In this highly original book David Wills rethinks not only our nature before all technology but also what we understand to be technology. Rather than considering the human being as something natural that then develops technology, Wills argues, we should instead imagine an originary imbrication of nature and machine that begins with a dorsal turn-a turn that takes place behind our back, outside our field of vision.   With subtle and insightful readings, Wills pursues this sense of what lies behind our idea of the human by rescuing Heidegger’s thinking from a reductionist dismissal of technology, examining different angles on Lévinas’s face-to-face relation, and tracing a politics of friendship and sexuality in Derrida and Sade. He also analyzes versions of exile in Joyce’s rewriting of Homer and Broch’s rewriting of Virgil and discusses how Freud and Rimbaud exemplify the rhetoric of soil and blood that underlies every attempt to draw lines between nations and discriminate be… More >>

Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics

It’s Not about the Technology centers on one of the most difficult challenges for any high-tech executive: how to manage the interaction between marketers and engineers. Amply thought provoking, full of real-life examples, its goal is to bridge the gap between marketers and engineers in a high technology company. And it achieves that goal very well. In most high technology companies, an often-seen problem is that engineers do not relate to marketing people. “Yeah, marketing is important, but what exactly do you guys do?” is a typical reaction from the engineering group. In such an environment, terms such as “differentiation,” “time-to-market,” and “competitive advantage” are simply words that have no place in the “real-world” of engineers. This book starts with the proposition that most execution failures occur due to this breakdown of marketing vs. engineering communication and offers comprehensive and easy-to-read insights that will help the reader to bridge this co… More >>

It’s Not About the Technology: Developing the Craft of Thinking for a High Technology Corporation

Taking up the critique of theology found in the work of Heidegger, George Pattison argues for a model of thinking about God that would not be liable to the charge of `enframing’ that Heidegger sees as characteristic of technological thinking. He constructs his case in relation to particular issues in bioethics, the place of theology in the university, the arts, and the contemporary experience of living in the city…. More >>

Thinking about God in an Age of Technology

Thinking Otherwise is a unique and revealing look at the philosophical dimensions of information and communication technology (ICT). Among thinkers, the importance of what transpires within the virtual world is the effect these activities have on real human beings who exist outside of and beyond the computer-generated virtual environment. Obviously, the result of ICT interactions can lead to good or bad outcomes.

Gunkel, however, is not concerned about deciding which argument is more compelling, but how these arguments are organized, articulated, and configured. This approach entails challenging, criticizing and even changing the terms and conditions of the discourse itself. For example, the binary nature of computer logic tends to color debate about subsequent moral issues by portraying each side as the antithesis of the other. That is, the switch is either turned on or off.

Thinking Otherwise investigates the unique quandaries, com… More >>

Thinking Otherwise: Philosophy, Communication, Technology

What does it mean to think about technology philosophically? Why try? These are the issues that Carl Mitcham addresses in this work, a comprehensive, critical introduction to the philosophy of technology and a discussion of its sources and uses. Tracing the changing meaning of “technology” from ancient times to our own, Mitcham identifies the most important traditions of critical analysis of technology: the engineering approach, which assumes the centrality of technology in human life; and the humanities approach, which is concerned with its moral and cultural boundaries. Mitcham bridges these two traditions through an analysis of discussions of engineering design, of the distinction between tools and machines, and of engineering science itself. He looks at technology as it is experienced in everyday life–as material objects (from kitchenware to computers), as knowledge ( including recipes, rules, theories, and intuitive “know-how”), as activity (design, construction, and use)… More >>

Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy