Beyond the canon: Don Ihde and North American philosophy of technology

Abstract

The paper seeks to discuss the origin and development of North American philosophy of technology against the background of the phenomenological canon. More specifically, it traces the trajectory of Don Ihde’s thought, whose “Technics and Praxis” (1979) is usually cited as the first North American book specifically described as a philosophy of technology. While the phenomenological tradition provided a firm foundation for Ihde’s project, it has never acted as a rigid conceptual framework. Enriching his theoretical perspective with insights taken from the engagements with pragmatism, Ihde departed from Heideggerian-style traditional phenomenological analyses of technology in a number of ways, which this paper discusses. In most general terms, as I argue, Ihde has reversed the direction of Heideggerian inquiry that concentrates on how concrete tools and procedures disclose their underlying reality and thus moved towards the analysis of technologies in their particularities. This shift has allowed him to approach the multidimensionality of technologies as material cultures within a lifeworld and explore the different aspects of experience that result from human-technology relations as embedded in specific cultural and social dimensions.