Critical Ihde

This critical reader brings together both essential as well as under-recognized writings from the work of Don Ihde, one of the most important contemporary thinkers on technology and human experience.

Don Ihde is one of the world's foremost thinkers on the place of technologies in our lives. Over the course of a long career, he has built a unique and useful perspective by expanding on phenomenological and American pragmatist philosophy and has developed wide-ranging insights and conceptual tools for describing the details of our experience across the various areas of human activity, including scientific practice, anthropological history, computer interface, design, art history, and the technologies of everyday life. The Critical Ihde brings together many of Ihde's most influential writings, as well as a number of under-recognized gems. Across these works are examples of his influential contributions to the phenomenology of human auditory and visual experience, his foundational work on the phenomenology of technology, and his thoughts on the technologies of scientific practice, including laboratory and medical imaging. Further, these chapters reveal the development of "postphenomenology," Ihde's original philosophical perspective, one that continues to flourish today across the work of a growing interdisciplinary and international collective of scholars.

Don Ihde is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His many books include Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures; Consequences of Phenomenology; and Experimental Phenomenology, 2nd edition: Multistabilities (all published by SUNY Press). Robert Rosenberger is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, President-Elect of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, and the author of Callous Objects: Designs Against the Homeless.