Between Reason and Experience

Between Reason and Experience by Andrew Feenberg

A leading philosopher of technology calls for the democratic coordination of technical rationality with everyday experience.

The technologies, markets, and administrations of today's knowledge society are in crisis. We face recurring disasters in every domain: climate change, energy shortages, economic meltdown. The system is broken, despite everything the technocrats claim to know about science, technology, and economics. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that today powerful technologies have unforeseen effects that disrupt everyday life; the new masters of technology are not restrained by the lessons of experience, and accelerate change to the point where society is in constant turmoil. In Between Reason and Experience, leading philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg makes a case for the interdependence of reason--scientific knowledge, technical rationality--and experience. Feenberg examines different aspects of the tangled relationship between technology and society from the perspective of critical theory of technology, an approach he has pioneered over the past twenty years. Feenberg points to two examples of democratic interventions into technology: the Internet (in which user initiative has influenced design) and the environmental movement (in which science coordinates with protest and policy). He examines methodological applications of critical theory of technology to the case of the French Minitel computing network and to the relationship between national culture and technology in Japan. Finally, Feenberg considers the philosophies of technology of Heidegger, Habermas, Latour, and Marcuse. The gradual extension of democracy into the technical sphere, Feenberg argues, is one of the great political transformations of our time.

Andrew Feenberg is the Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology at Simon Fraser University. Darin Barney is assistant professor of communication at McGill University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780262514255
ISBN 10	0262514257
Title	Between Reason and Experience
Author	Andrew Feenberg
Series	Between Reason And Experience
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	MIT Press Ltd
Year published	2010-04-09
Number of pages	284
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.