Synopses & Reviews
"... Dr. Ihde brings an enlightening and deeply humanistic perspective to major technological developments, both past and present." --Science Books and Films
"Don Ihde is a pleasure to read.... The material is full of nice suggestions and details, empirical materials, fun variations which engage the reader in the work... the overall points almost sneak up on you, they are so gently and gradually offered." --John Compton
"A sophisticated celebration of cultural diversity and of its enabling technologies.... perhaps the best single volume relating the philosophical tradition to the broad issues raised by contemporary technologies." --Choice
"... important and challenging... " --Review of Metaphysics
"... a range of rich historical, cultural, philosophical, and psychological insights, woven together in an intriguing and clear exposition... The book is really a pleasure to read, for its style, immense learning and sanity." --Teaching Philosophy
The role of tools and instruments in our relation to the earth and the ways in which technologies are culturally embedded provide the foci of this thought-provoking book.
Synopsis
"A sophisticated celebration of cultural diversity and of its enabling technologies. . . . perhaps the best single volume relating the philosophical tradition to the broad issues raised by contemporary technologies." -Choice
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Entry Level
1. From Garden to Earth
2. Technology and the Lifeworld
3. Lifeworld: Praxis and Perception
Heidegger's Hammer
Husserl's Galileo
Merleau-Ponty's Father
4. Adam and Galileo
Lifeworld Technics: Time Perception
Lifeworld Technics: Space Perception
Artifacts and Technofacts
5. Program One: A Phenomenology of Technics
Technics Embodied
Hermeneutic Technics
Alterity Relations
Background Relations
Horizontal Phenomena
Eve and the Spaceship
Dreams of Totalization
6. Program Two: Cultural Hermeneutics
Technology Transfer: Technologies as Cultural Instruments
Neocolonialism as the Failure of Tranfer
"Controlling" Technology
Techology-Culture Embeddedness as Multistable
The Varieties of Technological Experience
Adam and Eve's Culinary Revolution
7. Program Three: Lifeworld Shapes
Pluriculturality
Decisional Burden
Materializing the Conceptual
Oscillatory Phenomena
8. Epilogue: The Earth Inherited
Stwardship Recommendations for the Inherited Earth
To Conserve the Earth
Demythologizing (and Demasculinizing)
Technological Science
Galileo in the Kitchen
Concluding Postscript on Technological Science
Index