Review of African Eve Effect by Aant Elzinga

Alexandra Hofm?nner’s paper is stimulating and provocative. For science and technology studies (STS) it importantly reintroduces a lost dimension, philosophical anthropology 1968; in a critique of Western science, Jürgen Habermas of the Frankfurt School retrieved this dimension and distinguished three “knowledge constitutive interests” whereof the “technical instrumental” associated an empirical-positivist ideal pinned on measurement and control. Such epistemic categories however soon fell outside mainstream science studies, even if Andrew Feenberg—a student of Herbert Marcuse—persistently pursues a broad critical theory of technology.