The Newcomers: Humanities in Engineering Education

Abstract – Engineering education has undergone a progressive specialization, creating a professional figure far from the ideal of the Italian Renaissance “artifex”, who united technical skills with a deep humanistic education. Today, instead, we are witnessing a radical change of direction: the need to respond more adequately to the complex challenges proposed by “technoscience” has forced various countries to introduce in the syllabus of engineering departments subjects such as ethics, anthropology, literature, history of technology or even aesthetics, which can be called Engineering Humanities modelled on the Medical Humanities. The recent literature on this topic shows that the inclusion of humanities in engineering education is considered indispensable for regaining the human factor in technological questions. Among the disciplines that make up the humanities, philosophy has a fundamental importance, because the anthropological and ethical reflection on the meaning of human and nonhuman is the necessary premise for a human-centered technology. -