Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology

Volume 24, Issue 1/2, 2020

Critical Constructivism and Postphenomenology: Ethics, Politics, and the Empirical

Almost a Critical Theorist . . .

This article starts with an autobiographical reflection in which I first trace how close I came to doing my Ph.D. studies with Herbert Marcuse when he was at Brandeis University; then follows my early post-Ph.D. work which continued to use critical theorists in teaching, later following a growing disillusionment with the implicit elitism of many critical theory authors. Then I turn to deeper philosophical reasons for my divergence from critical theory by introducing the notion of “shelf-life,” and argue that much Marxist and neo-Marxist work is today outdated, or has reached limits of its shelf-life.