Abigail Bergeron

In this paper, I undertake a critical analysis of Martin Heidegger’s comparative understanding of man as world-forming and the animal as poor-in-world from his 1929/1930 lectures compiled in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1983/1995). I show that Heidegger imposed this framework onto his reading of Nietzsche’s perspectival realism in Lecture 25 from Nietzsche, Volume One (1961/1991). I argue that Heidegger’s understanding of an absolute metaphysical divide between the essence of humanity and the essence of animality is severely flawed due to its failure to deal with the problem of transposition and emergence. I also argue that Heidegger co-opted Jakob von Uexkull’s work regarding umwelts to suit Heidegger’s narrative of human superiority, making it antithetical to Uexkull’s project of humility. Heidegger claims to be contesting reductionist or mechanist conceptions of life and being. However, in this paper, I argue that his understanding of animal “captivation” and “disinhibiting rings” is merely a regurgitation of these same types of theories. Referencing the works of both Thomas Nagel and Uexkull, I conclude that Heidegger’s justification for the division between man and animal is circular and groundless. Despite his protestations to the contrary, it represents only an argument for anthropocentrism.

In this paper I aim to explore and evaluate the various philosophical methodologies and perspectives on technology, and apply them to questions concerning digital and information communication technologies. My goal is to consider, within the tradition of the philosophy of orientation, what these technologies promise and enable, what they constrain, and what they render impossible. I will argue for a substantivist and existential instrumentalist understanding insofar as these technologies represent both a totalizing force and the embodiment of human needs and desires.

Here I seek to examine Descartes’s arguments for the existence of God in the “Third Meditation” and the “Fifth Meditation” with that of Camus’s concept of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus. I will argue that considering the existential skepticism and agnosticism in Camus’s conception of the absurd provides an important contemporary perspective on the question of finding certainty without God (or meaning) and supports Descartes’s concern, that one struggles to have stability or certainty without God.