Thinker · TH-0129
Don Ihde
Don Ihde was an American philosopher who taught for most of his career at Stony Brook University. Building on Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, he…
Don Ihde was an American philosopher who taught for most of his career at Stony Brook University. Building on Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, he developed 'postphenomenology', a way of studying how technologies mediate human experience of the world. His typology of human–technology relations has become a standard framework in the philosophy of technology and science and technology studies.
Key ideas
- Technologies mediate how the world appears to us; they are not neutral tools.
- Human–technology relations include embodiment, hermeneutic, alterity and background relations.
- Every technological mediation amplifies some features of experience and reduces others.
- Phenomenology must be empirically informed and attentive to particular technologies.
Major works
- Listening and Voice (1976)
- Technics and Praxis (1979)
- Technology and the Lifeworld (1990)
- Postphenomenology (1993)
In the conversation
On the map
The questions in The Coordinates of Thought where Don Ihde takes a place.
- 6.16 Philosophy of Technology Do we shape our tools, or do they shape us?