasset’s critique of technological mass culture, in which he suggests that humans may increasingly lack the prudential virtues needed to identify and authentically choose those ends worthy of technological pursuit.

Insights from the phenomenological tradition of philosophy can be fruitfully applied to ongoing scientific investigations. In what follows, I review and refine a methodology I have developed for the application of concepts from the phenomenology of technology—concepts which articulate bodily and perceptual relations to technology—to a specific context of scientific practice: debate over the interpretation of laboratory images. As a guiding example, I introduce a case study of a contemporary debate over images of Mars which reveal evidence of fluid movement on the planet’s surface in the last decade. Next, the framework of phenomenological concepts is applied to this example, and contrasts are made with the results of previous case studies. I conclude with reflections on the implications of this perspective for both the use of imaging technologies in scientific research specifically, and for the phenomenology of technology generally.

In engineering design research different models of functional decomposition are advanced side-by-side. In this paper I explain and validate this co-existence of models in terms of the Kuhnian thesis of methodological incommensurability. I advance this analysis in terms of the thesis’ construal of (non-algorithmic) theory choice in terms of values, expanding this notion to the engineering domain. I further argue that the (by some) implicated threat of the thesis to rational theory choice has no force in the functional decomposition case: co-existence of different models of functional decomposition is rational from an instrumental point of view. My explanation covers cases in which different models are advanced as means for the same objective. Such cases cannot be explicated with the explanatory construct of variety in objectives, as advanced in other analyses of co-existing conceptualizations in engineering.

Until now, the body has played only a minor role in the philosophy of technology. However, more elaborate reflections on the relation between technology and the body are needed because of the advent of somatechnologies – technologies intentionally geared toward modifying bodies and that use bodily substances as technological means. The article discusses some approaches within the philosophy of technology that prove to be fruitful in this context. The article argues thatsomatechnical modifications of bodies should be understood as elements of ‘body technologies’ and body politics in a broader sense. In such a perspective, concepts of the body developed by Judith Butler and Michel Foucault should be adopted by a praxeological philosophy of technology.

Through a critique and analysis of technological dystopian literature, specifically Brave New World, 1984, and The Machine Stops, a humanizing framework analyzing the promise and responsibility of a liberal education is constructed. Through this framework we visualize agency as the central goal of education, buoyed by the development of independent thinking, affective engagement, and recognition of socio-cultural and historical contexts. Modern education must prepare learners to manage, apply, evaluate, synthesize, analyze information and knowledge and creatively contribute back to the world of information.

Rules of thumb are simple instructions, used to guide actions toward a specific result, without need of advanced knowledge. Knowing adequate rules of thumb is a common form of technological knowledge. It differs both from science-based and intuitive (or tacit) technological knowledge, although it may have its origin in experience, scientific knowledge, trial and error, or a combination thereof. One of the major advantages of rules of thumb is the ease with which they can be learned. One of their major disadvantages is that they cannot easily be adjusted to new situations or conditions.

This essay argues that a purely secular philosophy of technology omits an essential aspect of technical activity: the ultimate concern for which any action is undertaken. By way of an analysis of Borgmann and Hickman, I show that the philosophy of technology cannot articulate the nature of the good life without reference to an ultimacy beyond finite human goods. This paradoxically implies that human beings desire something infinite which they cannot name, a paradox that theologians have long understood in terms of a theological dialectic.