This is a book about aging and medical technologies in the twenty-first century. It will follow a style that evolved in this now sixth of my books with “technics” in the title. On one side personal, it is also autobiographical in that it will be my own experience of aging that is being described; on the other side I am a philosopher of technology, a recently arrived type of philosophy that emphasizes the role of technologies in many dimensions of human life, both individual and social. And, finally, my approach is known today as postphenomenology, a modified type of phenomenological...

SCIENCE AND ART have been lifetime passions of mine, and although I have written much more about the former, I have returned to the practice of doing art again in my later life. In the case of science, I have focused upon its material embodiment in technologies, primarily instruments, and drawn from a long praxis set of traditions, particularly phenomenology and pragmatism, which I call postphenomenology. I have long argued that without technologies—instruments—there could be no science. And as I have returned to doing art, I realize the same is the case for art practices.

In recent work,...

ALTHOUGH DONNA HARAWAY did not invent the term cyborg, she did help make it a term of popular culture. Her cyborg is a hybrid that can include human, animal, and machinic or technological parts. Haraway’s cyborg is simply a mixture. This, in turn, may combine with various human fantasies, including what I call technofantasies. Haraway herself was also well aware that the cyborg could stimulate imaginative fantasies. In popular culture, these fantasies include utopic-bionic science fiction variants that in film and television include all sorts of prostheses that make mere human limbs, organs, and the like superpowerful and better than...

I continue my autobiographical-postphenomenological narrative about the experience of an aging cyborg. I left this narrative in the last chapter with a section on open-heart surgery in 2008. At this time I was still a full-time faculty member at Stony Brook. By 2010, my knees begin to pain me when walking or cross-country skiing, a favorite “focal activity” I shared with Albert Borgmann, another philosopher of technology. X-rays showed the signs of aging knees. Thus begins Aging Cyborg III. (Note that X-rays were discovered by Roentgen, who made the first imaging devices in 1895. See a wonderful science history by...

AS NOTED IN MY EARLIER LLLB (late life little book), Ironic Technics, much of today’s surgery is often dubbed “ Nintendo surgery” with the idea that the new skills in this microsurgery relate to the eye–hand skills common to playing computer games. I have often pointed out that when the screen games that dominated computer games first appeared to addict so many young players, much publicity worried about a downgrading of more active, particularly outdoor, play by adolescents, but in retrospect, we can see that this practice ended up being a sort of pre-skilling for what is commonly called...

IN THIS CONCLUSION, I will return to more strictly philosophy of technology themes, and thus I ascend in some degree from my previous, more autobiographical narrative to a look at what I think are emergent patterns relating to more futuristic trajectories. It may seem odd, at first, to look at the closing of the planned U.S. supercollider in 1994 alongside Watson’s furtive glance at Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray crystallography images of biological structures revealing the double-helix shape of DNA in 1953. Linearly this seems to be a reversed history, but I shall take a philosophy of technology perspective related to active...

MEDICAL IMAGING is responsible for some of the most powerful moments of our lives, from the first glimpse of a growing fetus to the discovery of a tumor. Before the invention of the X-Ray in 1895, none of it was possible, but imaging is now a fundamental part of diagnosis and even how we understand our selfhood. If we considered these images to be art, then philosopher Don Ihde would be one of their most prolific collectors.

Ihde is a distinguished professor of philosophy at New York’s Stony Brook University. He is the author of over twenty books, including the...