Carl Mitcham

This volume grew out of the experience of the First Inter-American Congress on Philosophy of Technology, October 1988, organized by the Center for the Philosophy and History of Science and Technology of the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagiiez. The Spanish-language proceedings of that conference have been published in Carl Mitcham and Margarita M. Peiia Borrero, with Elena Lugo and James Ward, eds., El nuevo mundo de la filosofta y la tecnolog(a (University Park, PA: STS Press, 1990). This volume contains thirty-two papers, twenty-two summaries, an introduction and biographical notes, to provide a full record of that seminal gathering. Discussions with Paul T. Durbin and others - including many who participated in the Second Inter-American Congress on Philosophy of Technology, University of Puerto Rico in Mayagiiez, March 199- raised the prospect of an English-language proceedings in the Philosophy and Technology series. But after due consideration it was agreed that a more general volume was needed to introduce English-speaking readers to a growing body of literature on the philosophy of technology in the Spanish-speaking world. As such, the present volume includes Spanish as well as Latin American authors, historical and contemporary figures, some who did and many who did not participate in the first and second inter-American congresses.

An engineering colleague and collaborator of Chen Changshu, who has been called the founder of contemporary Chinese philosophy of technology, Yuan Deyu recalls early efforts to develop philosophy of technology that took place at Harbin Institute of Technology in the 1960s. Case studies based in the idea of learning from workers and frameworks adapted from Japanese theory of technology scholarship constituted the original philosophy of technology in contemporary China. The importance of this work is largely unknown in the West and even among Chinese scholars born after the Cultural Revolution. Against this background, Yuan questions many of the ways Chinese philosophers have tried to adapt or relate to Western studies in philosophy and technology.

The Foundations of Meta-Technics is a rigorous phenomenological analysis of the transcendence of anthropomorphic, anthropocentric, and geocentric technology in terms of the new meta-technical forms of space and time. The book draws out the epistemological and ontological implications of an emerging meta-technical supernature in which space and time are perceived by trans-human means and from trans-terrestrial perspectives. This book is especially valuable to philosophers in either the phenomenological or continental tradition.