Engineering Philosophy 
Theories of Technology, German Idealism, and Social Order in High-Industrial Germany 

ADELHEID  VOSKUHL

http://basu.daneshlink.ir/Handler10.ashx?server=2&id=50/article/637923/pdf

ABSTRACT:

 During the so-called “Second Industrial Revolution,” engineers were constituting themselves as a new social and professional group, and found themselves in often fierce competition with existing elites—the military, the nobility, and educated bourgeois mandarins—whose roots went back to medieval and early modern pre-industrial social orders. During that same time, engineers also discovered the discipline of philosophy: as a means to express their intellectual and social agendas, and to theorize technology and its relationship to art, history, culture, philosophy, and the state.

This article analyzes engineers’ own philosophical writings about technology as well as the institutions in which they composed them in 1910s and 1920s Germany. It emphasizes engineers’ contributions to well-known discourses founded by canonical philosophers, the role of preindustrial economies and their imagination in such philosophies, and the role of both the history and the philosophy of technology in engineers’ desire for upward social mobility.

If you own a slide rule and someone comes up with large claims or great
emotions, you say: “Just a moment please, first we want to work out the margin of error and the most probable value of all this!”—This was without a doubt a powerful idea of engineering. It served as the foundation for an appealing future self-image.
—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities1


Adelheid Voskuhl is associate professor in the Department of History and Sociology of
Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self (2013), which won the Jacques Barzun Prize for best book in cultural history. She wishes to acknowledge the support by the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which funded the research for and writing of this article. She is particularly grateful to the three anonymous T&C referees for their insightful comments and criticism and to Barbara Hahn for sustained and invaluable editorial support.
©2016 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
0040-165X/16/5704-0001/721–52