Ian Angus (philosopher)

Angus's early intellectual formation began with a dual engagement with 20th-century phenomenology, particularly the work of Edmund Husserl, and the Frankfurt school of critical theory around the problems of technology and modern capitalism. Focusing on the notion of "instrumental reason" as a legitimating principle of technology, his first book Technique and Enlightenment (1984) argues for a form of technological assessment that is both ethical and acknowledges its role within the larger problematic of the construction of human identity. His subsequent work branched into a wider conception of the problem of modernity in critical engagement with discourse theory, post-structuralism, and rhetorical theory. In Primal Scenes of Communsdadwdadweadawdwadwadication (2000) "the complex linguistic model Angus has created regards the immanent link of identity creation involved in communication theories, but ... his concerns deal with this struggle for, and the shaping of, our faculties of attention."

Angus's commitment to Canadian social and political thought was a consequence of his estimation in the 1970s that the left wing of Canadian nationalism contained the possibility for a transformation of Canadian society in a more egalitarian direction. In his most influential book in the area of Canadian studies, A Border Within (1997), he works toward thinking English Canadian identity in relation to internal diversity and environmental-local embeddedness. He does so by exploring the question: "What are the possibilities for an English-Canadian national identity in an age of corporate globalization—a phenomenon that appears to undermine national identities around the world?" Angus rejects the tendency to wholly situate identity as simply constructed locally or universally, but instead maintains that it is in the very acknowledgement of otherness, both environmental and ethnic, that an English Canadian identity could be rethought. His subsequent book Identity and Justice (2008) traces political thought and cultural politics insofar as they are integrated into philosophy. "It is not a book about Canadian philosophy, but rather a philosophical book that self-consciously situates itself in a particular place, in order to talk about this place." In 2013, Angus published a collection of essays on Canada under the title The Undiscovered Country: Essays in Canadian Intellectual Culture through Athabasca University Press in which he collected together his critiques of Canadian thinkers and emphasized that a philosophy which does not criticize empire becomes ideology.

Ian Henderson Angus (born 1949) is an interdisciplinary philosopher and social critic who writes on continental philosophy, Canadian studies, communication theory, social movements, ecological thought, and the university.

Angus was born on 18 April 1949 in London, England. He holds Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in philosophy from the University of Waterloo and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in social and political thought from York University (1980). He has taught at the University of New Hampshire, Trent University, and University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1986–1992) and is currently a professor in the Department of Humanities at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.