Material Hermeneutics explores the ways in which new imaging technologies and scientific instruments have changed our notions about ancient history. From the first lunar calendar to the black hole image, and from an ancient mummy in the Italian Alps to the irrigated valleys of Mesopotamia, this book demonstrates how revolutions in science have taught us far more than we imagined. Written by a leading philosopher of technology and utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, this book has implications for many fields, including philosophy, history, science, and technology. It will appeal to scholars and students of the humanities, as well as anthropologists and archaeologists.

..". Dr. Ihde brings an enlightening and deeply humanistic perspective to major technological developments, both past and present." Science Books & Films

"Don Ihde is a pleasure to read.... The material is full of nice suggestions and details, empirical materials, fun variations which engage the reader in the work... the overall points almost sneak up on you, they are so gently and gradually offered." John Compton

"A sophisticated celebration of cultural diversity and of its enabling technologies.... perhaps the best single volume relating the philosophical tradition to the broad issues raised by contemporary technologies." Choice

..". important and challenging... " Review of Metaphysics

..". a range of rich historical, cultural, philosophical, and psychological insights, woven together in an intriguing and clear exposition... The book is really a pleasure to read, for its style, immense learning and sanity." Teaching Philosophy

The role of tools and instruments in our relation to the earth and the ways in which technologies are culturally embedded provide the foci of this thought-provoking book."

Digital Media: Human-Technology Connection examines what it is like to be alive in today's technologically textured world and showcases specific digital media technologies that makes this kind of world possible. So much of human experience occurs through digital media that it is time to pause and consider the process and proliferation of digital consumption and humanity's role in it through an interdisciplinary array of sources from philosophy, media studies, film studies, media ecology and philosophy of technology. When placed in the interpretive lens of artifact, instrument, and tool, digital media can be studied in a uniquely different way, as a kind of technology that pushes the boundaries on production, distribution and communication and alters the way humans and technology connect with each other and the world. The book is divided into two sections to provide overarching definitions and case study specifics. Section one, Raw Materials, examines pertinent concepts like digital media, philosophy of technology, phenomenology and postphenomenology by author Stacey O Irwin. In Section Two, Feeling the Weave, Irwin uses conversations with digital media users and other written materials along with the postphenomenological framework to explore nine empirical cases that focus on deep analysis of screens, sound, photo manipulation, data-mining, aggregate news and self-tracking. Postphenomenological concepts like multistability, variational theory, microperception, macroperception, embodiment, technological mediation, and culture figure prominently in the investigation. The aim of the book is to recognize that digital media technologies and the content it creates and proliferates are not neutral. They texture the world in multiple and varied ways that transform human abilities, augment experience and pattern the world in significant and comprehensive ways.

A personal account of the aging body and advanced technologies by a preeminent philosopher of technology Medical Technics is a rigorous examination of how medical progress has modified our worlds and contributed to a virtual revolution in longevity. Don Ihde offers a unique autobiographical tour of medical events experienced in a decade, beginning in his 70s. Ihde offers experiential and postphenomenological analyses of technologies such as sonography and microsurgery, and ultimately asks what it means to increasingly become a cyborg. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Heidegger is the only thinker of his generation whose philosophy of technology is still widely read today. In it, he made three basic claims. First, he asserted that the essence of technology is not technological--that technology is not a neutral instrumentality. Second, he claimed that there is a qualitative difference between modern and traditional technologies. Third and most interestingly, he claimed that technology is a metaphysical perspective, a paradigmatic view of the whole of nature. Although Martin Heidegger remains recognized as a founder of the philosophy of technology, in the last sixty years a whole new world of technologies has appeared-bio-, nano-, info-, and imaging. With technology, time moves fast. Does philosophical time move, too? How adequate is Heidegger's thinking now for understanding today's technological advances?After an extensive Introduction that places Heidegger within the thinking about technology typical of his time, the author, a prominent philosopher of technology, reexamines Heidegger's positions from multiple perspectives-historical, pragmatic, anti-Romantic and postphenomenological. His critiques invert Heidegger's essentialism and phenomenologically analyze Heidegger's favored and disfavored technologies. In conclusion, he undertakes a concrete analysis of the technologies Heidegger used to produce his writing and discovers heretofore undiscussed and ironic results. Overall, the book not only serves as an excellent introduction Heidegger's philosophy of technology and a corrective in outlining its limitations, it indicates a postphenomenological counter-strategy for technological analysis, one that would look at the production of technology in practice, based on observing its forms of embodied activity.

Husserl's Missing Technologies looks at the early-twentieth-century "classical" phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, both in the light of the philosophy of science of his time, and retrospectively at his philosophy from a contemporary "postphenomenology." Of central interest are his infrequent comments upon technologies and especially scientific instruments such as the telescope and microscope. Together with his analysis of Husserl, Don Ihde ventures through the recent history of technologies of science, reading and writing, and science praxis, calling for modifications to phenomenology by converging it with pragmatism. This fruitful hybridization emphasizes human-technology interrelationships, the role of embodiment and bodily skills, and the inherent multistability of technologies. In a radical argument, Ihde contends that philosophies, in the same way that various technologies contain an ever-shortening obsolescence, ought to have contingent use-lives.

Heidegger is the only thinker of his generation whose philosophy of technology is still widely read today. In it, he made three basic claims. First, he asserted that the essence of technology is not technological--that technology is not a neutral instrumentality. Second, he claimed that there is a qualitative difference between modern and traditional technologies. Third and most interestingly, he claimed that technology is a metaphysical perspective, a paradigmatic view of the whole of nature. Although Martin Heidegger remains recognized as a founder of the philosophy of technology, in the last sixty years a whole new world of technologies has appeared-bio-, nano-, info-, and imaging. With technology, time moves fast. Does philosophical time move, too? How adequate is Heidegger's thinking now for understanding today's technological advances?After an extensive Introduction that places Heidegger within the thinking about technology typical of his time, the author, a prominent philosopher of technology, reexamines Heidegger's positions from multiple perspectives-historical, pragmatic, anti-Romantic and postphenomenological. His critiques invert Heidegger's essentialism and phenomenologically analyze Heidegger's favored and disfavored technologies. In conclusion, he undertakes a concrete analysis of the technologies Heidegger used to produce his writing and discovers heretofore undiscussed and ironic results. Overall, the book not only serves as an excellent introduction Heidegger's philosophy of technology and a corrective in outlining its limitations, it indicates a postphenomenological counter-strategy for technological analysis, one that would look at the production of technology in practice, based on observing its forms of embodied activity.

Husserl's Missing Technologies looks at the early-twentieth-century "classical" phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, both in the light of the philosophy of science of his time, and retrospectively at his philosophy from a contemporary "postphenomenology." Of central interest are his infrequent comments upon technologies and especially scientific instruments such as the telescope and microscope. Together with his analysis of Husserl, Don Ihde ventures through the recent history of technologies of science, reading and writing, and science praxis, calling for modifications to phenomenology by converging it with pragmatism. This fruitful hybridization emphasizes human-technology interrelationships, the role of embodiment and bodily skills, and the inherent multistability of technologies. In a radical argument, Ihde contends that philosophies, in the same way that various technologies contain an ever-shortening obsolescence, ought to have contingent use-lives.

Acoustic Technics opens with the 19th century discovery of radiation which exceeds our human bodily perceptual experience, light beyond light, sound beyond sound and on into what today we call the electromagnetic spectrum. Claiming a second scientific revolution through imaging technologies and drawing from both instrumental sensory mediation and animal studies, Acoustic Technics follows listening in its new forms into music, echo-location, infra and ultra-sounds, medical diagnosis, surveillance, and subsurface and interplanetary domains. Synthesized sounds, sonification, in both esoteric and popular technologies such as earbuds, cellphones, television are analyzed from a postphenomenological perspective.

Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations provides an introduction to the school of thought called postphenomenology and showcases projects at the cutting edge of this perspective. Postphenomenology presents a unique blend of insights from the philosophical traditions of phenomenology and American pragmatism, and applies them to studies of user relations to technologies. These studies provide deep descriptions of the ways technologies transform our abilities, augment our experience, and shape the world around us. This book proceeds with a preface by Don Ihde, postphenomenology's founder, and a detailed review of the main ideas of this perspective by the editors Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek. The body of this volume is composed of twelve postphenomenological essays which reflect the expansive range, detail-orientation, and interdisciplinarity of this school of thought. These essays confront a broad assortment of topics, both abstract and concrete. Abstract topics addressed include metaphysics, ethics, methodology, and analysis of the notions of selfhood, skill training, speed, and political activism. Just a few of the concrete topics studied include human-like interactive robots, ethics education, image interpretation in radiology, science fiction tropes, transportation history, wearable computing, and organ donation protocols for brain-dead bodies. The volume concludes with constructive critiques of postphenomenology by Andrew Feenberg, Diane Michelfelder, and Albert Borgmann, all figures whose work is relevant to postphenomenological projects.

Since the initial publication of "Experimental Phenomenology" in 1977, Don Ihde s groundbreaking career has developed from his contributions to the philosophy of technology and technoscience to his own postphenomenology. This new and expanded edition of "Experimental Phenomenology" resituates the text in the succeeding currents of Ihde s work with a new preface and two new sections, one devoted to pragmatism and phenomenology and the other to technologies and material culture. Now, in the case of tools, instruments, and media, Ihde s active and experimental style of phenomenology is taken into cyberspace, science and media technologies, computer games, display screens, and more."

Even before we humans became modern as homo sapiens we were busy inventing technologies. But our technologies also invent us as humans. And as we reflect upon this process, too often our interpretations have taken utopian or dystopian directions: our technologies will make life infinitely better and lead us into utopian realms, or our technologies will condemn us to alienation or even destroy our humanity itself. This set of essays, however, looks at the ironic dimensions of human-technology relations, at unpredicted, unexpected, surprizing outcomes. Are we today in a knowledge society? And, if so, are we wiser? Can we design intended uses into our technologies? Or, do they always surprise us with the unexpected? Can we technologize our very bodies? Become ever more Cyborgean? And have we or could we become posthuman? Here, drawing from a rich history of technologies, Ironic Technics takes a critical look at these contemporary, but also ancient questions.

While some people think that our new technologies which texture our lifeworld disembody human experience, and while others think that eventually we will be able to 'upload' our very embodiment into these technologies, this collection of chapters takes a close postphenomenological account of a myriad of these technologies as we interface with them. Beginning with cinema and the "Matrix Trilogy," then on to both ancient and new musical instrumentalities, romping with robots, venturing into radical imaging technologies which depict phenomena beyond human sensory capacity, and working with both information technologies and a deep history of writing technologies, Don Ihde brings his skills at doing variations to explore the role of human embodiment with technics. He argues that the new technologies both extend and transform our experience of embodiment. And the multistable trajectories of these new technics present possibilities often not yet explored.

Ranging from the experience of sound through language, music, religion, and silence, clear examples and illustrations, this text takes the reader into the important and often overlooked role of the auditory in human life.

Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations provides an introduction to the school of thought called postphenomenology and showcases projects at the cutting edge of this perspective. Postphenomenology presents a unique blend of insights from the philosophical traditions of phenomenology and American pragmatism, and applies them to studies of user relations to technologies. These studies provide deep descriptions of the ways technologies transform our abilities, augment our experience, and shape the world around us. This book proceeds with a preface by Don Ihde, postphenomenology's founder, and a detailed review of the main ideas of this perspective by the editors Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek. The body of this volume is composed of twelve postphenomenological essays which reflect the expansive range, detail-orientation, and interdisciplinarity of this school of thought. These essays confront a broad assortment of topics, both abstract and concrete. Abstract topics addressed include metaphysics, ethics, methodology, and analysis of the notions of selfhood, skill training, speed, and political activism. Just a few of the concrete topics studied include human-like interactive robots, ethics education, image interpretation in radiology, science fiction tropes, transportation history, wearable computing, and organ donation protocols for brain-dead bodies. The volume concludes with constructive critiques of postphenomenology by Andrew Feenberg, Diane Michelfelder, and Albert Borgmann, all figures whose work is relevant to postphenomenological projects.

..". an original, quirky, and illuminating collection of material concerning the relatively new and exciting field of technoscience studies.... T]he editors choice of multiple approaches to the work of four major figures is wholly suited to clarifying their unorthodox and consequently somewhat elusive philosophical positions." Robert Scharff

Although often absent from the considerations of philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists, the material dimension plays an important and even essential role in the practices of the sciences. Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality begins to redress this absence by bringing together four prominent figures who make technoscience, or science embodied in its technologies, a central theme of their work. Through lively personal interviews and substantive essays, the ideas of Andrew Pickering, Don Ihde, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour are brought to bear on the question of materiality in technoscience. The work of these theorists is then compared and critiqued in essays by colleagues. Chasing Technoscience is a ground-breaking, state-of-the-art look at current developments in technoscience."

We are facing an environmental crisis that some say is ushering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, one that threatens not only a great deal of life on the planet but also our understanding of who we are and our relation to the natural world. In the face of this crisis it has become clear that we need a more sustainable culture. In fact the language of sustainability has become pervasive in our culture and has deeply ingrained itself in our understanding of what living a good life would entail. "Sustainability," however, is a contested word, and it carries with it, often implicitly and unacknowledged, deep philosophical claims that are entangled with all kinds of assumptions and power relations, some of them very problematic. This book attempts to set this urgent goal of sustainability free from its more reductive and harmful interpretations and to thereby apply a more thoughtful environmental ethics to current and emerging technologies, particularly those involving reproduction and the harnessing of energy that dominate our elemental relations to sun and air, wind and water, earth and forest. The book is divided into 4 sections: (1) Sustainability: A Contested Term, (2) Sustainability and Renewable Technologies: Sun, Air, Wind, Water, (3) Sustainability and Design, and (4) Sustainability and Ethics. The first section sets the context for our studies and opens a space for thinking sustainability in a more thoughtful way than is often the case in contemporary discussions. The next two sections are the heart of our contribution to postphenomenology and technoscience, and the essays, here, turn to concrete examinations of particular technologies and questions of technological design in the light of our environmental crisis. The fourth section closes the book by drawing some more general implications for ethics from the intersection of the foregoing themes.

How should we understand the experience of encountering and interpreting images? What are their roles in science and medicine? How do they shape everyday life? Postphenomenology and Imaging: How to Read Technology brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to investigate these questions. The contributors make use of the "postphenomenological" philosophical perspective, applying its distinctive ideas to the study of how images are experienced. These essays offer both philosophical analysis of our conception of images and empirical studies of imaging practice. The contributors analyze concrete examples from a variety of fields of science and medicine, including radiology, neuroscience, cytology, physics, remote sensing, and space science. They also include examples of imaging in everyday life, from smartphone apps to animated GIFs. Edited by Samantha J. Fried and Robert Rosenberger, this collection includes an extensive "primer" chapter introducing and expanding the postphenomenological account of imaging, as well as a set of short pieces by "critical respondents": prominent scholars who may not self-identify as doing postphenomenology but whose adjacent work is illuminating.

Architecture and urban design are rarely considered as technology, but more frequently as a result of artistic creativity performed by gifted individuals. Postphenomenology and Architecture: Human Technology Relations in the Built Environment considers buildings and cities as technologies, from a postphenomenological perspective. This book argues that buildings and the furniture of cities-like bike lanes, benches, and bus stops-are inscribed in a conceptual framework of multistability, which is to say that they fulfill different purposes over time. Yet, there are qualities in the built environment that are long lasting and immutable, and transcend temporal functionality and ephemeral efficiency. The contributors show how different perceptions, practices, and interpretations are tangible and visible as we engage with these technologies. In addition, several of the chapters critically assess the influence of Martin Heidegger in modern philosophy of architecture., this book reads Heidegger in the perspective of architecture and urban design as technology, shedding light on what it means to build and dwell.

We are facing an environmental crisis that some say is ushering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, one that threatens not only a great deal of life on the planet but also our understanding of who we are and our relation to the natural world. In the face of this crisis it has become clear that we need a more sustainable culture. In fact the language of sustainability has become pervasive in our culture and has deeply ingrained itself in our understanding of what living a good life would entail. "Sustainability," however, is a contested word, and it carries with it, often implicitly and unacknowledged, deep philosophical claims that are entangled with all kinds of assumptions and power relations, some of them very problematic. This book attempts to set this urgent goal of sustainability free from its more reductive and harmful interpretations and to thereby apply a more thoughtful environmental ethics to current and emerging technologies, particularly those involving reproduction and the harnessing of energy that dominate our elemental relations to sun and air, wind and water, earth and forest. The book is divided into 4 sections: (1) Sustainability: A Contested Term, (2) Sustainability and Renewable Technologies: Sun, Air, Wind, Water, (3) Sustainability and Design, and (4) Sustainability and Ethics. The first section sets the context for our studies and opens a space for thinking sustainability in a more thoughtful way than is often the case in contemporary discussions. The next two sections are the heart of our contribution to postphenomenology and technoscience, and the essays, here, turn to concrete examinations of particular technologies and questions of technological design in the light of our environmental crisis. The forth section closes the book by drawing some more general implications for ethics from the intersection of the foregoing themes.

Acoustic Technics opens with the 19th century discovery of radiation which exceeds our human bodily perceptual experience, light beyond light, sound beyond sound and on into what today we call the electromagnetic spectrum. Claiming a second scientific revolution through imaging technologies and drawing from both instrumental sensory mediation and animal studies, Acoustic Technics follows listening in its new forms into music, echo-location, infra and ultra-sounds, medical diagnosis, surveillance, and subsurface and interplanetary domains. Synthesized sounds, sonification, in both esoteric and popular technologies such as earbuds, cellphones, television are analyzed from a postphenomenological perspective.

Digital Media: Human-Technology Connection examines what it is like to be alive in today's technologically textured world and showcases specific digital media technologies that make this kind of world possible. So much of human experience occurs through digital media that reflection on the process and proliferation of digital consumption has become necessary. This book takes on that task through an interdisciplinary array of sources including philosophy, media studies, film studies, media ecology, and philosophy of technology. When placed in the interpretive lenses of artifact, instrument, and tool, digital media can be studied in a uniquely different way that pushes the boundaries on production, distribution, and communication and alters the way humans and technology connect with each other and the world. In the first section, Raw Materials, Stacey O'Neal Irwin examines pertinent concepts like digital media, philosophy of technology, phenomenology and postphenomenology . In the second, Feeling the Weave, Irwin uses the postphenomenological framework, to explore empirical cases focused on deep analysis of screens, sound, photo manipulation, data-mining, aggregate news and self-tracking. Postphenomenological concepts like multistability, variational theory, microperception, macroperception, embodiment, technological mediation are explored. Digital Media demonstrates that digital media technologies and digital content are not neutral. They texture the world in multiple and varied ways that transform human abilities, augment experience, and pattern the world in significant ways.