Although there was much technological progress in the Roman em- pire and during the Middle Ages, philosophical reflection on technology did not grow at a corresponding rate. Comprehensive works such as Vi- truvius‘ De architectura and Agricola‘s De re metallica paid much atten- tion to practical aspects of technology but little to philosophy.

In the realm of scholastic philosophy, there was an emergent appre- ciation for the mechanical arts. They were generally considered to be born of – and limited to – the mimicry of nature. This view was chal- lenged when alchemy was introduced in the Latin West around the mid- twelfth century. Some alchemical writers such as Roger Bacon were willing to argue that human art, even if learned by imitating natural pro- cesses, could successfully reproduce natural products or even surpass them. The result was a philosophy of technology in which human art was raised to a level of appreciation not found in other writings until the Renaissance. However, the last three decades of the thirteenth century witnessed an increasingly hostile attitude by religious authorities toward alchemy that culminated eventually in the denunciation Contra alchy- mistas, written by the inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric in 1396.

The Renaissance led to a greater appreciation of human beings and their creative efforts, including technology. As a result, philosophical reflection on technology and its impact on society increased. Francis

Bacon is generally regarded as the first modern author to put forward such reflection. His view, expressed in his fantasy New Atlantis, was overwhelmingly positive. This positive attitude lasted well into the nine- teenth century, incorporating the first half-century of the industrial revo- lution. Karl Marx did not condemn the steam engine or the spinning mill for the vices of the bourgeois mode of production; he believed that on- going technological innovation were necessary steps toward the more blissful stages of socialism and communism of the future.

A turning point in the appreciation of technology as a socio-cultural phenomenon is marked by Samuel Butler‘s Erewhon, written under the influence of the Industrial Revolution, and Darwin‘s On the origin of species. This book gave an account of a fictional country where all ma- chines are banned and the possession of a machine or the attempt to build one is a capital crime. The people of this country had become con- vinced by an argument that ongoing technical improvements are likely to lead to a ‗race‘ of machines that will replace mankind as the domi- nant species on earth.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century a critical attitude predominated in philosophical re- flection on technology. The representatives of this attitude were, over- whelmingly, schooled in the humanities or the social sciences and had virtually no first-hand knowledge of engineering practice. Whereas Ba- con wrote extensively on the method of science and conducted physical experiments himself, Butler, being a clergyman, lacked such first-hand knowledge. The author of the first text in which the term ‗philosophy of technology‘ occurred, Ernst Kapp‘s Eine Philosophie der Technik, was a philologist and historian. Most of the authors who wrote critically about technology and its socio-cultural role during the twentieth century were philosophers of a general outlook or had a background in one of the other humanities or in social science, like literary criticism and so- cial research, law, political science or literary studies. The form of phi- losophy of technology constituted by the writings of these and others has been called by Carl Mitcham ‗humanities philosophy of technolo- gy‘, because it takes its point of departure in the social sciences and the humanities rather than in the practice of technology.

Humanist philosophers of technology tend to take the phenomenon of technology itself almost for granted; they treat it as a ‗black box‘, a unitary, monolithic, inescapable phenomenon. Their interest is not so much to analyze and understand this phenomenon itself but to grasp its

relations to morality (Jonas, Gehlen), politics (Winner), the structure of society (Mumford), human culture (Ellul) the human condition (Hannah Arendt) and metaphysics (Heidegger). In this, these philosophers are almost all openly critical of technology: all things considered, they tend to have a negative judgment of the way technology has affected human society and culture, or at least they single out for consideration the nega- tive effects of technology on human society and culture. This does not necessarily mean that technology itself is pointed out as the direct cause of these negative developments. In the case of Heidegger, in particular, the paramount position of technology in modern society is a symptom of something more fundamental, namely a wrongheaded attitude towards Being which has been in the making for almost 25 centuries. It is there- fore questionable whether Heidegger should be considered as a philoso- pher of technology, although within the traditional view he is considered to be among the most important ones. Much the same could be said about Arendt, in particular her discussion of technology in The human condition (1958), although her position in the canon of humanities phi- losophy of technology is not as prominent.

In its development, humanities philosophy of science continues to be influenced not so much by developments in philosophy but by develop- ments in the social sciences and humanities. Of particular significance has been the emergence of ‗Science and Technology Studies‘ in the 1980s, which studies from a broad social-scientific perspective how so- cial, political, and cultural values affect scientific research and techno- logical innovation, and how these in turn affect society, politics, and culture. We discuss authors from humanities philosophy of technology in Section 3 on ‗Ethical and Social Aspects of Technology‘, but do not present separately and in detail the wide variety of views existing in this field. For a detailed treatment Mitcham‘s book Thinking through tech- nology provides an excellent overview. A collection of more recent con- tributions offer Berg Olsen, Selinger and Riis; a comprehensive anthol- ogy of texts from this tradition is presented by Scharff and Dusek.

In the next section we will discuss in more detail a form of the phi- losophy of technology that can be regarded as an alternative to the hu- manities philosophy of technology. It emerged in the 1960s and gained momentum in the past fifteen to twenty years. This form of the philoso- phy of technology, which may be called ‗analytic‘, is not primarily con- cerned with the relations between technology and society but with tech- nology itself. It expressly does not look upon technology as a ‗black

box‘ but as a phenomenon that deserves study. It regards technology as a practice, basically the practice of engineering. It analyzes this practice, its goals, its concepts and its methods, and it relates its findings to vari- ous themes from philosophy. After having presented the major issues of philosophical relevance in technology and engineering that emerge in this way, we discuss the problems and challenges that technology poses for the society in which it is practiced in the third and final section.