This book is about, and in response to, Martin Heidegger’sphilosophy of technology.Heidegger is widely hailed as one of the major figures in the foundations of the philosophy of technology. And while it remains the case that in the early decades of the mid-twentieth century, he had a number of peers also interested in technology, particularly among European philosophers, if one judges by articles, books, and other publications today, Heidegger remains virtually the only one of these to continue to draw major comment.

Heidegger’s death in 1976 marked his entrance into the company of the “mighty dead,” as Robert...

Among the few philosophers to date to have taken technology seriously, it should be apparent that Martin Heidegger is a pioneer in this field. He was among the first to raise technology to a central concern for philosophy, and he was among the first to see in it a genuine ontological issue. This is the case in spite of the dominant and sometimes superficial interpretations of Heidegger that see in him only a negative attitude to technology.

It will be the aim of this essay to examine some of Heidegger’s main theses concerning technology and to elucidate the strategies that...

The thesis I wish to explore in this essay is thatthere is a significant sense in which technology may be seen to be both ontologically and historically prior to science. There is, of course, an obvious and trivial sense in which this claim may be regarded as true. If technologies in the broadest and most concrete sense involve humans and their uses of tools and artifacts, then at the least one can say that technology in this sense is both universal and probably used at the time of the rise of the human species. There are no instances of...

A century after his birth, two very contrary statements can be made concerning Martin Heidegger: First, in a significant sense, he is surely one of the most important founders of the philosophy of technology. His insights into the structures and functions of technology remain deep and suggestive. Second, we all also know that he joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and remained with it through the war. His associations with the movement, seen today as one of the most destructive applications of modern technology, are equally deeply disturbing.

My question is this: Is there something at the very heart...

We are now back to the beginning, the earth as we find it, heavily technologically textured, inherited from the previous generations of humans, all of whom left the Garden. I shall once again revert to a contemporary story. In this case the incident is an actual one, deliberately cast, for purposes relevant to the narrative, on one side in a “late Heideggerian” form and on the other with a postmodern commentary. The story is set in the late twentieth century in the foothills of Monte Albano, Tuscany, four centuries after the first birth pangs of the modern.

This scene was,...

I had remembered the movieBeing There, with Peter Sellers playing Jerzy Kosinski’s man of authenticity, as a deeply ironic and funny Heideggerian spoof in which the main character, an intellectually challenged gardener thrown out of his insular life into a world of high politics, became a sort of prophet-advisor to the president of the United States himself. The gardener would utter simple literalisms, such as “the soil must be tended if there is to be a good harvest,” which were taken as metaphorically profound by the political interlocutors. Here was Heideggerian authenticity caught in the world of political deception...

In this chapter, I first revisit Heidegger’s reception and continuation of influence within the philosophy of technology, filling in several gaps left out in the introduction. Some three and a half decades since his death, while there is some evidence that Heidegger is virtually the only still strongly visible philosopher of technology of his generation, there is also evidence that this reputation is fading. Following my revisitation, I then turn to apostphenomenologicalanalysis concerning Heidegger’s blindness to distinctions and multistabilities that may be found in technologies. Indeed, I contend that while he claims that attending to the particularities of...

In the progression of chapters, the reader will have noted that I have taken several different critical perspectives upon Heidegger—antiromantic, pragmatically anti-essentialist, historical, and so on. But there remains a double task to conclude this assessment of Heidegger: on one side, I shall now suggest that Heidegger’s philosophy of technology—already seen to be highly dated—has only regional or limited relevance, particularly with respect to contemporary technologies. On the other side, I want to suggest a more phenomenological, orpostphenomenologicalcounterstrategy for technology analysis. While I shall not repeat the exercise undertaken in the last chapter, which discusses...