David Blockley, Creativity, Problem Solving and Aesthetics in Engineering: Today’s Engineers Turning Dreams into Reality Priyan Dias, Philosophy for Engineering: Practice, Context, Ethics, Models, Failure

By Carl Mitcham

Creativity, Problem Solving and Aesthetics in Engineering: Today’s Engineers Turning Dreams into Reality by David Blockley (2019) Springer, Cham, hardback US$60, pp.xvii + 225, ISBN: 9783030382575

Philosophy for Engineering: Practice, Context, Ethics, Models, Failure by Priyan Dias (2019) Springer, Singapore, paperback £45, pp.xiii + 124, ISBN: 9789811512704

For more than 200 years since English-speaking engineering emerged in the late 1700s, it has mostly remained an unconscious presence in philosophy as well as in the larger culture – despite the fact that modernity is fundamentally dependent on engineering and is the first engineered lifeworld in human history. Insofar as engineering has been thought, it has mostly been subordinate to the science which it at once makes possible and puts to use in transforming its design and production of technologies; engineering has remained culturally subservient to the knowledge creation it enables and its production of ideally useful and convenient outputs. Together these two volumes by civil engineers in England and Sri Lanka are significant efforts from the engineering community to address the manifest cultural lacunae, both within and without engineering.

page: 397-403
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 37, Issue 4
SKU: 370410

SKU: 370410 Category: Tag: