Carl Mitcham

Responsible innovation is playing a progressively significant role in the developed countries of Europe and North America, but is not as often used as a framework for analysis in developing countries. This article describes how what we term latent or implicit RI was introduced to a large-scale technological project in China: the expansion of the deep-sea port in Dalian. This analysis first reviews the historical development of the port and summarizes the Chinese context since the Reform and Opening that began in the late 1970s. It provides a brief case study of a particular emergency containment pool construction project undertaken by Dalian Port, uses stakeholder analysis to evaluate the project, identifies key values influencing the work, and considers the extent to which it meets criteria set out in a specific four-dimensional RI methodological framework. We argue that although it does not use RI rhetoric, the PDA in effect practices latent RI which is also in fact becoming manifest. In conclusion we also consider some of the weaknesses of our argument and some ambiguities of RI.

Just as philosophy of technology has distinctive origins in Europe and in the United States, so too in China. Here we aim to give an introductory narrative account of Chinese origins for English language readers, anchored in the lives and thought of Chen Changshu 陈昌曙 and Yuan Deyu 远德玉, two leading influences on what is sometimes been called the “Northeastern School” in the philosophy of technology. A general introduction to this school is developed through a narrative account of Chen’s and Yuan’s interactive lives and work in historical context followed by appreciations of their philosophical achievements, most particularly Chen’s 1999 _Jishu zhexue yin lun_ 技术哲学引论 [Introduction to philosophy of technology] and two Yuan interviews from 2018 and 2022. Our claim is that Chen and Yuan were much earlier paying attention to the empirical experience of engineers than Western counterparts who later started the “empirical turn” movement and that their originary contributions are pertinent for anyone in the West who desires to engage with Chinese thinking about engineering and technology, if not in fact to the placing of Western philosophy of technology in a more global perspective.

The article calls attention to a distinction in English between the terms ‘engineering science’ and ‘engineering sciences’ (singular and plural): the former appearing to be broader and denote educational programs that include more than technical engineering, the latter to be a collective noun for diverse engineering sciences such as mechanics, statics, dynamics, electronics, et al. Furthermore, it calls attention to a professional society and journals dedicated to engineering science in the singular, briefly reflects on personal interaction with the Department of Engineering Science at Pennsylvania State University, and selectively dips into historical-philosophical literature. The article also provides reflections on ‘engineering wonder’.

This second companion volume on engineering studies considers engineering practice including contextual analyses of engineering identity, epistemologies and values. Key overlapping questions examine such issues as an engineering identity, engineering self-understandings enacted in the professional world, distinctive characters of engineering knowledge and how engineering science and engineering design interact in practice. Authors bring with them perspectives from their institutional homes in Europe, North America, Australia\ and Asia. The volume includes 24 contributions by more than 30 authors from engineering, the social sciences and the humanities. Additional issues the chapters scrutinize include prominent norms of engineering, how they interact with the values of efficiency or environmental sustainability. A concluding set of articles considers the meaning of context more generally by asking if engineers create their own contexts or are they created by contexts. Taken as a whole, this collection of original scholarly work is unique in its broad, multidisciplinary consideration of the changing character of engineering practice.

This inclusive cross-cultural study rethinks the nexus between engineering education and context. In so doing the book offers a reflection on contextual boundaries with an overall boundary crossing ambition and juxtaposes important cases of critical participation within engineering education with sophisticated scholarly reflection on both opportunities and discontents. Whether and in what way engineering education is or ought to be contextualized or de-contextualized is an object of heated debate among engineering educators. The uniqueness of this study is that this debate is given comprehensive coverage – presenting both instrumentally inclined as well as radical positions on transforming engineering education. In contextualizing engineering education, this book offers diverse commentary from a range of disciplinary, meta- and interdisciplinary perspectives on how cultural, professional, institutional and educational systems contexts shape histories, structural dynamics, ideologies and challenges as well as new pathways in engineering education. Topics addressed include examining engineering education in countries ranging from India to America, to racial and gender equity in engineering education and incorporating social awareness into the area. Using context as “bridge” this book confronts engineering education head on. Contending engineering ideologies and corresponding views on context are juxtaposed with contending discourses of reform. The uniqueness of the book is that it brings together scholars from the humanities, the social sciences and engineering from Europe – both East and West – with the United States, China, Brazil, India and Australia.

Ethical questions posed by emerging technologies call for greater understanding of their societal, economic, and environmental aspects by policymakers, citizens, and the engineers and applied scientists at the heart of their development and application. This article reports on the efforts of one research project that assessed the growth of critical thinking and awareness of these multiple aspects in undergraduate engineering and applied science students, with specific regard to nanotechnology. Students in two required courses, a first-year writing and engineering ethics course and a second-year social science course, went through nanotechnology modules as a part of their regular coursework. In the first-year humanities course, we observed self-reported increases in risk awareness, significant educational impact of the module, and a greater awareness of nanotechnology’s applications and social context. In the second-year social science course, we noted changes in risk/benefit analysis as well as in the character and depth of students’ historical analysis, but no change in comparative awareness of other topics, including labor issues and corporate motivations.

The article presents an historico-philosophical narrative of developments in the philosophy of technology across four generations: (1) the late 1800s work of such figures as Ernst Kapp and Karl Marx, (2) the mid-20th century analysis of technology as a challenge to the lifeworld by such thinkers as José Ortega y Gasset, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Ellul, (3) a pragmatist, empirical turn by late twentieth century US American and Dutch philosophers, (4) a current movement toward globalization. An elaboration on the third generation calls attention to work from the United States by Hans Jonas, Don Ihde, Albert Borgmann, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, and Paul Durbin as well as Dutch philosophers such as, among others, Peter Kroes, Anthonie Meijers, Hans Achterhuis, Philip Brey, and Peter-Paul Verbeek. A concluding section projects a future of continuing globalization.

What might it mean to aspire to the realization of a specifically engineering Bildung under conditions in which engineering has become a generative source for social-political and planetary disorder? Taking off from another effort to think engineering professionalism in engineering today, this chapter revisits the shift from pre-Enlightenment to Enlightenment concepts of Bildung, some of the boundary assumptions behind the notion of a possible engineering Bildung, and the mythopoeic engineer scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer as an exemplar of apocalyptic engineering Bildung.

Current ethical discourse on AI ethics is too narrow. The argument divides into three parts. Part one offers a simplified overview that samples recent work by Mark Coeckelbergh, one of the few philosophers who properly seeks to combine ethics and politics. Part two pushes for granting existential risk a more prominent, limit situation role in AI ethical-political discourse, and call attention to the post-World War II emergence of concerns about prospective potentials for global technogenic catastrophies. Part three pays tribute to Toby Ord’s effort to construct the kind of bridge that I advocate, but then questions whether the liberalist political philosophical basis on which it rests. Part four calls out liberalism as enabling AI in ways that undermine efforts to subject it to proper ethical-political judgment and regulation.

The movements to teach the responsible conduct of research (RCR) and engineering ethics at technological universities are often unacknowledged aspects of the ethics across the curriculum (EAC) movement and could benefit from explicit alliances with it. Remarkably, however, not nearly as much scholarly attention has been devoted to EAC as to RCR or to engineering ethics, and RCR and engineering ethics educational efforts are not always presented as facets of EAC. The emergence of EAC efforts at two different institutions—the Illinois Institute of Technology and Utah Valley University (UVU)—provide counter examples. The remarkably successful UVU initiative gave birth to EAC as a scholarly movement and to the associated Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum. EAC initiatives at the Colorado School of Mines, however, point up continuing institutional resistances to EAC. Finally, comparative reflection on successes and failures can draw some lessons for the future. One suggestion is that increasing demands for accountability and pedagogical research into what works in teaching and learning offers special opportunities.

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.