How do you think technology will affect the teaching and practice of philosophy? During my undergraduate degree (in philosophy), I took notes in numerous classes on a laptop and could download papers from a variety of journals as PDF. I have seen numerous academic perspectives regarding technology and learning - from Bert Dreyfus' idea that the podcast of his lectures at Berkeley on philosophy and literature reduced class attendance, to law schools having "laptops off" sessions to science professors encouraging (or even requiring) graduate students to blog about their lab work. I even saw a theory that ethical theories are implicitly tied to the technology of their time - the printing press linking with Kant, utilitarianism, Mill-style liberalism, the mass media of television, radio and newspapers doing the same for Rawls and Nozick. And, of course, many philosophy professors like Brian Leiter now have blogs and some have podcasts too.
At technical conferences, we use technology to provide things like ...
Computers have found their way into philosophy over the lasttwenty years or so, though philosophers disagree about the significance of thisfact for philosophy itself. Many philosophers see technology merely as an aidto productivity. There probably aren’t many professional philosophers who stilluse typewriters; most use computers for writing, and e-mail and the web for scholarlycommunication. The use of “Web 2.0” tools, such as blogs, wikis, and the likehave been adopted by still a minority of philosophers, and there remains a fairdegree of skepticism about the usefulness of such tools for research purposes.The availability of online access to many journals is a great help, thoughaccess and availability varies widely by institution, and by journal. There areonly a handful of “online only” journals. No established hard-copy journal thatI know of has gone exclusively online, though most have made back issuesavailable electronically, often through jstor.org or other aggregators. Use ofthe web by...
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