The Gods And Technology: A Reading of Heidegger

An analysis of Heidegger's philosophy of technology.

The Gods and Technology is a careful and original reading of the principal statement of Martin Heidegger's philosophy of technology, the essay Die Frage nach der Technik ("The question concerning technology"). That essay is a rich one, and Richard Rojcewicz's goal is to mine it for the treasures only a close reading of the original German text can bring out. Rojcewicz shows how the issue of technology is situated at the very heart of Heidegger's philosophical enterprise; especially for the late Heidegger, the philosophy of technology is a philosophy of Being, or of the gods.

For Heidegger, technology is not applied knowledge, but the most basic knowledge, of which science, for example, is an application. The ultimate goal of this study, and, as Rojcewicz writes, of Heidegger's thought, is practical: to find the appropriate response to the challenges of the modern age, to learn to live in a technological world without falling victim to the thrall of technological things.

Richard Rojcewicz teaches philosophy at Point Park University. He is the cotranslator (with André Schuwer) of three volumes of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe: Parmenides (GA 54), Basic Questions of Philosophy (GA 45), and Plato's Sophist (GA 19) and the translator of Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle (GA 61). He is also the translator of two volumes of Husserliana, Husserl's collected works: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book (Hua 4; cotranslated with André Schuwer) and Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907 (Hua 16).