Juliet Floyd

This book presents a wide range of thinking about how the discipline of philosophy has engaged and might in the future engage with the profound questions raised by rapidly shifting methods of communication. Although social media and telecommunications have dramatically altered the daily lives of people, and no technology has enjoyed the same rapid success as that of the mobile phone, the philosophical underpinnings and consequences of these changes have been insufficiently explored. Clustered in six sections, this book addresses major questions of interest to the thoughtful professional. Section I considers ontology: How should we consider emerging media and what are the categories through which we can organize and understand this new realm of social reality. Section II investigates human nature and its relationship to the social transformations that are occurring through new media. It also considers and compares historical methods of communication such as paper. In Section III, questions of time, narrative voice, and emotions are assessed in relation to emerging media. General issues concerning emergence of meaning, philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and agency are the focus of Section IV. Symbols and speech acts—including the philosophical ramifications of the communication process itself as viewed through emerging technologies—represent the key concerns of Section V. Section VI probes various interpersonal, institutional, and political/power dimensions stemming from new systems of communication. A coda points forward to outstanding open questions, calling for further research to be done. The book represents a seminal contribution assembling original thoughts from both leading and rising scholars of the field.

BOOK REVIEWS 475 mean the traditional notion of arche, i.e., a present homogeneous origin/kingdom" . The significance of this Ursprung is that of the event of world pretheoretically yielding itself itself and things . Van Buren's basic contention is that Heidegger's demythologized question about being in the early Freiburg period is overtaken by remythologizing tendencies, from the existential-transcendental configuration of the question in Being and Time to various mythopoetic reconfigurations. The latter developments are at odds with Heidegger's earlier Freiburg elaboration of the concrete historicity and the personal, lived, anarchic character of the question of being. One intriguing and far-reaching implication of van Buren's interpretation is that Being and Time amounts to an Abweg, a mistaken by-way, from which Heidegger, despite the Kehre, never fully recovers. The choice of the meta- phor of an Abwegis revealing and, in this connection, perhaps not entirely felicitous. For, if Being and Time is truly "off track," then there is presumably a right way and it must be possible to demonstrate both that right way and the nature of Being and Time's deviation from it. The terms of this crucial argument have been expertly set by van Buren in his monumental..