Technologies of Being in Martin Heidegger attempts to deepen the dialogue between philosophy of education and philosophy of technology, while engaging with the thought of Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler. Through a critical reading of Heidegger’s central notion of nearness, this book argues that thinking is intricately conditioned by technologically produced images, which are themselves interacting with imagination’s schematizing power.
The book further discusses how certain metaphorical synthesising processes, which are currently industrialized taking the form of social networking sites and search engines, discretise human behaviour and reorganise it in ways that often marginalise human interpretation and redefine nearness. Finally, it suggests how we might reconceptualise technology and education as processes of human individuation.
Technologies of Being in Martin Heidegger will be of great interest to scholars in the fields of philosophy of education, philosophy of technology, literary studies, cognitive linguistics and cognitive neuroscience.
Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Heidegger and Education: What Technology can tells us about Education 2. Hermeneutics and Heidegger’s Imaginings 3. Imaginative Synthesis as Metaphor 4. The Ready-to-hand: Nearness in Early Heidegger 5. Rootedness: Nearness as a Political Scheme 6. Re-turning Home: Nearness in Later Heidegger 7. Digital Metaphoric Machines of Nearness 8. Education as Bildung and Formation according to Image Conclusions
About the Author :
Anna Kouppanou is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cyprus.
Review :
"Anna Kouppanou revisits Heidegger’s Being and Time, basing her analysis on the ‘tendency to nearness’ that characterises the human being according to Heidegger. At the same time, this highly original and fruitful inquiry is an interpretation of the various transformations of Heidegger’s thought ̵ from the ‘question of Being’ to ‘Gestell’ and the episode of the proximity to Nazism. On the basis of a complete transformation of the questions of synthesis and metaphor in Heidegger, and in an effort to rethink education, Kouppanou is ultimately devoted to the examination of digital technologies as technologies of nearness and metaphor.
The book thus restates the question of Bildung in a profound way, thinking it from the perspective of metaphorical imagination and as a condition of care; indeed, at a time (in the absence of an epoch) characterised as the age of ‘post-truth’; when care as well as education seem to be condemned to oblivion.
By bringing the question of Bildung to that of imagination, and the question of imagination to that of metaphorical synthesis, Anna Kouppanou opens the prospect of a possible remembrance - anamnesis - from that which manifests itself as the ‘time of distress’ of Gestell, whose domination seems to have become total." - Bernard Stiegler, Director of the Institute of Research and Development, Georges Pompidou Center, France and Associated Professor at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK.
