The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays
The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays

Author: Martin Heidegger

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 1982-01-19

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 0061319694

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"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
The Question Concerning Technology in China

Author: Yuk Hui

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-09-02

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 0995455007

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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
Heidegger on Technology

Author: Aaron James Wendland

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-09-13

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1317200705

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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.

Kierkegaard and the Question Concerning Technology
Kierkegaard and the Question Concerning Technology

Author: Christopher B. Barnett

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-08-22

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 162892666X

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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.

The Gods and Technology
The Gods and Technology

Author: Richard Rojcewicz

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2006-06-01

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0791482308

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The Gods and Technology is a careful and original reading of the principal statement of Martin Heidegger's philosophy of technology, the essay Die Frage nach der Technik ("The question concerning technology"). That essay is a rich one, and Richard Rojcewicz's goal is to mine it for the treasures only a close reading of the original German text can bring out. Rojcewicz shows how the issue of technology is situated at the very heart of Heidegger's philosophical enterprise; especially for the late Heidegger, the philosophy of technology is a philosophy of Being, or of the gods. For Heidegger, technology is not applied knowledge, but the most basic knowledge, of which science, for example, is an application. The ultimate goal of this study, and, as Rojcewicz writes, of Heidegger's thought, is practical: to find the appropriate response to the challenges of the modern age, to learn to live in a technological world without falling victim to the thrall of technological things.

Heidegger on Science
Heidegger on Science

Author: Trish Glazebrook

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-23

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1438442696

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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.

Readings in the Philosophy of Technology
Readings in the Philosophy of Technology

Author: David M. Kaplan

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2009-10-16

Total Pages: 602

ISBN-13: 074256536X

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Ideal for professors who want to provide a comprehensive set of the most important readings in the philosophy of technology, from foundational to the cutting edge, this book introduces students to the various ways in which societies, technologies, and environments shape one another. The readings examine the nature of technology as well as the effects of technologies upon human knowledge, activities, societies, and environments. Students will learn to appreciate the ways that philosophy informs our understanding of technology, and to see how technology relates to ethics, politics, nature, human nature, computers, science, food, and animals.

Cosmotechnics
Cosmotechnics

Author: Yuk Hui

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-18

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1000396363

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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.

Improper Life
Improper Life

Author: Timothy C. Campbell

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2011-10-28

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1452932786

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How biopolitics can get beyond its obsession with death

Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology
Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy of Technology

Author: Vincent Blok

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-04-21

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1351733621

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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.