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The philosophy of technology does not have a clear beginning. However, modern philosophers and historians frequently point to the rationalists and empiricists of the early 17th century as a source of thought which began to combine philosophy and science in new ways. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), natural philosopher, saw science and technology as means to understand and master nature. Bacon believed the magnetic compass, the printing press, and gunpowder to be the most important developments of modern man. In chapter two of his book, Thinking Through Technology, Carl Mitcham made the case that Bacon was the first philosopher to focus attention on the subject of technology.
The attempt by Francis Bacon...to turn human attention toward technology and to invest human energy in its pursuit, in preference to politics and philosophy (not to mention religion and poetry), was itself undertaken by philosophical and rhetorical means. It was, we might say, the humanities that conceived technology-especially modern technology-not technology that conceived the humanities. (p. 39)
Bacon's contemporaries Rene Descartes (1596-1650), G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716), and Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) saw the world as being controlled by mathematical principles [6]. For the fathers of rationalism, technology and science were tools to understand and master the world. Descartes's exclamation, "give me matter and motion and I will construct the world" pointed to his mechanistic worldview. According to Postman (1992) the invention of the computer made possible Descartes's dream of the "mathematization of the world" (p. 118).
Leibniz is credited by Michael Heim (1993) as contributing to the idea of the computer (p. 15, 36). Leibniz's ideas of "universal language", "reasoning calculus", and a "community of minds", which he saw as a means to bring political and religious unity to Europe, might be interpreted in light of today's computer networks as an electronic global village [7].
The originator of the term philosophy of technology is believed to be Ernst Kapp, a German philosopher (1808-1896) who authored Philosophie de Technik. Influenced by Georg W. F. Hegel and Karl Ritter, Kapp fell out of favor with the German authorities in the late 1840s and was forced to leave his homeland. Kapp emigrated to the German pioneer settlement of central Texas where he lived for two decades (Mitcham, 1994, p. 23). Perhaps motivated by his life on the American frontier, technology was for Kapp a means to "overcome dependence on raw nature." This in turn required,
the colonization of space (through agriculture, mining, architecture, civil engineering, etc.) and of time (through systems of communication, from language to telegraph). The latter, in its perfected form, would constitute a "universal telegraphics" [8] linking world languages, semiotics, and inventions into a global transfiguration of the earth and a truly human habitat. (Mitcham, p. 23)
Technology as a means to conquer time and space is a well understood concept. The transcendent hope for technology may be understood as an attempt to achieve the eternal and the omniscient. Just as geographic frontiers were first crossed with wheeled wagons, then steam powered trains, and now jet airliners, electronic frontiers in cyberspace are crisscrossed at the speed of light on fiber optic highways. McLuhan claimed the Divine Force of electricity to "abolish space and time alike" (quoted in Carey, 1992, p. 116).
James Carey (1992) reminded us that the American frontier was settled by those who sought religious freedom in a new land [9]. Moving to a new world was a type of redemption (p. 16). In Early America, transportation and communication were closely identified, and not until the telegraph were they separated. Even then, the parallel development of the telegraph and railroads, the nation's nerves and arteries, represented the connection between communication and transportation [10]. Since the founding of the first colonies technological developments have increased the rate of transport many times over. But it has not begun to approach the gains made in the speed of communication. The development of the telegraph allowed information to travel at the speed of electricity and at once the idea of space was abolished. For a more up-to-date illustration consider the speed of communication on the Internet. A round-trip message from MIT in Boston, Massachusetts to McMurdo, Antarctica takes 640 milliseconds and 18 hops [11].
Another German philosopher associated with the philosophy of technology is Friedrich Dessauer (1881-1963). Dessauer, a devout Catholic, wrote books on theology, was a University lecturer, and opposed Hitler. For this last act he was forced to flee his country (Mitcham, 1994, p. 29). For Dessauer, technology had become "a new way for human beings to exist in the world" (p. 31) [12]. According to Mitcham, Dessauer,
defended technology in the strongest possible terms, he also sought to open up dialogue with existentialists, social theorists, and theologians. As a result, it is Dessauer's work that is most often cited when philosophers of science first acknowledged the philosophy of technology. (p. 29)
In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that scientific knowledge is limited to the phenomenal world, and remains separate from the noumena. In contrast to Kant, Dessauer believed that technological invention brings mankind into contact with things-in-themselves. The creative process of invention creates existence out of essence and the result is a working, practical solution to a problem. According to Mitcham, the transcendent nature of this process was enough for Dessauer to place it in the same context as Kant's scientific knowing, moral doing, and aesthetic feeling. For Dessauer, technology fit easily into his understanding of the Kantian categorical imperative (pp. 31-33).
The autonomous, world-transforming consequences of modern technology are witness to its transcendent moral value. Human beings create technology, but its power-which resembles that of "a mountain range, a river, an ice age, or planet"-goes beyond anything expected; it brings into play more than this-worldly forces....With Dessauer, technology becomes a religious experience-and religious experience takes on technological meaning. (p. 32)
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