Has the Philosophy of Technology Arrived? A State-of-the-Art Review

Using the occasion of the publication of a Blackwell anthology in the philosophy of technology,Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition(2003), as a key to the contemporary role of this subdiscipline, this article reviews the current state-of-this-art. Both philosophy of science and philosophy of technology are twentieth century inventions, but each has followed a somewhat different set of philosophical traditions and pursued sometimes divergent questions. Here the primary developments of recent philosophy of technology are examined with emphasis upon issues which might also be of greater interest to philosophers of science. These include epistemological, but also environmental and cultural issues. The bibliographical spread includes references to some fifty recent books in the field.