Andrew Feenberg’s distinction between formal and substantive bias in the design of technology is interrogated. The two dimensions of his definition—inten­tion and the enhancement of specific social interests—are examined and eight logical possibilities arising from his argument are identified. These possibilities are explored through discussion of examples and it is argued that Feenberg has both: a) not broken sufficiently with substantivist philosophies of technology so that he retains ambivalence on technology’s ‘biased essence,’ and b) illegitimately rejected the idea of a technology that is biased in itself. The latter category is important to critical theory of technology and the paper offers a conceptualization of it that draws on Habermas’s discourse ethics.

Andrew Feenberg’s political philosophy of technology uniquely connects the neo-Marxist tradition with phenomenological approaches to technology. This paper investigates how this connection shapes Feenberg’s analysis of power. Influenced by De Certeau and by classical positions in philosophy of technology, Feenberg focuses on a dialectical model of oppression versus liberation. A hermeneutic reading of power, though, inspired by the late Foucault, does not conceptualize power relations as external threats, but rather as the networks of relations in which subjects are constituted. Such a hermeneutic approach replaces De Certeau’s tactics of resistance with a critical and creative accompaniment of technological developments.

Critical theory of technology brings technology studies to bear on the social theory of rationality. This paper discusses this connection through a reconsideration of the contribution of the Frankfurt School to our understanding of what I call the paradox of rationality, the fact that the promise of the Enlightenment has been disappointed as advances in scientific and technical knowledge have led to more and more catastrophic consequences. The challenge for critical theory is to understand this paradox without romantic and anti-modern afterthoughts as a contribution to a progressive worldview.

Critical theory of technology (CTT) and postphenomenology (PostPhen) complement each other finely. Yet whereas CTT runs the risk of negating the interwovenness of humans and technology, a problem partly resolved by PostPhen, PostPhen itself threatens to neglect its very own base, i.e., the condition of technology and society being first and foremost human endeavors. This paper suggests not to decry these two approaches but to add a third component in order to compensate for their deficiencies. That third partner consists of a new-fledged version of philosophical anthropology elaborated on the basis of the media theory of Marshall McLuhan. I am here mainly concerned with how such an approach can supplement CTT, which it does by offering an account of technological mediation that harbors not only a relational-ontological but also—in contrast with PostPhen—a substantivist-ontological aspect, and in addition a proper theory of technological blindness, much needed to make sense of perceptive biases and meaning-constituting activities in everyday life. I will illustrate these issues by way of what I dub ‘the Mailman Problem’: a sketch of a very mundane instance of “deworlding” that is, however, not perceived as such.

Philosophers of technology are not playing the public role that our own theoretical perspectives motivate us to take. A great variety of theories and perspectives within philosophy of technology, including those of Marcuse, Feenberg, Borgmann, Ihde, Michelfelder, Bush, Winner, Latour, and Verbeek, either support or directly call for various sorts of intervention—a call that we have failed to heed adequately. Barriers to such intervention are discussed, and three proposals for reform are advanced: (1) post-publication peer-reviewed reprinting of public philosophy, (2) increased emphasis on true open access publication, and (3) increased efforts to publicize and adapt traditional academic research.

While throughout history, knowledge and information have been mostly bound in language and text, new twenty-first-century media increasingly tend to break with this tradition of linear sequentiality. This paper will present an account of how this development may be explained by a relationship between the use of digital technologies on the one hand, and the (human) user’s cognitive processes on the other. This will be done by, first, outlining two existing conceptions of human cognition and, subsequently, by confronting these with observations in the field of philosophy of media, most prominently the position of Marshall McLuhan.

Our article attempts to provide some clarity to the debate about the proper relationship between science and public policy by drawing on the philosophical field of logic. We argue that based on an analysis of the most fundamental ways that empirical and evaluative truth claims can be used together in arguments, the tendency to conceive of this relationship either in dual terms of “pure” vs. “applied” or complex “multi-disciplinary” or “multi-cultural” systems of categorization should be rejected in favor a basic four-part division. A significantly improved understanding of the connection between science and public policy can be based on an examination of the four most basic kinds of logical connection between empirical and evaluative statements. One such improvement is a better understanding of how funding should be divided between state and private interests.

This paper considers the particular ways in which the familiar letter (for thousands of years the predominant means of communicating over distance) and twenty-first century technologies like the Internet differingly shaped and shape our experience of distance and presence. It follows Heidegger, Dreyfus, and Borgmann in critiquing the kinds of experience and action the Internet makes possible, and—by way of Benjamin’s concept of “aura”—argues that while mediated communication over distance might have never been easier, faster, or cheaper, this increase in our effective power comes at the cost of a diminution of the affective power of the messages carried.

While Michel Foucault’s significance as a social theorist is undisputed, his importance as a technological theorist is frequently overlooked. This article considers the richness and the range of Foucault’s technological thinking by surveying his works and interviews, and by tracking his influence within Actor-Network Theory (ANT). The argument is made that we will not fully understand Foucault without understanding the central place of technology in his work, and that we will not understand ANT without understanding Foucault.

In response to the Royal Society report’s claim that “the acceptability of geo­engineering will be determined as much by social, legal, and political issues as by scientific and technical factors” (Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty [London: Royal Society, 2009], ix), a number of authors have suggested the key to this challenge is to engage the public in geoengineering decision-making. In effect, some have argued that inclusion of the public in geoengineering decision-making is necessary for any geoengineering project to be morally permissible. Yet, while public engagement on geoengineering comes in various forms, the discussion in geoengineering governance and the ethics of geoengineering have too often conceptualized it exclusively in terms of public participation in decision-making, and supported it by various liberal democratic values. However, if the predominant understanding of public engagement on—or, the role of the public in—geoengineering decision-making is indeed only grounded on liberal democratic values, then its normative relevance could be challenged by and in other ethical-political traditions that do not share those values. In this paper, I shall explore these questions from a Confucian perspective. I argue that the liberal democratic values invoked in support of the normative importance of public participation are, at least, foreign to Confucian political philosophy. This presents a prima facie challenge to view public participation in geoengineering decision-making as a universal moral requirement, and invites us to reconsider the normative significance of this form of public engagement in Confucian societies. Yet, I contend that the role of the public remains normatively significant in geoengineering governance and the ethics of geoengineering from a Confucian perspective. Drawing from recent work on Confucian political philosophy, I illustrate the potential normative foundation for public engagement on geoengineering decision-making.

Social scientists have documented some recent, dramatic changes in the nature of our social lives. Many scholars have thought that our reliance on technology to communicate with others is in large part responsible for that loss. However, there is also data to support the opposite conclusion—it might be the case that social networking technologies have helped, rather than hindered our social interactions. What I would like to propose is a philosophical argument, which I hope will offer a different sort of answer to the questions about whether we know people in the same ways, or perhaps more or less well, than we once did, in the days before Facebook, email, and such. Whether or not technology has enhanced our social lives, it is worth considering whether coming to know another person is a different sort of exercise than it used to be, when face-to-face interactions with others were the preferred way to find out what was going on in someone else’s life. What is different in sharing my thoughts, beliefs, feelings, desires, and such with another over the Internet versus in person? Is there any kind of knowledge that is available only in a face-to-face context? If so, what is the nature of that knowledge? In philosophical terms, what I want to examine is how our knowledge of others’ minds changes with various technologies that we use to communicate the contents of our mental states.

Can artifacts be agents in the same sense as humans? This paper endorses a pragmatic stance to that issue. The crucial question is whether artifacts can have free will in the same pragmatic sense as we consider humans to have a free will when holding them responsible for their actions. The origin of actions is important. Can an action originate inside an artifact, considering that it is, at least today, programmed by a human? In this paper it is argued that autonomy with respect to norms is crucial for artificial agency.

In this paper I deal with Hubert Dreyfus’s phenomenological ethics regarding information technologies and the use of the Internet. From the 1990s on, Dreyfus elaborates a multi-faceted model of ethical expertise which may find a paradigmatic field of application in the ways in which information technologies transform our sense of personal identity, as well as our view of ethical integrity and commitment. In his 2001 On the Internet, Dreyfus investigates further several of the ideas already present in his groundbreaking 1997 Disclosing New Worlds. A phenomenological ethics of the virtual aims at going beyond both the objectivist ideal of moral universalism, which departs from the dominant Cartesianism both in epistemology and in ethics, as well as from the postmodernist, Nietzsche-inspired moral relativism. By referring back to existentialism, especially to Kierkegaard, and to phenomenology, especially to Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, Dreyfus sketches a model of ethical expertise which can be particularly useful for internet users and researchers, as it combines a phenomenological anthropology of the virtual with a theory of cultural innovation and change. In my view, Dreyfus’s model may help overcome the strict either determinist or relativist accounts of the ethical challenges posed by information technologies. By endorsing a strongly anti-intellectualist view of information technologies, Dreyfus poses the necessity of identity and ethical integrity not only as abstract principles that require rational justification, but also as context-bound everyday practices that are in conformity with the “style” of a culture and several disclosive activities within it.

In this paper, I pursue a postphenomenological analysis of navigating with GPS in an automobile. I argue that GPS use is essentially different from navigating with a map insofar as one need not establish nor maintain orientation and directionality. Also, GPS provides a disembodied, omniscient navigational perspective. These aspects stem from the fact that GPS relies on earth-orbiting satellites, thereby reinforcing the modern view of the space/place relation that privileges abstract space over concrete, lived places. Following a postphenomenological thesis that technologies are non-neutral mediators of human experience, I examine some important qualitative aspects of traveling with GPS.

In this paper I comment on the arguments put forth by Robert Rosenberger and Galit Wellner on the issue of using a mobile phone while driving a car, and I do this by way of a detour through the work of Kevin Kelly and Marshall McLuhan. While Rosenberger and Wellner focus first and foremost on the possibilities and impossibilities within the human organism, I seek to add to the debate the however experimental standpoint of the technologies “themselves.”

In this contribution to the philosophical debate over distracted driving, I defend the idea that talking on the cell phone while driving is an activity that ought neither to be regulated by public policy means nor addressed by means of automotive safety design features, such as the augmented-reality windshield. I arrive at this conclusion through taking a phenomenologically-influenced look at what an average driver pays attention to during the act of driving an automobile. More specifically, I suggest that if driving while “celling” is taken to involve a single act of attention within a single experience, or taken to involve a “weak” form of multi-attention, a way opens up to see driving while “celling” as being “good” driving.

The case is made here for stricter regulations on the use of cell phones (both handheld and hands-free) while driving. I review, contextualize, and expand on a phenomenological account of distracted driving that I have developed across a series of papers. This account remains consistent with the empirical literature on the driver distraction of cell phones, but it also offers an alternative theory on why the distraction of cell phone conversation poses such a considerable danger. My argument is that cell phone distraction results from learned perceptual habits, and that breaking these deeply engrained habits is no simple matter.

In my discussion of the articles in this special issue of Techné I will relate the multiple perspectives on the phenomenon of driving-celling to the core debate, which concerns how this dual activity may be related to the need to have a concentrated focus, on the one hand, or to the possibility of a form of multitasking, on the other. The contributors show multiple perspectives on this phenomenon and draw from a range of authors on the roles of attention, embodiment and perception.