Heidegger’s oeuvre (> 100 volumes) contains a plethora of comments on contemporary science, or rathertechnosciencebecause, according to Heidegger, science is inherently technical. What insights can be derived from such comments for philosophers questioning technoscience as it is practiced today? Can Heidegger’s thoughts become a source of inspiration for contemporary scholars who are confronted with automated sequencing machines, magnetic resonance imaging machines and other technoscientific contrivances? This is closely related to the question of method, I will argue. Although Heidegger himself was (...) notoriously ambivalent when it came to method, especially in his later writings, his oeuvre nonetheless contains important hints for how a philosophical questioning of technoscience could be practiced, such as: paying attention to language (to the words that we use) or taking a step backwards (towards the moment of commencement of the type of rationality at work). For Heidegger, method means: being underway, and a philosophical method must be developed along the way. After discussing Heidegger’s views on method, both in his earlier and in his later writings, three dimensions of contemporary technoscience will be addressed, namely: technoscientific objects (research artefacts), technoscientific sites (laboratories as unworldly environments) and technoscience as a global enterprise. In the final section, the question will be addressed whether and how a critical encounter between philosophy and technoscience is possible. (shrink)

The project behind this and the following1 special issue of Angelaki first assumed concrete form in the shape of a three-day international conference, “Continental Philosophy and the Sciences,” hel...

The essay explores the possibilities afforded by Heidegger’s thought for addressing the question of the reality of the phenomenon within the framework of the theory of quantum mechanics. Heidegger’s conception of the task of phenomenology is seen to provide a crucial axis along which the phenomenon of quantum physics can be connected both to its appearance in language and to the historical unfolding of the horizon that grounds the possibility of an encounter with the phenomenon itself. The determinations of this (...) horizon, i.e. of the order of “phenomenality” that makes the appearance of the phenomenon possible, are analyzed in the instance of quantum mechanics, and compared to the ones presented by Heidegger in his considerations concerning the appearing of the phenomenon in Aristotelian and classical physics. The three main directives that structure the analysis of this order of phenomenality are the determinations of the conditions of experience of the phenomenon, of the function of language that makes this appearance possible, and of the subject function that constitutes, and is in turn constituted by, this experience. (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)

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)

Although true in some aspects, the suggested characterization of today’s science as a dichotomy between traditional science and data-driven science misses some of the nuance, complexity, and possibility that exists between the two positions. Part of the problem is the claim that Data Science works without theories. There are many theories behind the data that are used in science. However, for data science, the only theories that matter are those in mathematics, statistics, and computer science. In this conceptual paper, we (...) add two other philosophy of science tenets, experiments and data, to the discussion to create a more nuanced view of how data science uses theories. Following Ihde’s concept of technoscience and the incessant quest for more precision, magnification, and resolution, we argue that technology-driven science created a need for more technology-driven science, culminating in data science. Further, we adapt Hacking and Galison’s views on physics to argue that data science is also an experimental science, which uses data objects in experiments. Drawing from Heelan, we called these objects “data-objects-for-knowing”. Finally, we conclude that data science is a science to study artificially created phenomena—a science to study the data manipulated by the equations and operations of AI. It disregards the connections between data and the real world that were carefully built by the theories from other sciences. In the experiments of data science, data are the world itself. The knowledge created by data science is purposely disconnected from any theory from other sciences; it is a knowledge for the sake of itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: In Die Frage nach dem Ding, Martin Heidegger characterizes Galileo as an important transitional figure in the struggle to replace the Aristotelian conception of nature with that of Newton. However, Heidegger only attends to Galileo’s modernity and not to those Aristotelian elements still discernible in Galileo’s work. This article fleshes out both aspects in Galileo in light of Heidegger’s discussion. It concludes by arguing that the lacuna in Heidegger’s account of Galileo is the consequence of Heidegger’s own self-conscious modernity (...) − a modernity that he slyly hints at in a remark he makes in FD concerning Galileo and Democritus.RÉSUMÉ : Dans Die Frage nach dem Ding, Martin Heidegger qualifie Galilée de figure importante dans la lutte pour remplacer la conception aristotélicienne de la nature par celle de Newton. Toutefois, Heidegger examine seulement les traits modernes de Galilée et non ceux qui ressemblent à Aristote. Cet article précise ces deux aspects à partir de la discussion dans Die Frage nach dem Ding. Il conclut par l’affirmation que la lacune dans le portrait de Galilée est la conséquence de la modernité consciente de Heidegger lui-même — une modernité à laquelle il fait allusion dans une remarque concernant Galilée et Démocrite. (shrink)

If we examine the discussion between Carnap and Heidegger about metaphysics, we can easily see that epistemological, logical, and ontological issues were at the forefront of that debate, whereas at...

Continental philosophy of science has developed alongside mainstream analytic philosophy of science. But where continental approaches are inclusive, analytic philosophies of science are not–excluding not merely Nietzsche’s philosophy of science but Gödel’s philosophy of physics. As a radicalization of Kant, Nietzsche’s critical philosophy of science puts science in question and Nietzsche’s critique of the methodological foundations of classical philology bears on science, particularly evolution as well as style (in art and science). In addition to the critical (in Mach, Nietzsche, Heidegger (...) but also Husserl just to the extent that continental philosophy of science tends to depart from a reflection on the crisis of foundations), other continental philosophies of science include phenomenology (Husserl, Bachelard, Merleau‐Ponty, etc.) and hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, Heelan, etc.), especially incorporating history of science (Nietzsche, Mach, Duhem, Butterfield, Feyerabend, etc.). Examples are drawn from the philosophy of sciences (chemistry, geology, and biology) other than physics. (shrink)