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Reviewed by:
  • Globalization, Technology, and Philosophy
  • Albert Borgmann
David Tabachnick and Toivo Koivukoski , eds., Globalization, Technology, and Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.

This anthology represents a paradigm case of how North-American philosophers deal with a significant social phenomenon. To begin with, David Tabachnick and Toivo Koivukoski, the editors of the volume, deserve praise for having focused philosophical attention on what is perhaps the most sweeping and complex social issue today — globalization; and they deserve credit also for having used technology as a middle term between globalization and philosophy. No other term is more likely to concentrate a discussion of globalization without prejudging it.

Tabachnick and Koivukoski, finally have engaged two of the most prominent and well-established philosophers of technology, Don Ihde and Andrew Feenberg. Ihde, with characteristic wit and circumspection, reminds the critics and mourners of globalization of how much they use and presumably enjoy the richness of global communication; and he points out that the world whose passing the critics mourn is likely to be a romanticized version of the actual conditions.Feenberg gives a very interesting account of how cultural and philosophical views of technology have related to one another in the twentieth century, hope followed by despair, dystopia giving way to new and dubious visions of utopia.

There are also a couple of remarkable younger voices. Darin Barney provides a penetrating critique of the claim that a virtual global community is emerging. He exposes the central deficiency of virtual communities — the lack of substantial mutual obligations. Waller Newell develops a distinctive reading of the global political situation where the need for principled stability is well-balanced with a recognition of "the profound social, economic, and cultural transformations" that have changed the face of the earth (11).

The rest of the collection provokes mixed reactions. On the positive side, there is the engaging quality of the language. While lay readers would be [End Page 155] puzzled and put off by the technical and esoteric quality of most articles in the leading Anglo-American journals, the writing in this anthology is almost across the board accessible and reasonable. There is much erudition without pretention. The reader is invited into a conversation that ranges easily across millennia. In the essays of Arthur Melzer, Charlotte Thomas, and Donald Phillip Verene particularly there is a fine alternation of ease and elegance.

But there are also two matters of grave concern to anyone interested in the philosophy of society and culture. The first regards technology. Today's social and cultural situation around the globe is to all appearances terribly confused, conflicted, and complex. The standpoints that once promised or are still claiming to provide a sound perspective have lost authority, credibility, or integrity — Christianity, Islam, Marxism, capitalism, communitarianism, and postmodernism.

Technology in its broad and ordinary sense, to the contrary, conveys what is both distinctive of our age and of the greatest consequence, and it does so without right away provoking partisan anxieties. Ordinary notions cover, of course, confusions and inconsistencies. Thus technology as a term and phenomenon cries out for philosophical explication, clarification, and illumination. Since the mid-seventies of the last century, philosophy of technology has been vigorously pursued in North-America, more so than anywhere else. This development has reached a first conclusion in two representative anthologies.1

You would never know it from the present collection. Judging from it, a Kuhnian would find the philosophy of technology in a preparadigmatic mess where all issues still seem up for grabs, where everyone starts all over again, where some venerable figures like Heidegger, Ellul, Arendt, and Marcuse loom large, but where Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Hegel are invoked as often. Occasionally you find outright professions of how unsettled and tentative the theoretical situation of technology supposedly is (136, 189).

The second problem is the almost total lack of a conversation between social philosophy and social science. In the case of Horst Hutter's article on Nietzsche, this disconnect takes a triumphalist tone as though Nietzsche were the lord and judge of contemporary culture. To be sure, social philosophers are not entirely dependent on social scientists for content and substance. As participants of the technological culture...

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