healthy and optimistic disposition toward technological problems whichI hopetheywillsee as challengesrather than foregone conclusions.

and to act with enlightened and compassionate self-interest

to learn how to learn

may even have contributed in some forum or othertheir own thoughts and reflections on the impact of technology at the personal, professional, and social levels.

our failure so far to devise appropriate institutions for exercising human control over it.

he contrary it controls humans, that is, it shapes society to the requirements of efficiency and progress.

according to which technology is simply a tool or instrument of the human species through which we satisfy our needs.

as the Greeks believed and, as we will see, as some philosophers of technology believe today as well.

They remain purely subjective arbitrary choices and no essences guide us.

Science

The gap between man and world widens accordingly.

The meaning and purpose of things is something we create not something we discover.

We have a very different common sense

if society was misbehaving, then it could only be due to the fact that it was not adhering to the natural laws that governthe universe

is beginning to lose its vitality because the energy environment upon which it was nourished is nearing its own death.

Science, in this conte xt, is the methodology by which people learn the ways of nature so that they can, reduce them to consistent principles or rules. Technology, in turn, is the applicationof these rules in specific instances, the purpose being, to transform parts o f t he n a tur a l proc e s s i nto w or ka ble forms o f gr e a te r va l ue, structure, and order than exist in the primal state

progress is creating greater value, out of the natural world than what exists in its original state.

each organism is engaged in a relentless battle with all other creatures.

could well have pushed the mechanical world view offcenterstageand claimed hegemonyfor itself as a completely neworganizing principle for society.It neverhappened.

Scence and Technology are the tools for getting the job done.

Progress, then , is assumed toresult in an ever more ordered world.

The more materialwell-being we amass, the more ordered the world must be getting.

First, there is a precise mathematical order to the universe that can be deduced from an examination of the motions of the heavenly bodies.

growth

"invisible hand," which Smith a

Adam Smith, efficiency in all things was the watchword.

"trickle-down theory"

He who applies reason the best will benefit the most.

because their self-interest would notconflict withothers.

"effectively emancipated from the bonds of nature

Pureself-interest thus becomes, in Locke'sformulation, the sole basis for the establishment of the state.

reason,

the natural laws ofsociety were being violated becausethe social order was built upon irrational traditions and customs that originated from the theocentrism that had ruled the world for so long.

John Locke brought the workings of government and society in line with the world machine paradigm, and Adam Smith did the same with the economy.

Humanity now had a new purpose in life.

rather disordered and confused state that society found itself in

History was now seen as a progressive journey

perfectly ordered society

universal laws were now known

dilemma

Noting that mechanics deals only with the space-time relationships of matter in motion,

t wasa shortjourney from the worldas pure matter to the world of pure materialism,

It was a world view made for machines, not people.

mathematical method

impelled toward each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other.

controlling it f

controlling it.

or the Greeks, the science of learning was intended to ask the metaphysicalwhy of things; Bacon on the other hand thought that a science of learning should be committed to the how of things.

Paean

Machine Age

those who sketch out theblueprint that the rest of us end up filling in.

Some degree of respect for manual labor is, along with activism, integral to massive technological development.

The subsequent success of the simile indicates the direction of Europe's thought ab ou t God , na tu re an d ma n .

The slight but significant differences between Greek and Latin piety in this period help not only to make historically intelligible the accomplishment of the medieval West in technology but likewise to expose the psychic foundations of our modern technology which rests on that achievement

to an extraordinary degree, medieval religion created the climate of its own environment.

During the Middle Ages, both Eastern andWestern, this new religion was the essential novelty and stimulus to innovation as well as to the decay of some forms of creativity which had thrived in the Greco-Roman world. It is therefore, not surprising that so many religious and parareligious phenomena illuminate both the high rate of technological advance in the West, and, by contrast, its slow pace in the Byzantine world.

Many forces shaped the Middle Ages, but of these the most powerful was religion.

morality of technological advance

No more profound reversal of the peasant's relation to the land can be imagined. Formerly he had been part of nature; now he became an exploiter of nature.

As early as the sixth century a new heavy plow began to spread from the Slavic East.

Man and nature are two things, and man is master. Technological aggression, rather than reverent coexistence, is now man's posture toward nature.

About 1450 European intellectuals began to become aware of technological progress not as a project (as indicated above, this came in the late thirteen th c entury) but as an histo ric and happ y fact,

clocks were never permitted within or on Eastern churches: to place them there would have contaminated eternity with time.

it became almost a symbol of Heaven

increasing Western acceptance of mechanisms as aids to the spiritual life.

development of their respective technologies. The Greeks have generally held that sin is ignorance and that salvation comes by illumination. The Latins have asserted that sin is vice, and that rebirth comes by disciplining the will to do good works. The Greek saint is normally a contemplative; the Western saint, an activist.

Since people are often comic, so also history may be

an element of Christian compassion motivating the development of power machinery and labor-saving devices

Christianity, by destroying classical animism, brought about a basic change in the attitude toward natural objects and opened the way for their rational and unabashed use for human ends

Christianity obviously is not essential to technological dynamism. What Benz suggests, nevertheless, is that Christianity provided, historically in Europe, a set of assumptions, a cultural climate, unusually favorable to technological advance.

world's design,

especially of the anti-technological impulses in Zen—led him to find the genesis of Europe's technological advance in Christian beliefs and attitudes.

Occidental third of the Middle Ages generated what we call the modernworld.

technological attitude toward problem solving which was to become of inestimable importance for the human condition.

we shall never see an end of finding them.

sang the praises of the recent invention of invention

escapement,

Technicians at that time in large numbers

"the invention of invention"

From the later Middle Ages onward, world technology was increasingly European technology.

Moreover, modern technology is the extrapolation of that of the Western Middle Ages not merely in detail but also in the spirit that infuses it.

world history was a unique event.

Romans had been no less predatory than were Europeans of the late Middle Ages, but the Caesars were so ill equipped that they could not extend their rapacity greatly beyond the basin of the Mediterranean.

by enlarging the number of craftsmen skilled in making and correlating moving metal parts in machines

Occident

The emergence of the mechanical clock in the second quarter of the fourteenth century

but particularly after 1200, Europe led in the development of ship design and the nautical arts.

Only contemporary China—from which the West borrowed much—could compare with Europe in inventiveness and eagerness for useful novelties.

the West produced new labor-saving mechanical devices and explored new applications of power to production, thus providing the industrial basis for burgher capitalism.

burgher capitalism

the West produced new labor-saving mechanical devices and explored new applications of power to production

the Franks revolutionized their methods of warfare,

the northern peasantry created a novel agricultural system

This is not, however, the sort of problem that stands still.

It is much more often a process of gradual illumination of the fact to be explained by gathering around it other facts that,

These innovations caused a rapid increase in population and an agricultural surplus that permitted the growth of towns

based on it not standing up to the historical evidence.

the collapse of an elaborate city-state culture

innovating, but not generating a technological revolution of their own

scientific and technological

empiricism

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) may be considered the first to have seen a direct dependence of science on technology.

Interest in mathematics developed among Church scholars because the Church calculated the date of Easter by combining the lunar cycle with the solar year on the basis of the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the heavens.

who themselves did not study questions of a scientific character, stimulated others to do so.

the growing application of a variety of mechanical devices to manufacturing contributed to an interest in the representation of spatial relationships.

Increasing artisan and merchant activity

Cultural, economic, and environmental factors all interact with technology to affect the rate of historical change.

White asserts that the introduction of the foot-stirrup in the Frankish kingdom of the eighth century immediately changed the nature of warfare.

he term Dark Agessuggests a darkening relative to Greek and Roman antiquity and in many ways is misleading.

Islam encouraged the study of the sky and the earth to find proofs of one's faith

The first of these is the distinction between what the Greeks called physis and poiêsis.

humanity is a laboring sort of animal constantly at work transforming nature.

at the very origins of Western philosophy,

Vincian to the Galilean stage

civic individuals

a serf is required to perform a day of unpaid labor by a feudal lord

but little attempt to coordinate or codify

) failed to leave room

Such ideological blockage could only have led to technological blockage.

nature

It was simpler and cheaper to put slaves to heavy work than to construct machines to do it

economic complexity

superior military technology

manifestations of different paths of technological development

Quantitative and qualitative aspects of the goods became symbolically separated,

A conceptual leap toward abstract thinking then occurred

tokens

a counter for a definite quantity

except, perhaps, for a strata of intellectuals.

may have been the first specialists separated from agriculture who did not raise their own food and were not part of the ruling bureaucracy

thus contributing to the growth of urban settlements.

metal

physical force to enforce the new social morality

since the rituals to a large extent are considered necessary components of the technology.

since subsistence-level economies persist to this day.

exercise coercive power

qualitative changes

simple foraging as “a high mobility and movement to resources” and complex foragingas a “collecting strategy in which greater residential permanence is maintained through storage and logistical acquisition of resources

increase in production above the subsistence level, but also in the emergence and deepening of social stratification within the population

It is for this reason that many social philosophers reject the sociobiological views asserting that humans are genetically conditioned to be aggressive and acquisitive.

The adult men, women, and unmarried youth all participate in the hunt.

Toolmaking, development of the hand, socialization of food consumption, increasing differentiation in vocal communication, and mental development move forward in the evolutionary process as an integrative whole, a development in one area contributing to the development of the others.

The unique character of human toolmaking and tool use along with the uniqueness of bipedality suggests these two factors as the primary stimulus for the evolution of the modern human being

so that it is not unreasonable to assume (even without evidence) that the early bipedal hominids not only did not lag behind thepongids in toolmaking, but also had begun to advance in their use of tools.

have led to

historical sequence of key stages of human societal developmen

Followers of this third approach attach widely varying weights to the two sides of this interaction

TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETAL DEVELOPMENTA principal concern of philosophy of technology is how technological development influences the course of societal interrelationships at different stages of societal organization, as well as how specific stages of societal organization and culture affect technological development.

Should we accept such determinism

"technological determinism."

In a single author's writing, the term could serve as both cause and effect, or as both object and process.

the meaning of "technology" remained unstable in the second half of the twentieth century, when it evolved into an annoyingly vague abstraction

Men took control of alemakingonly when it was commercialized.

came the realization that machines cannot be understood in isolation

search of prominent American periodicals shows that between 1860 and 1870 "technology" appeared only 149 times, while "invention" occurred 24,957 times.

Often the use of tools and machines has preceded a scientific explanation for how they work or why they fail.

Their domination of nature, which had no sinister side effects,

second nature."

The Romans valued what we now call technology more highly than the Greeks.

technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relations between nature and man."

The existence of a tool also immediately implies that a cultural group has reached a point where it can remember past actions and reproduce them in memory

I do not propose to develop a grand theory of how human consciousness evolved in relation to tools

echnologies are not just objects but also theskills needed to use them

To improvise with tools or to tell stories requires the ability to imagine not just one outcome but several

mental projection of a sequence, including an initial desire, several actions, and successful feeding. The sequence becomes more complex when more tools are involved, or when thesame tool is used in several ways. Composing a narrative and using a tool are not identical processes, but they have affinities. Each requires the imagination of altered circumstances, and in each case beings must see themselves to be living in time. Making a tool immediately implies a succession of events in which one exercises some control over outcomes. Either to tell a story or to make a tool is to adopt an imaginary position outside immediate sensory experience. In each case, one imagines how present circumstances might be made different

Ultimately, the meaning of a tool is inseparable from the stories that surround it.

necessities

and one might argue that humanity fashioned itself with tools.

Technologies are not foreign to "human nature" but inseparable from it.

it did so with forethought.