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.

How should we understand the experience of encountering and interpreting images? What are their roles in science and medicine? How do they shape everyday life? Postphenomenology and Imaging: How to Read Technology brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to investigate these questions. The contributors make use of the “postphenomenological” philosophical perspective, applying its distinctive ideas to the study of how images are experienced. These essays offer both philosophical analysis of our conception of images and empirical studies of imaging practice. Edited by Samantha J. Fried and Robert Rosenberger, this collection includes an extensive “primer” chapter introducing and expanding the postphenomenological account of imaging, as well as a set of short pieces by “critical respondents”: prominent scholars who may not self-identify as doing postphenomenology but whose adjacent work is illuminating.

Postphenomenology is a fascinating investigation of the relationships between global culture and technology. The impressive range of subjects to which Don Ihde applies his skill as a phenomenologist is unified by what he describes as "a concern which arises with respect to one of the now major trends of Euro-American philosophy--its textism." He adds, "I show my worries to be less about the loss of subjects or authors, than I do about [there] not being bodies or perceivers."

Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human–Technology Relations provides an introduction to the school of thought called postphenomenology and showcases projects at the cutting edge of this perspective. Postphenomenology presents a unique blend of insights from the philosophical traditions of phenomenology and American pragmatism, and applies them to studies of user relations to technologies. These studies provide deep descriptions of the ways technologies transform our abilities, augment our experience, and shape the world around us. This book proceeds with a preface by Don Ihde, postphenomenology’s founder, and a detailed review of the main ideas of this perspective by the editors Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek. The body of this volume is composed of twelve postphenomenological essays which reflect the expansive range, detail-orientation, and interdisciplinarity of this school of thought. These essays confront a broad assortment of topics, both abstract and concrete. Abstract topics addressed include metaphysics, ethics, methodology, and analysis of the notions of selfhood, skill training, speed, and political activism. Just a few of the concrete topics studied include human-like interactive robots, ethics education, image interpretation in radiology, science fiction tropes, transportation history, wearable computing, and organ donation protocols for brain-dead bodies. The volume concludes with constructive critiques of postphenomenology by Andrew Feenberg, Diane Michelfelder, and Albert Borgmann, all figures whose work is relevant to postphenomenological projects.

Science is highly dependent on technologies to observe scientific objects. For example, astronomers need telescopes to observe planetary movements, and cognitive neuroscience depends on brain imaging technologies to investigate human cognition. But how do such technologies shape scientific practice, and how do new scientific objects come into being when new technologies are used in science? In How Scientific Instruments Speak, Bas de Boer develops a philosophical account of how technologies shape the reality that scientists study, arguing that we should understand scientific instruments as mediating technologies. Rather than mute tools serving pre-existing human goals, scientific instruments play an active role in shaping scientific work. De Boer uses this account to discuss how brain imaging and stimulation technologies mediate the way in which cognitive neuroscientists investigate human cognitive functions. The development of cognitive neuroscience runs parallel with the development of advanced brain imaging technologies, drawing a lot of public attention—sometimes called “neurohype”—because of its alleged capacity to demystify the human mind. By analyzing how the objects that cognitive neuroscientists study are mediated by brain imaging technologies, de Boer explicates the processes by which human cognition is investigated.

Postphenomenology and Media: Essays on Human–Media–World Relations sheds light on how new, digital media are shaping humans and their world. It does so by using the postphenomenological framework to comprehensively study “human-media relations,” making use of conceptual instruments such as the transparency-opacity distinction, embodiment, multistability, variational analysis, and cultural hermeneutics. This collection outlines central issues of media and mediation theory that can be explored postphenomenologically and showcases research at the cutting edge of philosophy of media and technology. The contributors together enlarge the range of thinking about human-media-world relations in contemporary society, reflecting the interdisciplinary range of this school of thought, and explore, sometimes self-reflexively and sometimes critically, the provocative landscape of postphenomenology and media.

Architecture and urban design are typically considered as a result of artistic creativity performed by gifted individuals. Postphenomenology and Architecture: Human Technology Relations in the Built Environment analyzes buildings and cities instead as technologies. Informed by a postphenomenological perspective, this book argues that buildings and the furniture of cities—like bike lanes, benches, and bus stops—are inscribed in a conceptual framework of multistability, which is to say that they fulfill different purposes over time. Yet, there are qualities in the built environment that are long lasting and immutable and that transcend temporal functionality and ephemeral efficiency. The contributors show how different perceptions, practices, and interpretations are tangible and visible as we engage with these technologies. In addition, several of the chapters critically assess the influence of Martin Heidegger in modern philosophy of architecture. This book reads Heidegger from the perspective of architecture and urban design as technology, shedding light on what it means to build and dwell.