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Don Ihde: Heidegger’s technologies: Postphenomenological perspectives

Fordham University Press, New York, 2010, 155 pp, ISBN-13: 978-0823233762 US $60.00(cloth), ISBN-13: 978-0823233779, US $22.00 (paper)

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Notes

  1. Such limitations have not gone unnoticed by other postphenomenologists, of course. See, e.g., Selinger (2008). A more well-rounded history would start with Mitcham (1994, pp. 19–93), then trace simultaneously and comparatively the philosophical trajectories of Ihde and, say, Andrew Feenberg, starting with Feenberg (2006, pp. 175–210); and more recently, Feenberg (2010), at the same time reading both thinkers against the background of a good “continental” transformation of traditional philosophy of science, from its obsessive preoccupation with scientific method to a wider focus on science as a human practice—as in, e.g., Rouse (1987, 1996). For contrast, one might also consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on line, to see how analytic philosophers imagine that technology is just another topic to which they can apply the standard tools and practices of the Anglo-American mainstream. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/.

  2. See especially, Scharff (2006, pp. 131–144); and Ihde (2006, pp. 267–290). [In the interests of full disclosure, I am one of the contributors to the latter volume, and I am characterized in Ihde’s preface to the volume under review as “the loyal opposition to my increasingly critical take on Heidegger” (xii)].

  3. Woessner (2011, pp. 2–3, passim).

  4. Overheard at an APA meeting in 1990, this warning from a program committee member: “We must never let philosophy of science become science studies.” The warning was, of course, 10–15 years too late.

  5. HT 65–71. Ihde says little here except in passing about his sustained interest in visual technologies both generally and in contemporary science (where their very existence stands as an implicit refutation of pretty much everything traditional philosophy of science has to say about scientific experimentation), but I think it is important to note that books like Ihde (1991, 1998) could not have been written without the survival of Ihde’s initial interpretation of SZ’s Division One.

  6. At one point, Ihde presents a “crypto-Heideggerian” description of how the infamous Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island “gathers the Fourfold” just as much as any temple. The point, he asserts, is that in his implicit glorification of the Greek temple as displaying an authentic sort of gathering, Heidegger hides what Langdon Winner calls the “politics of the artifact,” whereas “we” can make today’s accounts much more powerful by “adding back” the politics (81–83). But Ihde misses his critics’ point. Adding something back is what one does after having already prioritized something else. Why don’t Ihde’s accounts ever start with the political? Is this really just a matter of keeping it simple?

References

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Correspondence to Robert C. Scharff.

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Scharff, R.C. Don Ihde: Heidegger’s technologies: Postphenomenological perspectives. Cont Philos Rev 45, 297–306 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-012-9215-z

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