Scharff’s study of Heidegger’s earlier lectures and their debt to Dilthey’s phenomenology allow one to recognize the Diltheyan influences that pervade Being and Time, undistracted by Husserl’s super-Cartesianism.

Many philosophers of science and technology who see themselves as coming “after” Husserl also claim that their phenomenology is hermeneutical. Yet they neither practice the same sort of phenomenology, nor do they all have the same understanding of hermeneutics. Moreover, their differences often seem to be more a function of different pre-selected substantive commitments—say, to take a “material” turn or to be resolutely “empirical”—than the product of any serious effort to clarify what it is be hermeneutical. In this essay, after (...) some discussion of Dilthey’s reception among post-Husserlians (especially Patrick Heelan and Don Ihde), I consider how aspiring hermeneuts might make their own pre-possession of substantive and methodological commitments a hermeneutical topic. This is, of course, is not just a scholarly question of how post-Husserlian phenomenologists might make themselves more phenomenological. Without thoughtful self-awareness of these commitments, one’s assumptions about the use of technology, design, the place of science in the larger culture and in relation to conceptions of human flourishing—all of these assumptions are likely to pass through into technoscientific practice with insufficient critical consideration. (shrink)

Questions about what experts need to know to facilitate their collaboration in interdisciplinary situations are usually answered with proposals concerning the technical methods, epistemic ground rules, and explanatory theories that one applies “across” disciplines, just as such methods, rules, and theories are applied “within” a discipline. However, phenomenology offers something better. Instead of following the traditional route of looking for general conditions that apply to collaborative practice, phenomenology turns to what actually happens in collaborative experience and shows that success is (...) not just a function of applied procedures, even when they are in play. Instead, individual experts seem to rediscover their ability to keep their thoughts and concepts looser, more informal, and open-endedly responsive to the situation—just as they did when they first began to shape unfamiliar circumstances into a regionally shared practice—only now with potentially interdisciplinary circumstances as their experienced phenomenon. By cultivating an awareness of how it is with life prior to its being variously studied, exploited, or harnessed to explanatory theories and essentialist ideas, they remain open to becoming expert collaborators, just as they are already regional experts. An example of this process is given from the authors’ recent field research. (shrink)

Phenomenologists usually insist that their approach involves going “back” to and “starting” with technoscientific experience—that is, returning to the actual existing or living through of technoscientific life—after centuries of privileging the analysis of how things are “objectively” known and denigrating accounts of how they are “subjectively” lived with. But then who says this and how is this understood? “Who” is really a phenomenologist, when so many diverse thinkers claim the title? This paper considers some of the reasons why this is (...) such a difficult question and argues that it is wrong to look for The Answer to it. (shrink)

Questions about what experts need to know to facilitate their collaboration in interdisciplinary situations are usually answered with proposals concerning the technical methods, epistemic ground rules, and explanatory theories that one applies “across” disciplines, just as such methods, rules, and theories are applied “within” a discipline. However, phenomenology offers something better. Instead of following the traditional route of looking for general conditions that apply to collaborative practice, phenomenology turns to what actually happens in collaborative experience and shows that success is (...) not just a function of applied procedures, even when they are in play. Instead, individual experts seem to rediscover their ability to keep their thoughts and concepts looser, more informal, and open-endedly responsive to the situation—just as they did when they first began to shape unfamiliar circumstances into a regionally shared practice—only now with potentially interdisciplinary circumstances as their experienced phenomenon. By cultivating an awareness of how it is with life prior to its being variously studied, exploited, or harnessed to explanatory theories and essentialist ideas, they remain open to becoming expert collaborators, just as they are already regional experts. An example of this process is given from the authors’ recent field research. (shrink)

Trish Glazebrook and Dana Belu both think I spend too much time criticizing the Cartesianism that both empirical and transcendental philosophies of technology quite obviously oppose. They argue that I would have been better off if I had instead considered how these two philosophies “converge on the thesis of crisis” in technoscientific life and/or “made wider use of Feenberg’s work”. While I am sympathetic to both Glazebrook’s thesis and Feenberg’s work, I argue that their recommendations raise precisely the “pre-philosophical” issue (...) I discuss in my paper. The issue, addressed directly by both Nietzsche and the young Heidegger, is how such recommendations can be carried forward as productive, life-driven articulations of our current needs in technoscientific times and not just become two more in a long string of chosen “turns” in a history of philosophical “positions.”. (shrink)

I approach the idea of empirical turns and transcendental theories indirectly. I do not start “post-“ or “neg-” anything; instead I begin pre-philosophically—that is, before everyone has a position and opposes other positions—with Heidegger’s “preparatory hermeneutical” question: As whom and with what concerns do empirically or transcendentally minded philosophers of technology respond to their experience of technoscientific life? For example, in his second Untimely Meditation, Nietzsche identifies his concern as one of “taking advantage” of historical knowledge “for life,” that is, (...) he understands himself to be motivated by a life-driven, not scientific “need.” But how are “needs” in Nietzsche’s sense to be distinguished? The question leads straight to Heidegger’s idea of a hermeneutics that comes “before philosophy”—a “hermeneutics of facticity” that considers “what goes on in [i.e., motivates] a philosophy before it becomes what it is”? I argue that once Nietzsche’s notion of need is expanded and deepened in Heidegger’s direction, we gain some clarity about how to appropriate any information “for life,” whether it is science-based, culturally operative, or phenomenological. I then consider Ihde, Stiegler, and the future prospects of empirical turns and transcendental theories in light of this idea. (shrink)