Abstract

In this important and challenging contribution to the rapidly developing philosophy of technology Ihde proposes nothing less than a "systematic reformulation of a framework and set of questions regarding technology in its cultural setting". More specifically, he sees his task as twofold: to provide a perspective from which to view "the phenomenon of human-technology relations" and to offer a "framework or 'paradigm' for understanding". Rejecting the distanced, objective, or "bird's-eye" perspective as inappropriate for considering a subject-matter in which we are inextricably immersed, he adopts a perspective which he calls "navigational," one of finding bearings and directions within the fluid and dynamic situations of our technologically textured lifeworld. Remarking that such a perspective is "necessarily relativistic," he claims that, nonetheless, the employment of phenomenology and hermeneutical methods is able to yield a framework for understanding this lifeworld. Ihde makes these points and supports them in the "Introduction" and first four chapters of the book, which together comprise a general introduction to his overall approach, basic assumptions, and methodology. In the three chapters which follow he provides us with some results of his use of these methods in three "programs" which move, as he puts it, from a "phenomenology of technics," through "cultural hermeneutics," to a more speculative consideration of "lifeworld shapes." This movement is avowedly from a more focused and secure description of the essential structures of material human-technology relations to increasingly larger and less secure depictions of our technological culture and lifeworld. He then concludes the book with certain "stewardship recommendations for the inherited earth."