As philosophy goes, philosophy of technology is a relatively young field.
Courses called “History of Modern Philosophy” cover philosophers of the
Renaissance and the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Philosophy
of the early twentieth century is covered in “Contemporary Philosophy.”
The main branches of philosophy go back over 2200 years. Philosophy of
science was pursued, in fact if not in name, by most of the early modern
philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the midnineteenth
century several physicists and philosophers were producing works
that focused solely on the philosophy of science. Only sporadically were
there major philosophers who had much to say about technology, such as
Bacon around 1600 and Marx in the mid-nineteenth century. Most of the
“great philosophers” of this period, although they had a great deal to say
about science, said little about technology. On the assumption that technology
is the simple application of science, and that technology is all for
the good, most philosophers thought that there was little of interest. The
“action” in early modern philosophy was around the issue of scientific
knowledge, not technology. The romantic tradition from the late eighteenth
century was pessimistic about science and technology. Romantics emphasized
their problematic and harmful aspects, and only a handful of academic philosophers
concerned themselves with evaluation and critique of technology
itself. Particularly in Germany, there was a pessimistic literature on the evils
of modern society in general and technological society in particular. We
shall examine at length several of the twentieth-century inheritors of this
tradition. In the English-speaking countries, with the exception of romantic
poets such as Wordsworth and mid-nineteenth-century culture critics such
as Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and Ruskin, or the socialist artist William
Morris, few had much to say about the evaluation of technology. Only with
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the realization that atom and hydrogen bombs
could literally cause humanity to go extinct, did widespread, popular, critical
evaluation of technology occur in the English-speaking world. With the
widespread popular awareness that industrial pollution and its degradation
of the environment was a major problem, perhaps dated from the publication
of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, or from Earth Day of 1970, a
further wave of concern for the understanding of the negative side-effects of
technology arose. With the advent of genetic engineering and the specter of
human cloning in the late 1970s, with the possibility of technologically manipulating
human heredity and even human nature, there was yet another
set of issues and impulses for the critical evaluation of technology.