Technologies of Being in Martin Heidegger ― Nearness, Metaphor and the Question of Education in Digital Times

Technology today permeates education’s discourses and practices and, for this reason, there is now, more than ever, a significant need for dialogue between the philosophy of education and the philosophy of technology. Technologies of Being in Martin Heidegger introduces such a dialogue, while engaging critically with the thought of Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, in order to show that both education and technology are processes of human formation or individuation.

Through a deconstruction of Heideggerian metaphysics, the book reveals that thinking and technology function according to presuppositions about image, imagination and education, while their interaction inextricably involves metaphor as imagination’s basic schematizing power. Metaphor is understood as a hermeneutical process of connectedness that brings together distinct domains, allowing their transformation and the emergence of new qualities and states of being. In this light, metaphor can be mainly linguistic or mainly technological and involve the human or not. Indeed, through the study of specific technological, and in fact, digital instances, this book will show that certain metaphorical processes are currently industrialized and take the form of social networking sites and search engines that exclude the human.

This book shows how we might reconceptualise technology and education as processes of human individuation and it is in this light that the question of education in digital times is discussed. As a result, this book will be of great interest to scholars, researchers and postgraduates in the fields of philosophy of education and philosophy of technology. It should also be essential reading for those interested in cognitive linguistics and cognitive neuroscience.