Kouppanou, Anna; (2014) Technologies of being in Martin Heidegger : nearness, metaphor and the question of education. Doctoral thesis , UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

Technology permeates education’s discourses and practices, and further dialogue between philosophy of education and philosophy of technology is urgently needed. This thesis attempts to do this by engaging critically with the thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler in order to show that both education and technology are processes of human formation (Bildung). Heidegger’s philosophy of technology underlines the way technology conditions human action and thus allows for an investigation of the constitution of the human being. At the same time, Heidegger’s philosophy maintains certain essentialist elements that make it unresponsive to the digital technologies that increasingly form our milieu. In matters of technology the nature of nearness is always at issue, and digital technology accelerates the changes that occur in this respect. For this reason, and notwithstanding Heidegger’s achievements, it is necessary to challenge his account in certain respects. Through a deconstruction of Heidegger’s theory, I attempt to show that thinking and technology intertwine in his critique of metaphysics. In fact, thinking and technology function according to presuppositions about image (Bild), imagination (Einbildungskraft) and education (Bildung), and both inextricably involve metaphorisation in various ways. In this thesis, I analyse the notion of metaphor either as passive or active transfer of the self. The role of image, as I have already noted, is very important for this process, and it is for this reason that Heidegger’s distinction between ‘representative’ image and ‘originary’ image becomes very important for this investigation. For Heidegger, the possibility of originary image opens up the path towards a nontechnologically mediated truth (alētheia) that offers true nearness to things, whereas representative image condemns thinking to uncritical repetition and existence to a state in which everything is equally far and equally near. This discussion and the specific chain of notions (Bild, Einbildung, Bildung) offers a new way into the investigation of those current digital image-technologies that purport to afford us nearness to things and people. It examines their effects on thinking and imagination, and education’s role in relation to these developments.

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