Selinger, Evan, ed.: Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde.

Hanson, F. Allan

SELINGER, Evan, ed. Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. xi + 308 pp. Cloth, $86.50--This volume is a critical review of how Don Ihde has contributed to and stimulated phenomenology, postphenomenology and the philosophy of technoscience over the last four decades. Evan Selinger brought forth this admirable tribute to his mentor by assembling original essays from nineteen of Ihde's former students, colleagues and professional peers. All leading scholars in the field, their contributions make for required reading, not only for Ihde aficionados but for anyone interested in the history, sociology, or philosophy of technoscience.

Ihde dwells in the borderland between philosophy and other disciplines in that his phenomenological approach directly pertains to actual experience in many of its forms. Some of the essays are devoted to insights from or pertinent to Ihde that advance understanding of concrete things and events. Trevor Pinch writes a history of the electronic synthesizer and discusses the tension between its having a voice of its own and its capacity to emulate other instruments, while Judy Locbhead explores the impact of various forms of visual notation on the experience of hearing and understanding music. Robert P. Crease addresses the nature of experimentation in scientific laboratories. Peter Galison turns a Heideggerian perspective on the Columbia disaster and other problems in the space program to examine the issue of breakdown in complex technological systems, and Donna Haraway considers the numerous implications of the expanded technology-human-animal interface that is brought about by attaching cameras to turtles, whales and penguins.

Haraway's paper also embodies a theme that crops up repeatedly in the volume, as well as in Ihde's work, which is to shift attention from individual things or activities to the relationships that emerge from their combinations. This theme takes several forms, one of which is the relation between science and technology. Selinger recounts in the Introduction (p. 6) how, in a seminar in Colombia in 1982, Ihde was denounced for affirming a distinction between science and technology that masks how the interworkings of the two are often used both ideologically and materially to undermine indigenous cultures. The experience had complex ramifications, one being to fix in Ihde the necessary and historically ubiquitous interconnections of science and technology, to be studied by the philosophy of "technoscience." This issue is taken up in essays by Paul B. Thompson, Robert C. Scharff, and Hans Lenk.

Another aspect of the emphasis on relationships is that between people and things. Rather than thinking of a person using a tool or instrument, the human-tool combination is better considered as a single agency: an actant or a cyborg. Carl Mitcham points out the link between Ihde's phenomenology and the pragmatism of Dewey, who also held that things commonly considered to be outside the body--tools, friends, institutions--are better understood as belonging to it. Donn Welton examines the difference between mechanical extensions of the body and machines embedded in the body. A fascinating elaboration on the human-instrument nexus is found in Finn Olesen's account of the impact of the stethoscope on the practice of medicine and the conceptualization of disease. Andrew Feenberg insists that the body's linkage with things affects not only what that extended agency does, but also its passive role of how it is treated. Albert Borgmann elaborates Ihde's distinction between technologies that directly extend our senses (such as a telescope or microscope) and those hermeneutic extensions that require interpretation of texts (for example, read-outs from the Hubble telescope).

Selinger's essay is one of several noting that Ihde has not pursued the ethical implications of his work as far as might be desired. This may be partly because, as Richard A. Cohen points out, Ihde has avoided the dystopian judgments about technology of thinkers like Heidegger and Ellul. In his concluding essay Ihde discusses several facets of this issue, among them (perhaps as another upshot of the criticism he received in Colombia) the "paradox of prognosis," which concerns how technologies generate unintended consequences and have different impacts in different cultural settings. The volume's most focused effort to extend the ethical dimension is Peter-Paul Verbeek's contribution, "The Morality of Things." He surmises that ethics may be on the verge of a Copernican revolution that will include things among moral agents. Things are invariably involved in human decisions and actions, he holds, and they should therefore be implicated in the morality of those decisions and actions. The difficulty, of course, is dealing with the complaint that things do not act intentionally and do not receive rewards or punishments. (It was not always such. Ihde's concluding essay refers to the medieval practices of punishing the animal as well as the human participants in bestiality and flogging bells that were used to call people to insurrection.) Certainly it is high time to extend moral responsibility to include animals and things. But instead of investigating them in isolation it would be better to hew to the emphasis Ihde and others place on relationship, and to concentrate on the moral status of extended agencies composed of various combinations of human and nonhuman elements.--F. Allan Hanson, University of Kansas.