Reimagining Philosophy and Technology, Reinventing Ihde

256 Pages·2020·3.441 MB·English

by  Glen Miller, Ashley Shew

Philosophy of Engineering and Technology
Glen Miller
Ashley Shew  Editors
Reimagining
Philosophy and
Technology,
Reinventing Ihde
Philosophy of Engineering and Technology
Volume 33
Editor-in-Chief
Pieter E. Vermaas, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Editors
Darryl Cressman, Maastricht University, The Netherlands
Neelke Doorn, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Byron Newberry, Baylor University, U.S.A
Editorial advisory board
Philip Brey, Twente University, The Netherlands
Louis Bucciarelli, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S.A
Michael Davis, Illinois Institute of Technology, U.S.A
Paul Durbin, University of Delaware, U.S.A
Andrew Feenberg, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Luciano Floridi, University of Hertfordshire & University of Oxford, UK
Jun Fudano, Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Japan
Craig Hanks, Texas State University, U.S.A
Sven Ove Hansson, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Vincent  F.  Hendricks, University of Copenhagen, Denmark & Columbia
University, U.S.A
Don Ihde, Stony Brook University, U.S.A
Billy V. Koen, University of Texas, U.S.A
Peter Kroes, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Sylvain Lavelle, ICAM-Polytechnicum, France
Michael Lynch, Cornell University, U.S.A
Anthonie Meijers, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Sir Duncan Michael, Ove Arup Foundation, UK
Carl Mitcham, Colorado School of Mines, U.S.A
Helen Nissenbaum, New York University, U.S.A
Alfred Nordmann, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Joseph Pitt, Virginia Tech, U.S.A
Ibo van de Poel, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Daniel Sarewitz, Arizona State University, U.S.A
Jon A. Schmidt, Burns & McDonnell, U.S.A
Peter Simons, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Jeroen van den Hoven, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
John Weckert, Charles Sturt University, Australia
The Philosophy of Engineering and Technology book series provides the
multifaceted and rapidly growing discipline of philosophy of technology with a
central overarching and integrative platform. Specifically it publishes edited
volumes and monographs in: the phenomenology, anthropology and socio-politics
of technology and engineering the emergent fields of the ontology and epistemology
of artifacts, design, knowledge bases, and instrumentation engineering ethics and
the ethics of specific technologies ranging from nuclear technologies to the
converging nano-, bio-, information and cognitive technologies written from
philosophical and practitioners’ perspectives and authored by philosophers and
practitioners. The series also welcomes proposals that bring these fields together or
advance philosophy of engineering and technology in other integrative ways.
Proposals should include: A short synopsis of the work or the introduction chapter.
The proposed Table of Contents The CV of the lead author(s). If available: one
sample chapter. We aim to make a first decision within 1 month of submission. In
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More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8657
Glen Miller • Ashley Shew
Editors
Reimagining Philosophy
and Technology, Reinventing
Ihde
Editors
Glen Miller Ashley Shew
Department of Philosophy Department of Science, Technology,
Texas A&M University and Society
College Station, TX, USA Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA, USA
ISSN 1879-7202 ISSN 1879-7210 (electronic)
Philosophy of Engineering and Technology
ISBN 978-3-030-35966-9 ISBN 978-3-030-35967-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35967-6
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
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Preface
Before explaining the rationale for this collection of essays about the work of Don
Ihde, we thank the contributors who have given us the privilege of their time and the
pleasure of their work. Their time and effort have brought together an exciting col-
lection that examines different facets of postphenomenology, its impact, material
hermeneutics, media and sensory technologies, and the technological bent of politi-
cal and social life. We are proud to have such wonderful contributors’ work to share
with you in this volume. Thank you, Trish Glazebrook, Paul Thompson, Bob
Scharff, Yuk Hui, Lenore Langsdorf, Peter-Paul Verbeek, Galit Wellner, Ingrid
Richardson, Carl Mitcham, Zhang Kang, and Don Ihde.
Ihde’s work is influential in philosophy of technology, and one cannot engage in
the field without coming into contact with his work in some way. His work has
become focal, to use a visual metaphor that he might say comes with some risk, in
the practice of philosophizing about technology; it serves as a keystone for people
working between phenomenology, philosophy of science, philosophy of technol-
ogy, and science and technology studies and is easily explored and enmeshed with
other theoretical approaches.
This book was commissioned by Springer to coincide with the Society for
Philosophy and Technology’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the first such award
given by the Society in its 35-year history and awarded to Don Ihde in 2017. We are
unusual editors for a volume on Ihde: neither of us is a former student of Ihde nor
do we work in research groups dedicated to postphenomenology. We come to this
volume as philosophers of technology who appreciate the tradition that Ihde has
created within our field. Our collection of essays differs from previous volumes on
his work: we aim for a reinvention of Ihde. We did this by inviting some authors
who commonly contribute to postphenomenological discourse as well as others
from outside of these circles. We asked for articles that would both plumb the depths
and deepen and explore the intersections of postphenomenology to other theories
and how it has been taken up in different cultures in order to reinterpret and reimag-
ine his work in new contexts and alongside other theoretical frames.
Our authors have delivered chapters that are carefully researched and incisive,
and we are proud to share this collection that presents a different entry to Ihde’s
v
vi Preface
work than previous festschrifts and edited volumes. We hope this volume serves as
an entry point for scholars outside the postphenomenological tradition and those
from other disciplines. We seek to reimagine Ihde’s work in three sections: (1)
plumbing its origins, both pragmatist and phenomenological; then turning to (2) the
theoretical intermingling, deepening, and expanding that his work invites; and
finally (3) looking at new investigations using Ihde’s work and postphenomenology.
These three sections are, as it were, sandwiched between Ihde’s works, old and new.
We are excited to share Don Ihde’s 1973 introduction to Sense and Significance,
reprinted for the first time. The volume concludes with Ihde’s own words, a short
new chapter from Don Ihde, “Hawk,” where he considers his work at its own inter-
play with feminist STS engagements and reflects on his youthful observations of
vision and predation. Many thanks to Don for his cooperation with this volume and
his permission to share this work.
We again thank our authors for their contributions (and for what we have learned
from them through this project) and hope the readers can see the many facets
through which and by which they might reimagine the work of Don Ihde in different
contexts, applied to different technologies, alongside different theories, and in dif-
ferent disciplines. We also would like to thank Pieter Vermaas, series editor for
Springer’s POET series, for his support and guidance through this project, as well
as our incredible indexer Laura Shelley, and Virginia Tech Ph.D. students, Jack Leff
and Ariel Ludwig, for their editorial assistance in preparing this volume.
Blacksburg, VA, USA Ashley Shew
College Station, TX, USA Glen Miller
Contents
1 Editors’ Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Glen Miller and Ashley Shew
Part I P lumbing Phenomenological and Pragmatist Origins
2 Introduction to Sense and Significance Reprint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Don Ihde
3 Ihde’s Revolutions: From Paris to Science, Rock,
and Radical Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Trish Glazebrook
4 Ihde’s Pragmatism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Paul B. Thompson
5 Postphenomenology, a Technology with a Shelf-Life?
Ihde’s Move from Husserl toward Dewey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Robert C. Scharff
6 For a Cosmotechnical Event: In Honor of Don Ihde
and Bernard Stiegler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Yuk Hui
Part II E xtending Concepts and Theories
7 The Multiplicity of Multistabilities: Turning Multistability
into a Multistable Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Galit Wellner
8 Relational Ethics: The Primacy of Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Lenore Langsdorf
9 Politicizing Postphenomenology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Peter-Paul Verbeek
vii
viii Contents
Part III Inventing New Connections
10 Postphenomenology, Ethnography, and the Sensory
Intimacy of Mobile Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Ingrid Richardson
11 Designing and Constructing the (Life)World: Phenomenology
and Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
Glen Miller and Carl Mitcham
12 Let Things Speak: Don Ihde’s Thought and Philosophy
of Technology in China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Zhang Kang
13 Hawk: Predatory Vision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
Don Ihde
Appendix: A Chronological Listing of Don Ihde’s Books
and Major Volumes on His Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
Chapter 1
Editors’ Introduction
Glen Miller and Ashley Shew
Don Ihde’s voice has been influential in philosophy of technology for more than
four decades. Credited with writing the first monograph on philosophy and technol-
ogy in English, Technics and Praxis, in 1979, Ihde has published 25 books and
numerous articles over the course of his fifty-year career. In addition to his volumi-
nous output, a great deal has been written about his work, notably Evan Selinger’s
edited volume Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde (2006), Jan
Kyrre Berg Friis and Robert P. Crease’s Technoscience and Postphenomenology:
The Manhattan Papers (2015), and a special issue of Techne: Research in Philosophy
and Technology dedicated to “Postphenomenology: Historical and Contemporary
Currents” (2008), also edited by Evan Selinger. Lexington Press’s book series
devoted to volumes on postphenomenology, one of his signature contributions, and
philosophy of technology, has published 11 books as of January 2019. Many of
Ihde’s graduate students are productive and innovative thinkers forging new intel-
lectual projects, and many are active in the Society for Philosophy and Technology
(SPT). In recognition of these contributions, among others, Ihde was the recipient
of the first SPT Lifetime Achievement Award, which he received in Darmstadt,
Germany in 2017.
This volume, proposed to us in the wake of this award by Pieter Vermaas, arose
in recognition that, in spite of all that had already been written, more is needed. One,
a new generation of scholars who have not traveled along with Ihde over the course
of the last fifty years is thinking through problems of philosophy and technology.
This volume is designed to introduce his work to these scholars who come from a
G. Miller (*)
Department of Philosophy, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
A. Shew
Department of Science, Technology, and Society, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1
G. Miller, A. Shew (eds.), Reimagining Philosophy and Technology, Reinventing
Ihde, Philosophy of Engineering and Technology 33,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35967-6_1