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Editor’s Foreword
- Indiana University Press
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Editor's Foreword Indiana University Press is proud to launch the Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Technology with the following trio: John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology, by Larry A. Hickman; Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth, by Don Ihde; and Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art, by Michael Zimmerman. The Indiana Series is the first North American series explicitly dedicated to the philosophy of technology. (There are other series relating philosophy and technology, particularly those that collect interdisciplinary articles, but none of these has been devoted to the development of a new subdiscipline within philosophy.) Broadly conceived, it nevertheless will address a wide variety of issues relating to technology from distinctly philosophical perspectives. Philosophically, our approach will be pluralistic, and this is evidenced in our first round of books. The traditions of both American pragmatism and Euro-American trends are evidenced. Our trio is timely. We begin with radical reappraisals and interpretations of the two early twentieth-century philosophers who made questions of technology central to their thought: John Dewey and Martin Heidegger. And we are also beginning with a systematic reformulation of a framework and set of questions regarding technology in its cultural setting in Technology and the Lifeworld. Later we will be adding topics of a more thematic nature, including books on "Engineering Birth," "Big Instrument Science," "Media and Rationality," "Technological Transformations of Perception," and many others. Our goals are to include philosophically critical, historical, and interpretive studies as well as original and topical ones within a perspective that is balanced, reasoned, and rigorous regarding the emergent field of the philosophy of technology. viii Editor's Foreword With John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology we are also trying to balance the beginning of our series. While it must be admitted that others have heretofore dominated what has become a North American philosophy of technology-including the dystopians Jacques Ellul and Herbert Marcuse, and also Martin Heidegger, who made zechnology central to his thought-John Dewey's prior instrumentalism has often been overlooked. Yet Dewey is, par excellence, the American "father" of the philosophy of technology. Larry Hickman demonstrates this here in his insightful reappraisal of Dewey in the context of the philosophy of technology. The result is a tour de force with respect to Dewey. Hickman shows Dewey's relevance to many of the most contemporary questions involving modern science and technology. Long before it became fashionable in history-of-technology circles, Dewey described and analyzed the interconnection of science and technology and, simultaneously with Heidegger, argued for a precedence of technology over science, based, in Dewey's case, upon a pragmatic theory of action. Philosophers as diverse as Richard Rorty and William Barrett have recognized Dewey as the American philosophical revolutionary who, even before Wittgenstein and Heidegger, moved philosophy into the postmodern period. Larry Hickman takes this appreciation a step further and places Dewey in the very midst of a high-technological culture. Dewey is seen as critic, appreciator, and expositor of the unique kind of "instrumentalism" that has evolved in contemporary life. Considering Dewey in the context of his more recent peers, Hickman addresses the now-crucial issues of technological determinism, the technology/science interface, and, above all, the question of the role of the philosopher in our social and political, technologically textured world. Here, then, is a most original piece of Dewey scholarship, combined with a penetrating critique of technological culture. It is located precisely between the extremes of utopian and dystopian thinking and displays both the balance and engagement required by the conversation with technology. The key metaphor, coined by Hickman, is responsible technology. One can see immediately how such a notion meshes with the valuation of community and democracy, which also play crucial roles in Dewey's thought. By bringing both Dewey and these issues up to date, Hickman clearly broadens the field of the philosophy of technology. DON IHOE ...