My Background


I studied Technical Physics at the University of Eindhoven, Netherlands. During my studies I followed all available courses on Philosophy with the Analytical oriented courses of J.S. Doorman and the introductions in the Fenomenology of W. Luypen and R.C. Kwant. 

To keep up to date with philosophy I attended almost all  Nederlands-Vlaamse filosofie dagen, during the last 30 years and used the inputs as a reference for urther reading. During about ten years I gave, with Piet Steures an evening an introduction course in philosophy at the Veluws College in Apeldoorn. The discussions with the attending students and Piet stimulated to improve the understanding of the basics. The introduction papers I prepared for the sessions form the base of the content of my Dutch website: filosofietuin.

More recent I finished my study Philosophy at the Radboud University Nijmegen. My bachelor with the focus on philosophy of science and my master on philosophy cognition with the thesis on Philosophy of Technology.


The content of the sectionem> The cognitive analyses of Functional Artifact design is mainly based on what I remember of these developments since the mid 60s, when we designed electronic functions with single transistors and the first simple integrated circuits and we still made use of a few applications on one of the vacuum tube based computers originally developed at Philip's-Research. However, for a number of details, in particular the years of announcement I have made use of various sources on the internet. [see e.g. http://inventors.about.com, various websites of suppliers such as analog devices; and of course wikipedia]. It is amazing that you can type in just the well known type numbers of old electronis devices like 741, 8008 etc. and a number of useful links pop up. For the purpose of this subsection only some main developments are mentioned. In retrospect this seems a logical flow of developments. In practice many, sometimes fierce, discussions took place when it came to decisions whether to move from triode tube to junction transistors for serious applications. The discussions as the transition from bipolar to MOS could be almost emotional (from what I remember mainly on the bipolar side, I might be wrong here because I was at the MOS side).

During my professional live I was involved in the development of internal memory systems for mainframe computers, display terminals, multimeters, chart recorders, and instrumentation systems, including the development of specific integrated circuits. Later I have been involved in the technology management, application systems architecture and information and automation management.

Philosophygarden        of Hans Tromp