A Research On Mumford's Philosophy Of Technology

Lewis Mumford was famous for his division of the history of technology and philosophy of technology. This paper studied his philosophy of technology which includes megamachine definition, the division of the history of technology, megamachine's effect, and view of organic technology, commented his philosophy of technology and then expatiated its modern value.Carl Mitcham, a well-known philosopher of technology regarded Mumford as the lead of four humanism philosopher of technology in twentieth century. Mumford thought that in modern society, human being became machine's slave and lost themselves. In order to solve this negative effect, human being continually develop new technology, the result is that they are trapped in an evil circle: technology development—negative effect—technology development such circulation. The analysis on the megamachine and megatechnics constituted an important part in Mumford's philosophy of technology. He thought that the megamachine is the state used administration method and congregated political, economical, martial, bureaucracy factors to form such technology. Unitarianism technology is the important character of megamachine.Mumford wanted to build a view of organic technology to solve the conflict between human being and technology. The view of organic technology will not build directly, it needs detail implement measures. Megamachine is a bureaucracy system. In the modern time, it means using centralization system to build modern technology and its development mold. As to capitalism country, it needs to explode the negative effect from its foundation. So the basic method for solving conflict between human being and machine is to destroy private concept. Our country is influenced by megamachine while intruding and using foreign advanced technology, it brought some negative effect to technology development. Through the research on Mumford's philosophy of technology, we know that it is necessary to pay attention to human being's position in technology development, exert humanistic environment especially ethical factor's influence to technology development and use scientific development concept to supervise our country's technology development.