This paper discusses the relation between the later Husserl and the later Heidegger regarding their criticisms of modern science and technology. It is suggested that the overlap between both accounts is more significant than is standardly acknowledged. The paper first explores Heidegger’s ideas about the ‘essences’ of science and technology, how they allegedly determine the contemporary worldview, conceal our relation to being, and how Heidegger warrants his critical attitude toward this. It then discusses Husserl’s philosophical–historical assessment of the ‘idea’ of (...) modern science, which Husserl believed resulted in the decapitation of philosophical questioning. Although key differences in method, aims, and their proposed solution to the dominance of the technological-scientific worldview should not be overlooked, the paper suggests that core aspects of Heidegger’s analyses can be traced back to Husserl. (shrink)

This thesis develops a hermeneutic philosophy of science to provide insights into physics education. -/- Modernity cloaks the authentic character of modern physics whenever discoveries entertain us or we judge theory by its use. Those who justify physics education through an appeal to its utility, or who reject truth as an aspect of physics, relativists and constructivists, misunderstand the nature of physics. Demonstrations, not experiments, reveal the essence of physics as two characteristic engagements with truth. First, truth in its guise (...) as correspondence enables a human being to prepare for the distinctive event of physics. -/- Second, the event of physics occurs in human perception when someone forces a hidden reality to disclose an aspect of itself. Thus, the ground of physics is our human involvement with reality achieved by way of truth. -/- To support this account of physics, the thesis reports phenomenological investigations into Isaac Newton’s involvement with optics and a secondary school physics laboratory. These involve interpretations of Heidegger’s theory of beings, schema and signification. The project draws upon, and contributes to, the hermeneutic phenomenology of modern physics, a tradition in continental philosophy that begins with Immanuel Kant, and advances particularly from Martin Heidegger to Patrick Heelan. -/- The thesis advocates an ontological pedagogy for modern physics which has as its purpose each individual student’s engagement with reality and truth. Students may achieve this through demonstrations of phenomena that will enable them to dwell with physics, an experience that contrasts with their embroilment in modernity, and which perpetuates nature’s own science. (shrink)

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 26, Issue 3, Page 335-343, September 2012.

Martin Heidegger’s radical critique of technology has fundamentally stigmatized modern technology and paved the way for a comprehensive critique of contemporary Western society. However, the following reassessment of Heidegger’s most elaborate and influential interpretation of technology, The Question Concerning Technology, sheds a very different light on his critique. In fact, Heidegger’s phenomenological line of thinking concerning technology also implies a radical critique of ancient technology and the fundamental being-in-the-world of humans. This revision of Heidegger’s arguments claims that The Question Concerning (...) Technology indicates a previous unseen ambiguity with respect to the origin of the rule of das Gestell. The following inquiry departs from Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and connects it to a reassessment of ancient technology and Aristotle’s justification of slavery. The last part of the paper unfolds Heidegger’s underlying arguments in favor of continuity within the history of technology. According to these interpretations, humans have always strived to develop modern technology and to become truly modern in the Heideggerian sense. The danger stemming from the rule of das Gestell is thus not only transient and solely directed toward contemporary Western society, but also I will argue that humans can only be humans as the ones challenged by the rule of das Gestell. (shrink)

The experience of researching as a Māori student within academia will often raise questions about how and whether the student’s research privileges Māori world views and articulates culturally specific epistemologies. This study offers some theorising, from the perspectives of a Maori doctoral student and her Maori supervisor, on the metaphysical nature of research for Maori. It emphasises that there is a space for speculative, creative and responsive thinking as a central method in the student’s doctoral research and describes how access (...) to free thinking has been only partly recognised in currently dominant methods of research. We describe this approach as ‘whakaaro’, and note its relationship to language itself, to the researcher and the interviewee, and in particular to the researcher’s intuitive and largely unknowable response to what an interviewee utters. In that act, the student envisages that she will expansively hint at the deep expression of the profoundly mysterious. Here, our thinking resonates with various Western and indigenous writings about research and adumbrates the potential of the whakaaro method without foreclosing against its various permutations. (shrink)

In modern continental thought, natural science is widely portrayed as an exclusively instrumental mode of reason. The breadth of this consensus has partly preempted the question of how it came to persuade. The process of persuasion, as it played out in Germany, can be explored by reconstructing the intellectual exchanges among three twentieth-century theorists of science, Heidegger, Habermas, and Werner Heisenberg. Taking an iconic Heisenberg as a kind of limiting case of “the scientist,” Heidegger and Habermas each found themselves driven (...) to place new constraints on their previously more capacious assessments of science, especially its capacity to reflect on its method. Tracing how that happened, through archival and historical contextualization and close readings of their texts, lets us make visible Heidegger and Habermas’s intellectual affinities and argumentative parallels, which derived not only from their shared grounding in earlier reactions against positivism, but also from confrontation with contemporary events. The latter included, for Heidegger, the rise of a technically powerful science exemplified by nuclear physics, and for Habermas, post-World War II controversies over science, technology, and their socially critical possibilities. (shrink)

How do we encourage Heidegger’s notion of originary thinking in education, and indeed how should one engage with thinking at all? In this response, I consider the challenge that Heidegger lays down for speculation that refers certainty to the unknown. In my answer to the contributors of this special issue, I highlight the fact that all of us are compelled to depart from Heidegger at some stage but, at the same time, to carry vestiges of his meditative and exploratory thought (...) with us as we start anew. Heidegger thus recommends that speculative thinking, and its dark participation with mystery, be honoured generally, in both educational contexts and in reply to others. Whether student or teacher, writer or interlocutor, one is rendered vulnerable in the face of that overwhelming call to think without a prescribed horizon, and I set out to explore some of my thinking as I respond to the deep creativity of the contributors’ works. (shrink)