‘A surprising number of those responsible for the technical standards of the Web have a background in Philosophy. This eclectic collection brings together diverse perspectives on how the big questions of philosophy relate to the engineered realities of the Web. How do philosophical debates about representation, semantics and reference apply to Web documents and identifiers? Could the all-pervading presence of the Web even be changing how we think?’
―Dan Brickley, Google
‘This is a collection of essays that contributes to our understanding of the philosophical issues raised by the Web. The editors are to be congratulated for their constructionist methodology (“philosophical engineering”) and for their “denaturalising ontology” program. Contemporary philosophy needs more of both.’
―Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Philosophical Engineering represents the first interdisciplinary exploration of the philosophical foundations of the Web, a new area of inquiry with important implications across a range of domains. The twelve essays here bridge the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, and phenomenology. They bring together insightful new scholarship both from well-known analytic and continental philosophers, such as Andy Clark and Bernard Stiegler, and from new “digital native” scholars in philosophy and engineering.
The contributors take into account both the impact of the Web on philosophy and the philosophical foundations of the architecture of the Web. They tackle a variety of questions, such as the impact of Google on intelligence and epistemology, the philosophical status of digital objects, ethics on the Web, semantic and ontological changes caused by the Web, and the potential of the Web to serve as a genuine cognitive extension. The book also includes an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web. Setting a new standard for scholarship in this emerging field, this is an essential volume for those interested in defining a philosophy of the Web.
From the Back Cover
Philosophical Engineering represents the first interdisciplinary exploration of the philosophical foundations of the Web, a new area of inquiry with important implications across a range of domains. The twelve essays here bridge the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, and phenomenology. They bring together insightful new scholarship both from well-known analytic and continental philosophers, such as Andy Clark and Bernard Stiegler, and from new “digital native” scholars in philosophy and engineering.
The contributors take into account both the impact of the Web on philosophy and the philosophical foundations of the architecture of the Web. They tackle a variety of questions, such as the impact of Google on intelligence and epistemology, the philosophical status of digital objects, ethics on the Web, semantic and ontological changes caused by the Web, and the potential of the Web to serve as a genuine cognitive extension. The book also includes an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web. Setting a new standard for scholarship in this emerging field, this is an essential volume for those interested in defining a philosophy of the Web.
About the Author
Harry Halpin is Postdoctoral Associate with the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Visiting Researcher at the Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation du Centre Pompidou, France, as part of a European Commission–funded Marie Curie PHILOWEB project. His research interests range from the complex dynamics of tagging to the philosophical foundations of Anonymous. He is the author of Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web (2012), which analyzes the impact of the Web on theories of semantics.
Alexandre Monnin is Head of Web and Metadata Research at the Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation du Centre Pompidou, France, and Associate Researcher at INRIA and CNAM. He has published research on tagging, the architecture of the Web, and its importance for ontology. In 2010, he organized the first interdisciplinary PhiloWeb conference and in 2012 he held the first international seminar on the topic, both at the Sorbonne. He co-initiated SemanticPedia, the semantic platform for Wikimedia projects in French.
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