Dr. Carl Mitcham

Carl Mitcham

Carl Mitcham is Director of the Hennebach Program for the Humanities, supported by a major endowment from Ralph Hennebach. The Hennebach program sponsors a regular series of Visiting Professors and promotes the general enhancement of the humanities on campus. Carl earned degrees from the University of Colorado (BA, MA) and Fordham University (PhD) and has held faculty appointments previously at Berea College (Kentucky), St. Catharine College (Kentucky), Brooklyn Polytechnic University, and Pennsylvania State University. His disciplinary background is in philosophy, with an emphasis in philosophy and ethics of science, technology, and engineering. His scholarly publications, however, have been as much interdisciplinary as disciplinary, especially insofar as he has worked to bring philosophy of technology into the interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies.

What it means to be human is the fundamental question of the humanities. As the modern sciences broke away from the humanities and the humanities themselves splintered — into competitive academic programs in philosophy, history, literature and linguistics, criticism and theory of the arts, religious studies, the qualitative social sciences, and more — concepts of human nature have become increasingly differentiated and problematic. Each discipline tends configure around its own conception of the human. The power and reach of engineering also rests on and advances a distinctive view of the human. In a progressively engineered world — one where everything from the human genome to the urban lifescape and from nanomaterials to the global climate is subject to engineered design — it is ever more important for humanities scholars and engineers to cross disciplinary boundaries and to struggle to think together about being human and the human condition.