This book offers a comprehensive survey of Heidegger's ideas on technology and modernity.The scale of some environmental problems, such as climate change and human overpopulation, exceed any one nation state and require either co-ordinated governance or a shift in the culture of modernity. "Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change" examines this crisis alongside Heidegger's ideas about technology and modernity. Heidegger suggests that refocusing on the primary questions that make it meaningful to be human - the question of Being - could create the means for alternative discourses that both challenge and sidestep the attempt for total surveillance and total control. He advocates recognising the problematic relationship humanity has with the environment and reinventing new trajectories of understanding ourselves and our planet.This book aims to properly integrate environment into philosophy and political theory, offering a constructive critique of modernity with some helpful suggestions for establishing a readiness for blue sky scenarios for the future.The book lays out the practical implications of Heidegger's ideas and engages with philosophy of technology, considering the constraints and the potentials of technology on culture and environment.
Ruth Irwin is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
1. Globalisation and the Environment; 2. Climate Change and the Crisis of Philosophy; 3. Social Conscience and Global Market; 4. Categories, Environmental Indicators, and the Enlightenment Market; 5. Pessimistic Realism or Total Management; 6. Population Statistics and Modern Governmentality; 7. Pragmatism; 8. Heidegger, the Origin and the Finitude of Civilisation; 9. Technology and the Kultur Late Modernity; 10. Embodied Subjectivity and the Critique of Modernity; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
"Ruth Irwin's Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change is a superbly written and theoretically coherent introduction to the most pressing issues that face our modernity... It is a book that should be widely read." Professor Michael A. Peters, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA"
