Lorenzo De Stefano

Only a catastrophe could save us. Being-towards-death in the era of the ecological crisis The aim of this essay is to develop a theoretical background to approach the problem of climate change, starting from the question of death as theorized by Heidegger in his masterpiece Being and Time. In order to do that, I start from the concept of the Anthropocene in relation with the problem of human and natural history and introducing the Heideggerian concept of history as epiphenomenon of temporal structure of the Dasein. On this basis, the being-toward-death, the as exposed in the abovementioned work, will help to provide a hermeneutic criterion to approach an ethic of the catastrophe.

The problem of technology cannot be separated from the problem of man, his nature and his determination. This essay surveys the nexus man-technology in the philosophical perspective of G. Anders, hybridized with André Leroi-Gourhan’s empiric anthropology. Anders philosophical concepts such as promethean gap and Weltfremdheit are investigated following the line of human evolution, that set itself as a process of gradual exoneration from nature in which technology and language play an essential role.