[MaFLa] Reminder: Heidegger's 'Untimely' Critique of Technology - lecture

[Krisztina Biber]

The CEU Philosophy Department cordially invites you to a talk 
(as part of its Departmental Colloquium series)
by
Robert Scharff   (University of New Hampshire)
on
Heidegger's 'Untimely' Critique of Technology

Tuesday, 20 January, 2009, 5.30 PM, Zrinyi 14, Room 412


ABSTRACT

Heidegger’s treatment of technology is undoubtedly and fundamentally
critical from beginning to end. About the hegemony and increasingly
global reach of technoscientific understanding, he is deeply
“distressed.” Yet his critics are wrong to conclude that
Heidegger’s criticisms are overdrawn-that he suffers from
anti-technoscientific bias or terminal pessimism. Objections of this
sort typically misread Heidegger’s aims and selectively read his
texts. His critique of technology is, in fact, “untimely” in
Nietzsche’s sense. It says what people do not want to hear, precisely
when they need to hear it. Hence, the standard objections to
Heidegger’s critique are best viewed as the sign of a widespread
contemporary tendency-a tendency found even among allegedly
post-positivist and phenomenological writers about technoscience-to
overestimate the degree to which we have left behind a Comtean, or
classical positivist understanding of our age.




Kriszta Biber
Department Coordinator
Philosophy Department
Tel: 36-1-327-3806
Fax: 36-1-327-3072
E-mail: biberk at ceu.hu 
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