Philosophy of Technology

Brilliant paper urging philosophy not ignore technology - Here

 

A major difference between the historical development of modern technology as compared to modern science, which can at least partly explain this situation, is that science emerged in the seventeenth century from philosophy itself. The answers that Galileo, Huygens, Newton, and others gave, by which they initiated the alliance of empiricism and mathematical description that is so characteristic for modern science, were answers to questions that had belonged to the core business of philosophy since antiquity. Science, therefore, kept the attention of philosophers. Philosophy of science is a transformation of epistemology in the light of the emergence of science. The foundational issues—the reality of atoms, the status of causality and probability, questions of space and time, the nature of the quantum world—that were so lively discussed during the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century are an illustration of this close relationship between scientists and philosophers. No such intimacy has ever existed between those same philosophers and technicians; their worlds still barely touch. To be sure, a case can be made for a similar continuity between central questions in philosophy, having to do with human action and practical rationality, and the way technology approaches and systematizes the solution of practical problems. 

Technology is a continuous attempt to bring the world closer to the way it is to be. Whereas science aims to understand the world as it is, technology aims to change the world.