I present the arguments of Gabriel Marcel which are intended to overcome the potentially negative impact of technology on the human. Marcel is concerned with forgetting or rejecting human nature. His perspective is metaphysical. He is concerned with the attitude of the "mere technician" who is so immersed in technology that the values which promote him as an authentic person with human dignity are discredited, omitted, denied, minimized, overshadowed, or displaced. He reviews the various losses in ontological values which curtail (...) the full realization of the human person in his dignity. The impact of technology leads too often to a loss of the sense of the mystery of being and self, authenticity and integrity, the concrete and the existential, truth and dialogue, freedom and lover, humanity and community, fidelity and creativity, the natural and the transcendent, commitment and virtue, respect of the self and responsiveness to others, and especially of the spiritual and the sacred. Thus, the task of the philosopher is to be a watchman, un veilleur, on the alert for a hopeful resolution of the human predicament. (shrink)

A very readable, scholarly, and provocative book by Louis Dupré gives a new interpretation and meaning to the passage to modernity. Dupre gives a fascinating hermeneutic analysis of the creative revolution achieved by the early and late humanists and thinkers of the Renaissance in rethinking reality in terms beyond the ancient and medieval ontotheological synthesis of God, the human, and the Cosmos. The book analyzes how the break leading into modernity took place at that time and prior to the second (...) modern revolution--the Enlightenment, when the transcendent component was disowned in favor of the human subject. Later, both were deprioritized in favor of the cosmos. (shrink)