Society for the History of the Philosophy of Technology (HPT)

He was also one of the first to translate Paul Ricoeur into English. He was an active member of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, receiving the lifetime achievement award from this organization in 2017.
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But, his influence is not limited to this. He made important contributions to sound studies through his work on the materialities that mediate listening and he was also interested in the philosophy of science through his work on the hermeneutics of scientific instruments.
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Drawing from a background in phenomenology and hermeneutics, his book Technology and the Lifeworld (1990) led to what became known as post-phenomenology.
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Ihde is one of the most well-known contemporary philosophers of technology whose work has had left an indelible mark on the philosophy of technology.
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Today (14 January) we celebrate the birthday of Don Ihde (1934-2024).
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An active member of the Society for Philosophy and Technology (SPT) during the 1980s, his influence can be found in the work of many political philosophers of technology, including Langdon Winner, Carl Mitcham, and Andrew Feenberg.
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Although often mistaken as a technophobe or a dystopian thinker, he resisted the demands of efficiency and productivity that have become aligned with technological society in hopes of recovering a sense of humanity in which technology serves our needs instead of defining what our needs should be.
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In it, Ellul argues that humans have lost their sense of freedom because they have had to adapt to the demands of technology.
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His ideas were influenced by Marx, Kiekegaard, and Karl Barth and he was, simultaneously, a theologian, a sociologist, an anarchist, and a philosopher of technology. His book The Technological Society (1964) is one of the best-known philosophical approaches to technology.
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Today we celebrate the birthday of Jacques Ellul (1912-1994). Ellul was a remarkable person whose work in the French resistance during the war was widely celebrated.
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*correction* Trevor Pinch died on this day in 2021. He lived between 1952 and 2021.

You are right, he lived from 1952 till 2021.

His approach inspired generations of scholars across STS, anthropology, and the philosophy of technology, contributing to a richer understanding of how tools, instruments, and devices are always co-produced by society.
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Trevor Pinch playing a Moog prodigy synthesizer.

Pinch’s later work on musical technologies, especially synthesizers and sound cultures, highlighted how users creatively redefine and repurpose technologies, often in ways engineers never anticipated.
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This perspective reoriented away from abstract judgments about “technology” in general toward close attention to how specific artifacts evolve in concrete social worlds.
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For Pinch, technologies are shaped by the meanings and practices of different social groups. “Technical” problems are never just technical; they emerge from cultural expectations, user communities, and political choices.
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With Wiebe Bijker, he co-created the influential Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework, showing that technological artifacts—bicycles, synthesizers, scientific instruments—do not develop through purely technical logic but through social negotiation, interpretation, and controversy.
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A portrait of Trevor Pinch holding a book "the golem at large : what you should know about technology". He coauthored this book with Harry Collins.

OTD in 1952, Trevor Pinch died. A central figure in the development of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Pinch helped transform how we understand the relationship between society and technology.
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Her insights continue to guide contemporary debates on AI, automation, gender justice, and the social shaping of technology, making her one of the most influential voices in the field today.
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Instead, she demonstrated how the organization of work, care, and institutions shapes our experience of time as much as any device.
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In her later work on time pressure and digital acceleration, Wajcman challenged the common belief that modern technologies inevitably make life faster.
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She showed how machines, infrastructures, and workplace systems often reflect masculine norms of efficiency, control, and autonomy—while also emphasizing that these systems can be redesigned to support more equitable and humane forms of life.
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For Wajcman, understanding technology requires examining whose perspectives count in design and whose labor is obscured or devalued.
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In TechnoFeminism and earlier work on the gendering of workplace technologies, she argued that technologies are never neutral: they are shaped by the values, hierarchies, and assumptions of the societies that produce them.
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OTD in 1950, Judy Wajcman was born. A pioneering sociologist and feminist theorist, Wajcman reshaped the philosophy and sociology of technology by showing how technological systems are deeply entwined with gender, power, and social organization.
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From this, Verbeek pushed the philosophy of technology towards what has been called an "ethical turn," encouraging philosophers to work with designers, engineers, and policy makers in order to direct technology towards more ethical ends.
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A leading proponent of the empirical turn, Verbeek's book What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology drew together Don Ihde's project of postphenomenology and actor-network theory into an influential approach called "technical mediation theory."
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This weekend (December 6th) we celebrate Peter-Paul Verbeek's birthday.
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Illich remains a key reference for anyone asking how technology might be designed to support freedom rather than control, and community rather than consumption.
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This perspective deeply influenced later critiques of industrial modernity and helped shape contemporary debates on degrowth, appropriate technology, and digital autonomy.
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