Abstract
This introduction to the special issue of Human Studies on postphenomenology outlines specific developments which have led to this style of phenomenology. Postphenomenology adapts aspects of pragmatism, including its anti-Cartesian program against early modern subject/object epistemology. Postphenomenology retains and emphasizes the use of phenomenological variations as an analytic tool, and in practice postphenomenology takes what is commonly now called “an empirical turn,” which deeply analyzes case studies or concrete issues under its purview.
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Notes
I outlined a program incorporating pragmatism and phenomenology in three papers given at the Husserl Circle meetings of 2003, 2005 and 2007. “Husserl’s Galileo needed a Telescope” (2003a) argues that, contrary to Husserl’s claim in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, that science “forgets” the lifeworld, I argued that science’s use of instrumentation necessarily situates its instrument practice in the lifeworld. “Pragmatism + Phenomenology + Postphenomenology” (2005) argued that pragmatism’s attack upon early modern epistemology avoids the usual negative critiques of phenomenology as “subjectivist,” “anti-science,” and as “foundationalist.” And “Consciousness Revisited: Dewey and Husserl” (2007b) examines the differences ascribed to “consciousness” by Dewey and Husserl. Dewey regards any attempt to divorce consciousness from its social and natural base to be a distorting falsification of experience, whereas Husserl’s “reductions” must perform as a detour if a lifeworld is to be discovered.
Another recent paper on postphenomenology is “Postphenomenology—Again?,” which was a keynote address for a conference on postphenomenology at Kent State University. The published form is available from the Aarhus University, Denmark, STS website (2003b).
Mitcham, the foremost historian of the philosophy of technology, has one extensive discussion of my pragmatism in his Thinking Through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy (1994) and a second extensive discussion in “From Phenomenology to Pragmatism: Using Technology as an Instrument” (2006, pp. 21–36). Larry Hickman was a recent critic on a session on Postphenomenology at the 2007 Society for Philosophy and Technology meeting, again following the phenomenology–pragmatism theme; this session has been submitted to Techne.
The technoscience research roasts have included philosophers of science Joseph Rouse (Wesleyan) and Peter Galison (Harvard); philosophers of technology Albert Borgmann (U-Montana), Hubert Dreyfus (UC-Berkeley), Andrew Feenberg (Simon Fraser), Langdon Winner (RPI); sociologists of science Andrew Pickering (U-Illinois), Trevor Pinch (Cornell), Harry Collins (Cardiff); and feminist science studies researchers, Donna Haraway (UC-Santa Cruz), Evelyn Fox-Keller (MIT), Sandra Harding (UC-UCLA).
The contemporary style of research affords more than the usual opportunities for doctoral students to network and become productive during their dissertation process. In the case of Evan Selinger, this has included co-editing two books with his mentors (Selinger 2003 and 2006). To date, all Ph.Ds. doing technoscience concentrations have pre-published chapters or articles related to their research projects.
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Ihde, D. Introduction: Postphenomenological Research. Hum Stud 31, 1–9 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9077-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9077-2