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Author(s): Robert C. Scharff [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.167436.1, 0000 0001 2192 7145, University of New Hampshire, , Durham, NH, USA Correction to: Philosophy & Technology (2022) 35: 62 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-022-00544-0 [...]

Phenomenologists usually insist that their approach involves going 'back to' and 'starting' with technoscientific experience-that is, returning to the actual existing or living-through of technoscientific life-after centuries of privileging the analysis of how things are 'objectively' known and denigrating accounts of how they are 'subjectively' lived with. But then who says this and how is this understood? 'Who' is really a phenomenologist, when so many diverse thinkers claim the title? This paper considers some of the reasons why this is such a difficult question and argues that it is wrong to look for The Answer to it., Author(s): Robert C. Scharff [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.167436.1, 0000 0001 2192 7145, University of New Hampshire, , Durham, NH, USA [Displayed Quote]As the media and its advertisers say, 'recent [...]

W. W. Norton & Company, 2011 Measure and the Measureless Dr. Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen Friis University of Copenhagen Norre Farimagsgade 5 A, Room 10.0.27 1014 Copenhagen, Denmark Email: jkof@sund.ku.dk [...]

How Does a Postphenomenologist Expand Hermeneutics? Robert C. Scharff, PhD University of New Hampshire Durham, NH 03824-3574, USA Email: robert.scharff@unh.edu How does Ihde know we should 'expand' hermeneutics? The answer [...]

Response Don Ihde, PhD Harriman Hall 221 Stony Brook University Stony Brook, NY 11794-3750, USA Email: dihde@notes.cc.stonybrook.edu Thanks to Philosophy and Technology, its editors and the critical respondents for this [...]

The Body as Image Interpreter Robert Rosenberger, PhD School of Public Policy Georgia Institute of Technology DM Smith Building, 685 Cherry Street, Atlanta, GA 30332-0345, USA Email: estragon10@yahoo.com Despite being [...]

Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science Larry A. Hickman, PhD Center for Dewey Studies Southern Illinois University Carbondale Carbondale, Illinois 62901, USA Email: lhickman@siu.edu Some philosophers have seemed content to talk [...]

Book Symposium on Don Ihde's Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science Northwestern University Press, 1998 Interpreting the Visual Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen Friis, PhD University of Copenhagen Norre Farimagsgade 5 A, [...]

No one doubts the radically transformative power of contemporary technologies and technoscientific practices over the material dimensions of our experience. Yet with the coming of all the exciting changes and the promise of ever better material conditions, what kinds of lives are we implicitly being encouraged to live? One would think that current philosophical studies of technology would make this a central question, and indeed, a few have done so. But many do not. Following the lead of thinkers who have made the so-called 'empirical turn,' many demur, usually with some remarks about the question being too abstract and general--too likely to suck us into utopian or dystopian speculations--when what is called for are truly informative and 'concrete' studies of what it is like to be with actual technologies. My paper considers the good life question--and the philosophical price one pays for not asking it--in light of Auguste Comte's theory of the three stages of intellectual development. Comte's depiction of the third, positive scientific stage is much less dated than one might assume. In fact, it is useful to think of our own era as arriving with a Comtean story attached, that is, a story of life in the 'developed' world becoming ever better thanks to modern science and technology. Because this story now seems less deserving of the unqualified optimism Comte had about it, I argue that thinking of our own experience as permeated by Comte's conception of third-stage life gives us a fresh way to consider our misgivings about this default position without either lapsing into utopian or dystopian speculation, or confining one's focus to purely postphenomenological or pragmatic studies of technoscientific life as it now 'appears.' Keywords Technoscience * Technological life * Philosophy of technology * Auguste Comte * Feenberg * Ihde, 1 Introduction All philosophers of technology are, of course, interested in the radically transformative social, cultural, and political power of technology and the technologized sciences. It just is the case [...]