From Technological Humanity To Bio Technical Existence

From Technological Humanity to Bio-technical Existence can be framed as a metaphysics of the present. It starts from the current epoch, an era increasingly marked not only by technology but also by technics in the most general sense, and asks how this affects human existence. The book asks what is called technics, what is called humanity, how these relate to one another, and how changes in these notions oblige us to revise the philosophical notion of existence. It investigates how the idea of technological humanity—of technology as an extension and instrument of the human—is discovered and deconstructed by Martin Heidegger, Helmuth Plessner, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, and Giorgio Agamben. Finally, the book presents a new idea of bio-technical existence, one that underlies these philosophers' works without being fully elaborated. This idea—of technics as a condition of humanity that humans share with other living and technical beings—is the author's own philosophical proposition and the final result of the book.

This book addresses the question of deconstruction by asking what it is and discussing its alternatives. To what extent does deconstruction derive from a philosophical stance, and to what extent does it depend upon a set of strategies, moves, and rhetorical practices that result in criticism? Special attention is given to the formulations offered by Jacques Derrida (in relation to Heidegger's philosophy) and by Paul de Man (in relation to Kant's theory of the sublime and its implications for criticism). And what, in deconstructive terms, does it mean to translate from one textual corpus into another? Is it a matter of different theories of translation or of different practices? And what of difference itself? Does not difference already invoke the possibility of deconstruction's "others"? Althusser, Adorno, and Deleuze are offered as exemplary cases. The essays in this volume examine in detail these differences and alternatives. The Textual Sublime is particularly concerned with how a text (philosophical or literary) sets its own limits, borders, and margins, how it delimits what constitutes the text per se and how it invokes at the same time what is not determinately in the text. The textual sublime is that aspect of a text that deconstruction shows to be both an element of the text and what surpasses the text, what takes it outside itself (in view of alternatives and alterities) and what ties it to differing philosophical, rhetorical, historical, and critical practices.

“Essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the current state of biotechnology and the opportunities and dangers it may create.” —American Scientist Technology is a process and a body of knowledge as much as a collection of artifacts. Biology is no different—and we are just beginning to comprehend the challenges inherent in the next stage of biology as a human technology. It is this critical moment, with its wide-ranging implications, that Robert Carlson considers in Biology Is Technology. He offers a uniquely informed perspective on the endeavors that contribute to current progress in this area—the science of biological systems and the technology used to manipulate them. In a number of case studies, Carlson demonstrates that the development of new mathematical, computational, and laboratory tools will facilitate the engineering of biological artifacts—up to and including organisms and ecosystems. Exploring how this will happen, with reference to past technological advances, he explains how objects are constructed virtually, tested using sophisticated mathematical models, and finally constructed in the real world. Such rapid increases in the power, availability, and application of biotechnology raise obvious questions about who gets to use it, and to what end. Carlson’s thoughtful analysis offers rare insight into our choices about how to develop biological technologies and how these choices will determine the pace and effectiveness of innovation as a public good.

With Existential Technics, Don Ihde advances his reflections on the role technology plays in human life. Heretofore primarily the province of Continental thinkers, philosophy of technology is a growing preoccupation of North American philosophers. This collection of essays is a philosophical reflection on and critique of human experience from a clearly American perspective guided by phenomenological analysis. This book is divided into three parts. The first, technics, deals with human interaction with technology and its existential effects. The remaining sections on perception and interpretation examine the imaginative use of phenomenology in the visual and auditory realms of art, music, and intercultural perceptions, and are followed by discussions of contemporary hermeneutics and deconstruction theory, particularly in the thought of Heidegger and Derrida.

This book is the first monograph that takes a comprehensive approach to Jacques Derrida as a philosopher of technology. It refines and complements his mainstream image as a philosopher of language and deconstructionist of classical literary and philosophical texts. This volume outlines the key features of Derrida’s alternative philosophy of technology, a philosophy which Sjöstrand argues, avoids the problems associated with, on the one hand, a Heideggerian orientation, which completely separates thinking and technology and, on the other, an empirically oriented ”post-phenomenology” that can be said to be hegemonic within the field today. Based on a sustained interpretation of Derrida, and a robust, coherent philosophy of technology, a phenomenology of technology is developed that, in a radical way, extends the concept of technology to cover the entire field of phenomenology. This places the technological not in opposition to humanity, but rather always already in close proximity to man and, consequently, to life, ethics, politics, democracy and religion. Strikingly, this important aspect of Derrida’s thinking is only rarely analyzed or discussed by his many exegetes. This text appeals to graduates and researchers working on Derrida, phenomenology, and the philosophy of technology.

Since the discovery of the structure of DNA and the birth of the genetic age, a powerful vocabulary has emerged to express science’s growing command over the matter of life. Armed with knowledge of the code that governs all living things, biology and biotechnology are poised to edit, even rewrite, the texts of life to correct nature’s mistakes. Yet, how far should the capacity to manipulate what life is at the molecular level authorize science to define what life is for? This book looks at flash points in law, politics, ethics, and culture to argue that science’s promises of perfectibility have gone too far. Science may have editorial control over the material elements of life, but it does not supersede the languages of sense-making that have helped define human values across millennia: the meanings of autonomy, integrity, and privacy; the bonds of kinship, family, and society; and the place of humans in nature.

" Educating the Posthuman is an exciting and refreshing book. This book is unique and unusual. Weaver explores the intersections between literature, biosciences and curriculum theory. Understanding the posthuman best happens when scholars explore these three interrelated areas of study."

M. C. Roco and W.S. Bainbridge In the early decades of the 21st century, concentrated efforts can unify science based on the unity of nature, thereby advancing the combination of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and new technologies based in cognitive science. With proper attention to ethical issues and societal needs, converging in human abilities, societal technologies could achieve a tremendous improvement outcomes, the nation's productivity, and the quality of life. This is a broad, cross cutting, emerging and timely opportunity of interest to individuals, society and humanity in the long term. The phrase "convergent technologies" refers to the synergistic combination of four major "NBIC" (nano-bio-info-cogno) provinces of science and technology, each of which is currently progressing at a rapid rate: (a) nanoscience and nanotechnology; (b) biotechnology and biomedicine, including genetic engineering; (c) information technology, including advanced computing and communications; (d) cognitive science, including cognitive neuroscience. Timely and Broad Opportunity. Convergence of diverse technologies is based on material unity at the nanoscale and on technology integration from that scale.