The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays

Author: Martin Heidegger
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061319694
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
"To read Heidegger is to set out on an adventure. The essays in this volume--intriguing, challenging, and often baffling to the reader--call him always to abandon all superficial scanning and to enter wholeheartedly into the serious pursuit of thinking.... "Heidegger is not a 'primitive' or a 'romanitic.' He is not one who seeks escape from the burdens and responsibilities of contemporary life into serenity, either through the re-creating of some idyllic past or through the exalting of some simple experience. Finally, Heidegger is not a foe of technology and science. He neither disdains nor rejects them as though they were only destructive of human life. "The roots of Heidegger's hinking lie deep in the Western philosophical tradition. Yet that thinking is unique in many of its aspects, in its language, and in its leterary expression. In the development of this thought Heidegger has been taught chiefly by the Greeks, by German idealism, by phenomenology, and by the scholastic theological tradition. In him these and other elements have been fused by his genius of sensitivity and intellect into a very individual philosophical expression." --William Lovitt, from the Introduction

The Question Concerning Technology in China

Author: Yuk Hui
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0995455007
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
A systematic historical survey of Chinese thought is followed by an investigation of the historical-metaphysical questions of modern technology, asking how Chinese thought might contribute to a renewed questioning of globalized technics. Heidegger's critique of modern technology and its relation to metaphysics has been widely accepted in the East. Yet the conception that there is only one—originally Greek—type of technics has been an obstacle to any original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought. Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger's challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and technologies as anthropologically universal. This investigation of the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of modern Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani, sheds new light on the obscurity of the question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological modernity and westernization? In The Question Concerning Technology in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical questioning of globalized technics.

Heidegger on Technology

Author: Aaron James Wendland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317200705
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Book Description
This collection offers the first comprehensive and definitive account of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. It does so through a detailed analysis of canonical texts and recently published primary sources on two crucial concepts in Heidegger’s later thought: Gelassenheit and Gestell. Gelassenheit, translated as ‘releasement’, and Gestell, often translated as ‘enframing’, stand as opposing ideas in Heidegger’s work whereby the meditative thinking of Gelassenheit counters the dangers of our technological framing of the world in Gestell. After opening with a scholarly overview of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology as a whole, this volume focuses on important Heideggerian critiques of science, technology, and modern industrialized society as well as Heidegger’s belief that transformations in our thought processes enable us to resist the restrictive domain of modern techno-scientific practice. Key themes discussed in this collection include: the history, development, and defining features of modern technology; the relationship between scientific theories and their technological instantiations; the nature of human agency and the essence of education in the age of technology; and the ethical, political, and environmental impact of our current techno-scientific customs. This volume also addresses the connection between Heidegger’s critique of technology and his involvement with the Nazis. Finally, and with contributions from a number of renowned Heidegger scholars, the original essays in this collection will be of great interest to students of Philosophy, Technology Studies, the History of Science, Critical Theory, Environmental Studies, Education, Sociology, and Political Theory.

The Essence of Truth

Author: Martin Heidegger
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780826459237
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
The Essence of Truth must count as one of Heidegger's most important works, for nowhere else does he give a comparably thorough explanation of what is arguably the most fundamental and abiding theme of his entire philosophy, namely the difference between truth as the "unhiddenness of beings" and truth as the "correctness of propositions". For Heidegger, it is by neglecting the former primordial concept of truth in favor of the latter derivative concept that Western philosophy, beginning already with Plato, took off on its "metaphysical" course towards the bankruptcy of the present day. This first ever translation into English consists of a lecture course delivered by Heidegger at the University of Freiburg in 1931-32. Part One of the course provides a detailed analysis of Plato's allegory of the cave in the Republic, while Part Two gives a detailed exegesis and interpretation of a central section of Plato's Theaetetus, and is essential for the full understanding of his later well-known essay Plato's Doctrine of Truth. As always with Heidegger's writings on the Greeks, the point of his interpretative method is to bring to light the original meaning of philosophical concepts, especially to free up these concepts to their intrinsic power.

Heidegger on Science

Author: Trish Glazebrook
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438442696
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Book Description
Although Martin Heidegger is well known for his work on technology, he is not often discussed in the context of science broadly speaking. This volume is the first to showcase diverse perspectives on Heidegger's assessments of the sciences, looking at a number of different ways that Heidegger's writings contribute to questions concerning how we understand the world through science. With particular attention to quantum theory, natural science, technoscience, and a section devoted specifically to investigating what Being and Time has to say about science, the book will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of disciplines and traditions. It closes with consideration of questions about sustainability and ethics raised by Heidegger's engagement with the sciences.

Cosmotechnics

Author: Yuk Hui
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000396363
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
This volume is initial reflections on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics, which opens up an anti-universalist and pluralist perspective on technology beyond the West. Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa, and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with decolonial studies and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology

Author: Vincent Blok
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351733621
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Book Description
This book examines the work of Jünger and its effect on the development of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. It offers a unique treatment of Jünger’s philosophy and his conception of the age of technology, in which both world and man appear in terms of their functionality and efficiency. It demonstrates Jünger’s influence on Heidegger’s conceptions of will, work and gestalt at the beginning of the 1930s. At the same time, Blok evaluates Heidegger’s criticism of Jünger and provides a novel interpretation of the Jünger-Heidegger connection: that Jünger’s work in fact testifies to a transformation of our relationship to language and conceptualizes the future in terms of the Anthropocene.

Improper Life

Author: Timothy C. Campbell
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452932786
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
How biopolitics can get beyond its obsession with death

Kierkegaard and the Question Concerning Technology

Author: Christopher B. Barnett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 162892666X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Over the last several decades, technology has emerged as an important area of interest for both philosophers and theologians. Yet, despite his status as one of modernity's seminal thinkers, Søren Kierkegaard is not often seen as one who contributed to the field. Kierkegaard and the Question Concerning Technology argues otherwise. Christopher B. Barnett shows that many of Kierkegaard's criticisms of "the present age" relate to the increasing dominance of technology in the West, and he puts Kierkegaard's thought in conversation with subsequent thinkers who grappled with technological issues, from Martin Heidegger to Thomas Merton. Barnett shows that Kierkegaard's writing, with its marked emphases on personal "upbuilding," stands as a place where deeper, non-technical modes of thinking are both commended and nurtured. In doing so, Barnett presents a Kierkegaard who remains relevant--perhaps all too relevant--in today's digital age.

Questioning Technology

Author: Andrew Feenberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134737971
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
In this extraordinary introduction to the study of the philosophy of technology, Andrew Feenberg argues that techonological design is central to the social and political structure of modern societies. Environmentalism, information technology, and medical advances testify to technology's crucial importance. In his lucid and engaging style, Feenberg shows that technology is the medium of daily life. Every major technical changes reverberates at countless levels: economic, political, and cultural. If we continue to see the social and technical domains as being seperate, then we are essentially denying an integral part of our existence, and our place in a democratic society. Questioning Tecchnology convinces us that it is vital that we learn more about technology the better to live with it and to manage it.