Society for the History of the Philosophy of Technology (HPT)

Through his analyses of work, mechanization, and automation, he helped establish the critical tradition that continues to ask how technological societies might remain truly human.
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Friedmann’s interdisciplinary approach bridged sociology and philosophy, influencing later thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Ellul, and Bernard Stiegler.
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For Friedmann, technology was a double-edged force: it held the promise of liberation through efficiency and creativity, but also the danger of alienation, fragmentation, and the loss of meaning in modern life.
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In works such as Le travail en miettes (The Anatomy of Work, 1956), he examined how industrial automation and the rationalization of labor were transforming not only production but the human experience of work itself.
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Today we commemorate Georges Friedmann, who died on this day in 1977. A French sociologist and philosopher, Friedmann was among the first to study technology as a social and philosophical problem in the 20th century.
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Given the bias against history and continuity that Innis equated with the dominant media of the twentieth century, it is little wonder that one of his last essays was titled "A Plea for Time."
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Those dominated by space-biased media, such as paper or electronic images, accord high value to abstract knowledge, bureaucracy, and to exercising control over space, but place relatively little value on, and even denigrate, tradition or continuity with the past.
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Societies shaped by time-biased media, in the purest form, are oral cultures: they emphasize continuity, collectivity, and practical knowledge.
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He did this by defining media as either space-biased or time-biased. The latter are durable media, like stone and papyrus, that are difficult to transport and reproduce, while the former are light and easily transported, such as paper, TV images, and digital communication.
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Like other media theorists, Innis argued that the form of media and not its content privileged particular types of knowledge.
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The characteristics of the great empires that dominate Western history—Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, Rome, Europe, and North America—are the characteristics of particular media of communication, like hieroglyphics, papyrus, and print.
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In these books, Innis argued that the history of any civilization could be studied as a history of the dominant media of communication of that civilization.
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Trained as a political economist, Innis wrote two important books about the materiality of communication: Empire and Communication (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951).
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Often pointed to as the one of the originators of media theory, his work strongly influenced Marshall McLuhan, who famously claimed that The Gutenberg Galaxy was merely "a footnote of explanation" to Innis' work.
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This week, we commemorate the work of Harold Innis, who was born on 5 November 1895 and died on 8 November 1952.
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Some great history of philosophy of technology happening in Brussels next couple of days #philtech

History Of Technology University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

And and Endowed Chair in History of Technology (nice salary) at UC Irvine, due Dec 1.

recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09897

A couple of job postings in the #histSTM #histsci #histmed realm: Asst Prof in Social Studies of Medicine at Cambridge, due Nov 17.

www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/assista...

I'm hiring! A 2-year postdoc on my ERC project "KNOW-HOW" at the Cogito: Epistemology Research Centre University of Glasgow. (Deadline for applications 9 November.) Please share with anyone you think might be interested. Details below

www.jobs.gla.ac.uk/job/research...

As someone who goes to a lot of events about AI... This was really rather special!

S5 E11 - Steven Shapin on the Social Life of Scientific Knowledge Podcast Episode · The HPS Podcast - Conversations from History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science · 19/10/2025 · 50m

This week we welcome Prof. Steven Shapin to the pod!🎙️

We explore his journey through interdisciplinary spaces, revisit Leviathan and the Air-Pump 40 years on, and explore how credibility, trust and expertise are shaped by the fragmentation of expertise and (recent) political & cultural challenges

As a technology, the clock produces seconds, minutes, and hours, disassociating time from human events and creating the belief in a separate world of mathematically measurable sequences. As clocks began to appear, time keeping turned into time serving—we became slaves to time.
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In "Technics and Civilization," Mumford made the persuasive argument that the mechanical clock, invented in the monasteries of medieval Europe, was the starting point of the industrial revolution.
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His later work, including the two volumes of "The Myth of the Machine" (1967/1970) took a more pessimistic view on the relationship between humans, the environment, technology, and power and his influence on writers such as Jacques Ellul and Langdon Winner was evident.
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Strongly influenced by the nineteenth-century American transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau, Melville) Mumford was an early American philosopher of technology, whose work "Technics and Civilization" (1934) was one of the first books dedicated to philosophical reflection on technology.
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On this day in 1895, Lewis Mumford was born in Flushing, New York.
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In recognizing technology as central to our being, Ortega helped establish the groundwork for the humanistic and phenomenological traditions in the philosophy of technology that followed.
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His reflections constitute an early anthropological engagement with technology, seeing it as an expression of life.
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Technology, in his view, is thus existential rather than instrumental—a creative act through which humanity shapes both the world and itself.
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For Ortega, humans are not simply biological beings adapting to their environment; they are technical beings who transform that environment to expand their freedom and possibilities.
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