 During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century a critical attitude predominated in philosophical reflection on technology. The representatives of this attitude were, overwhelmingly, schooled in the humanities or the social sciences and had virtually no first-hand knowledge of engineering practice. Whereas Bacon wrote extensively on the method of science and conducted physical experiments himself, Butler, being a clergyman, lacked such first-hand knowledge. Ernst Kapp, who was the first to use the term ‘philosophy of technology’ in his book Eine Philosophie der Technik (1877 [2018]), was a philologist and historian.  Most of the authors who wrote critically about technology and its socio-cultural role during the twentieth century were philosophers of a general outlook, such as Martin Heidegger (1954 [1977]), Hans Jonas (1979 [1984]), Arnold Gehlen (1957 [1980]), Günther Anders (1956), and Andrew Feenberg (1999). Others had a background in one of the other humanities or in social science, such as literary criticism and social research in the case of Lewis Mumford (1934), law in the case of Jacques Ellul (1954 [1964]), political science in the case of Langdon Winner (1977, 1980, 1983) and literary studies in the case of Albert Borgmann (1984). The form of philosophy of technology constituted by the writings of these and others has been called by Carl Mitcham (1994) “humanities philosophy of technology”, because it takes its point of departure from the social sciences and the humanities rather than from the practice of technology, and it approaches technology accepting “the primacy of the humanities over technologies” (1994: 39), since technology originates from the goals and values of humans. 