Despite the topic s urgency and centrality, this is the first edited volume to offer a comprehensive assessment of the varying approaches to early engagement with new technologies, including nanotechnology, synthetic biology, biotechnology and ICT. Covering five main approaches to early engagement constructive technology assessment (CTA), value-sensitive design (VSD), midstream modulation (MM), the network approach for moral evaluation, and political technology assessment the book will be a pivotal text in the rapidly developing research field of ELSI, which explores the ethical, legal,...

Building on the breakthrough text Philosophy and Engineering: An Emerging Agenda, this book offers 30 chapters covering conceptual and substantive developments in the philosophy of engineering, along with a series of critical reflections by engineering practitioners. The volume demonstrates how reflective engineering can contribute to a better understanding of engineering identity and explores how integrating engineering and philosophy could lead to innovation in engineering methods, design and education.

The volume is divided into reflections on practice, principles and...

This book considers the question: to what extent does it make sense to qualify technical artefacts as moral entities? The authors contributions trace recent proposals and topics including instrumental and non-instrumental values of artefacts, agency and artefactual agency, values in and around technologies, and the moral significance of technology.

The editors introduction explains that as agents rather than simply passive instruments, technical artefacts may actively influence their users, changing the way they perceive the world, the way they act in the world and the way they...

New biotechnologies have propelled the question of what it means to be human or posthuman to the forefront of societal and scientific consideration. This volume provides an accessible, critical overview of the main approaches in the debate on posthumanism, and argues that they do not adequately address the question of what it means to be human in an age of biotechnology. Not because they belong to rival political camps, but because they are grounded in a humanist ontology that presupposes a radical separation between human subjects and technological objects.

The volume offers a...

This combination of historiography and theory offers the growing Anglophone readership interested in the ideas of Gilbert Simondon a thorough and unprecedented survey of the French philosopher's entire oeuvre. The publication, which breaks new ground in its thoroughness and breadth of analysis, systematically traces the interconnections between Simondon's philosophy of science and technology on the one hand, and his political philosophy on the other.

The author sets Simondon's ideas in the context of the epistemology of the late 1950s and the 1960s in France, the milieu...

This volume identifies, discusses and addresses the wide array of ethical issues that have emerged for engineers due to the rise of a global economy. To date, there has been no systematic treatment of the particular challenges globalization poses for engineering ethics standards and education. This volume concentrates on precisely this challenge. Scholars and practitioners from diverse national and professional backgrounds discuss the ethical issues emerging from the inherent symbiotic relationship between the engineering profession and globalization. Through their discussions a deeper and...

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...