The Philosophy of Technology: Thought in the Machine Age

This course provides a survey of the major works in the philosophy of technology from the nineteenth century to today. Rather than start with the Aristotelian distinction between techne and episteme, our inquiry instead begins with the division between manual and cognitive labor in the industrial workplace. What questions does modern production pose of metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology? The answer demands a philosophy of technology that also conceives of technology itself as philosophy and that confronts the prospect of machine intelligence.