Books in the Postphenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology series

Why does the announcement of a new cellphone model ignite excitement and passion? Why do most people return home when they forget their cellphones, while only few would return for their wallets? How did the cellphone technology become so dominant for many of us? This book offers an analysis of the historical evolution and of the meanings of this technology in the lives of billions of people. The book offers a unique point of view on the cellphone that merges genealogical analysis of its development since the 1990s and philosophical insights into a coherent analytical framework. With new concepts like histories of the future and memory prosthesis, the book aims to explain the excitement arising from new model announcements and the ever-growing dependency on the cellphone through the framing of these experiences in wide philosophical contexts. It is the first philosophical analysis of the important roles the cellphone plays in contemporary everydayness.

This book argues that our technological era is the most radical form of anarchism we have ever experienced. People are not only removing the role of the expert as a mediator, but also replacing the role of a transcendent god with an omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent technological entity that is totally immanent.

This collection of essays, written by an international group of scholars, provides a more critical and creative contemporary practice of "sustainability." The book sets this practice free from its reductive interpretations and applies a more thoughtful environmental ethics to the current and emerging technologies that dominate our lives.

Science is highly dependent on the technologies needed to observe scientific objects. In How Scientific Instruments Speak, Bas de Boer develops a philosophical account of instruments in scientific practice, focusing on the cognitive neurosciences. He argues for an understanding of scientific instruments as mediating technology.

This edited collection provides insight into understanding architecture and urban design as technology. In order to understand how and why we live in built environments, we are in need of a conceptual framework that takes into account what role architecture as technology plays in our being and becoming in the world.

Introduced in 1894 as a treatment for a deadly childhood disease, the diphtheria serum stands as a milestone in pharmaceutical history. Diphtheria Serum as a Technological Object: A Philosophical Analysis of Serotherapy in France 1894-1900 considers the production and use of this serum in France, analyzing the drug in terms of a technological object. To do this, Jonathan Simon draws on the philosophy of technology, exploring the application of this approach to medical drugs and suggesting how such an analysis can in turn contribute to this domain of philosophy. Starting with the manufacture of the serum from horses' blood, Simon then considers the processes involved in transforming the blood serum into a legal medical drug and establishing its efficacy as a treatment against diphtheria. The book looks at the place the drug assumed in French society at the time, as well as the legal and political implications of its manufacture and use. All these elements are deployed to characterize a specifically French serum, as the author argues that the constitution of the drug in its full sense is not only technical but also social, political, and legal. Considering the serum as technological object facilitates a philosophical reflection on the nature of medical drugs in general by means of a thorough analysis of this particular historical example. The insights offered in this book will be of interest to students and scholars working on the philosophy of technology, particularly the medical sciences, as well as to historians of medicine, particularly those interested in the history of pharmacy.

This edited collection explores the distinctive contributions of postphenomenological perspectives toward imaging in science, medicine, and everyday life. With its original empirical investigations of imaging across a variety of fields, the book expands our conceptual framework for understanding images.

This volume explores the arrangement of science, technology, society, and education. Using the concept of 'feedback loop', this book processes subjects dear to the work of Joseph C. Pitt: technology as humanity at work, pragmatism, Sicilian realism, pragmatist pedagogy, instrumentation in science, and more.

This book presents a new and radical interpretation of some of Martin Heidegger's most influential texts. The unfamiliar interpretations all seek to question and unframe hasty assessments of the concepts and constellations of thoughts surrounding Heidegger's notion of modern technology.

This volume contributes to postphenomenological research into human-technology relations with essays reflecting on methodological issues through empirical studies of education, digital media, biohacking, health, robotics, and skateboarding. This work provides new perspectives that call for a comprehensive postphenomenological research methodology.

Friis and Crease illustrate the diversity of content and styles in postphenomenology, a burgeoning field that has attracted attention among scholars engaged in technology studies. Contributors to this edited collection seek to analyze, clarify, and develop postphenomenological language and concepts, expand the work of Don Ihde, the field's founder, and delve into areas that Ihde never tackled.

Acoustic Technics, aware that digital and computer embedded technologies produce data that today can be transformed into acoustic images, notes the transformations these phenomena imply for a diverse set of practices, such as music, communication, medical diagnosis, and scientific knowledge.

In this book, Ingemar Nordin analyzes how not only scientific but also non-scientific knowledge is to be used in practice when establishing a rational technological and medical development.

Postphenomenology and Media: Essays on Human-Media-World Relations explores our contemporary media landscape from the unique perspective of postphenomenology. This volume for the first time puts the central concepts of postphenomenology to work for the specific analysis of new, digital media-thus delivering a wholly innovative take on their study.

Weiss, Propen, and Reid gather a diverse group of scholars to analyze the growing obsolescence of the human-object dichotomy in today's world. In doing so, Radical Interface brings together diverse disciplines to foster a dialog on significant technological issues pertinent to philosophy, rhetoric, aesthetics, and science.

Digital Media: Human-Technology Connection examines what it is like to be alive in today's technologically textured world and showcases specific digital media technologies that makes this kind of world possible. So much of human experience occurs through digital media that it is time to pause and consider the process and proliferation of digital consumption and humanity's role in it through an interdisciplinary array of sources from philosophy, media studies, film studies, media ecology and philosophy of technology. When placed in the interpretive lens of artifact, instrument, and tool, digital media can be studied in a uniquely different way, as a kind of technology that pushes the boundaries on production, distribution and communication and alters the way humans and technology connect with each other and the world. The book is divided into two sections to provide overarching definitions and case study specifics. Section one, Raw Materials, examines pertinent concepts like digital media, philosophy of technology, phenomenology and postphenomenology by author Stacey O Irwin. In Section Two, Feeling the Weave, Irwin uses conversations with digital media users and other written materials along with the postphenomenological framework to explore nine empirical cases that focus on deep analysis of screens, sound, photo manipulation, data-mining, aggregate news and self-tracking. Postphenomenological concepts like multistability, variational theory, microperception, macroperception, embodiment, technological mediation, and culture figure prominently in the investigation. The aim of the book is to recognize that digital media technologies and the content it creates and proliferates are not neutral. They texture the world in multiple and varied ways that transform human abilities, augment experience and pattern the world in significant and comprehensive ways.

This book provides an introduction to postphenomenology, an emerging school of thought in the philosophy of technology and science and technology studies, which addresses the relationships users develop with the devices they use.

This book provides an introduction to postphenomenology, an emerging school of thought in the philosophy of technology and science and technology studies, which addresses the relationships users develop with the devices they use.

This collection of essays, written by an international group of scholars, provides a more critical and creative contemporary practice of "sustainability." The book sets this practice free from its reductive interpretations and applies a more thoughtful environmental ethics to the current and emerging technologies that dominate our lives.

The idea that animals make things has entered into popular news and public understanding, but inclusion of animal artifacts within engineering and technology studies lags. This volume works to unite animal construction literature with concepts from epistemology of technology.