Don Ihde is a philosopher of science and technology

Philosophy of technology

The philosophy of technology is a philosophical field dedicated to studying the nature of technology and its social effects.- History :Considered under the rubric of the Greek term techne , the philosophy of technology goes to the very roots of Western philosophy.* In his Republic, Plato sees...

, and a post-phenomenologist. In 1979 he wrote what is often identified as the first North American work on philosophy of technology, Technics and Praxis. Ihde is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook

State University of New York at Stony Brook

The State University of New York at Stony Brook, also known as Stony Brook University, is a public research university located in Stony Brook, New York, on the North Shore of Long Island, about east of Manhattan....

. Ihde is the author of thirteen original books and the editor of many others. Recent examples include Chasing Technoscience (2003), edited with Evan Selinger; Bodies in Technology (2002); Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science (1998); and Postphenomenology (1993). Ihde lectures and gives seminars internationally and some of his books and articles have appeared in a dozen languages. He is currently working on Imaging Technologies: Plato Upside Down.

Role of bodies in cyberspace

Ihde's Bodies in Technology spells out the original exploration of the ways cyberspace affects the human experience. The book is useful to those research scholars who are exploring the role of bodies in the virtual reality. The book is the study of embodiment in cyberspace, an ideal book also related to human-computer interaction (HCI); Ihde explores the meaning of bodies in technology, that how the sense of our bodies and our orientation in the world is affected by various form of information technologies. The research of Ihde is important to humanist scholars because it provokes a new approach to study how to use and integrate computers and technologies for the humanity. In a recent paper, "Was Heidegger prescient concerning Technoscience?", Ihde re-examines Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...

's philosophy of science with a reappraisal of what was innovative, and what remained archaic. Heidegger then is read against the background of the "new" approaches to science in science studies, and against the background of the scientific revolutions which have occurred since the mid-20th century.

Technoscience Research Seminar

Ihde is the Director of the Technoscience Research Group in the Philosophy Department. He directs an ongoing graduate and post-graduate research seminar which brings notable scholars for "roasts," which reads only living authors.

The study of technoscience

Technoscience

Technoscience is a concept widely used in the interdisciplinary community of science and technology studies to designate the technological and social context of science...

 examines cutting-edge work in the fields of the philosophies of science and technology, and science studies; it also emphasizes the roles of our material cultures and expertise.

The seminar participants read only living authors (such as Donna Haraway

Donna Haraway

Donna J. Haraway is currently a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States...

, Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour is a French sociologist of science and anthropologist and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies...

, Ian Hacking

Ian Hacking

Ian Hacking, CC, FRSC, FBA is a Canadian philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of science.- Life and works :...

, Andrew Pickering

Andrew Pickering

Andrew Pickering is a sociologist, philosopher and historian of science at the University of Exeter. He was a professor of sociology and a director of science and technology studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 2007. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of...

, Sandra Harding

Sandra Harding

Sandra G. Harding is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology and philosophy of science.She has contributed to standpoint theory and to the multicultural study of science...

, etc.) and occasionally Ihde has invited other authors to the seminar on technoscience for a "roast" (roastees have included Peter Galison

Peter Galison

Peter Louis Galison is the Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and Physics at Harvard University.Galison received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in both Physics and the History of Science in 1983. His publications include Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics ...

, Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley....

, Albert Borgmann

Albert Borgmann

Albert Borgmann is an American philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of technology. He was born in Freiburg, Germany, and is a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana.-Philosophy:...

, Andrew Feenberg

Andrew Feenberg

Andrew Feenberg holds the Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His main interests are philosophy of technology, continental philosophy, critique of technology and science and technology studies...

, and Harry Collins

Harry Collins

Harry Collins is a British professor at the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. While at the University of Bath Professor Collins developed the Bath School approach to the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge...

). The seminar on technoscience has already resulted in a number of publications related to its activities and participants regularly present research results at major international conferences (Aarhus, Denmark; Vienna, Austria; CERN, Switzerland, etc.).

Expanding Hermeneutics

On the issues of Hermeneutics from the Phenomenological Perspective Ihde examines what might he called a "material hermeneutics," which characterizes much practice within the domains of technoscience. Ihde rejects the vestigial Diltheyan

Wilhelm Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist and hermeneutic philosopher, who held Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of...

division between the humanistic and natural sciences and argues that certain types of critical interpretation, broadly hermeneutic, characterize both sets of disciplines. Ihde examines what he calls a style of interpretation based in material practices relating to imaging technologies which have given rise to the visual hermeneutics in technoscience studies. Veszprém, 1993, it was at that meeting that Ihde first proposed the notion of Expanding hermeneutics.

Material Hermeneutics

Abstract of Ihde's Sheffield paper on Material Hermeneutics, 2006:

A material hermeneutics is a hermeneutics which "gives things voices where there had been silence, and brings to sight that which was invisible." Such a hermeneutics in natural science can best be illustrated by its imaging practices. The objects of this visual hermeneutics were not texts nor linguistic phenomena, but things which came into vision through instrumental magnifications, allowing perception to go where it had not gone before. One could also say that a visual hermeneutics is a perceptual hermeneutics with a perception which while including texts, goes beyond texts. This local history gives but a small glimpse of the directions Ihde tried to outline in Expanding Hermeneutics. Such material hermeneutics are doubly material—first, in the sense that the objects being investigated are material entities—paramecia, extra-geocentric satellites, and eventually even the chemical make-up of the stars—but also it is material in the sense that the instruments being used to 'bring close' such phenomena are also material entities, technologies, by which and through which the natural sciences are embodied.

In Expanding Hermeneutics I outlined both a weak program of hermeneutics in natural science, that is, a program of actual and extant practices which can best be understood as hermeneutic practices, and a strong program which was more prescriptive, suggesting ways to radicalize a material hermeneutics. In part the trajectory of expanding hermeneutics comes from much that I have learned from the new versions of interdisciplinary "science studies," which include the strands of the new sociologies of science, feminist critiques of science, and the varieties of philosophy of science which emphasize praxis, instruments, and laboratories over sheer theory production, all under which he now title "technoscience studies." I developed a sensitivity to the ways in which our instruments, technologies operate in hermeneutic ways.

Selected works

• Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction (1977)
• Technics and Praxis (1979)
• Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (1990)
• Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction (1993)

External links

• Ihde's homepage at Stony Brook University.
• Ihde writes on "Expanding Hermeneutics".
• Ihde discusses postphenomenology.
• Interview with Don Ihde, May 2003.
• Interview (audio) with Ihde, March 2006.
• A festschrift on Ihde.
• Ihde on Listening and Voice. Phenomenologies of Sound.