Matthew Stripling

BARBA-KAY, Antón. A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. x + 295 pp. Cloth, $29.99—This is a truly remarkable book, brimming with extensive research, penetrating insight, and poetic beauty. The book’s main theme is the cultural revolution caused by digital technology. As the book shows, we have always been shaped by our tools. With new ways of doing come new ways of being human. In this way, the digital revolution is continuous with previous technological revolutions. But Barba-Kay argues that digital technology also represents a new, perhaps even final, stage in the history of technology. What makes digital technology so powerful—and so dangerous—is that it is a natural technology.

SEDGWICK, Sally. Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. x + 194 pp. Cloth, $80.00—This book is a compact, tightly focused, approachable yet subtle interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of history. It dispels the idealist caricature sometimes encountered in histories of philosophy and instead argues for a more empirically minded Hegel who is deeply sensitive to the contingency and finitude of human existence. The book’s central objective is to show that according to Hegel reason is indebted to its past, that it is shaped by, anchored in, bound by the past. This means that all our rational concepts, both theoretical and practical, emerge from and are shaped by contingent forces largely outside our control. In this way, Hegel calls into question a certain (Kantian) conception of rational autonomy in which reason is a priori and wholly independent of empirical reality. Instead, according to Sedgwick, Hegel paves the way for the historical materialism of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, since he acknowledges that our concepts depend upon and change with history. Sedgwick maintains that this does not mean that, for Hegel, reason is reduced to nature. According to Sedgwick, Hegel is not a naturalist, historicist, or positivist. A gap remains between the is and the ought such that reason is, as she says, an “unusual combination” or “hybrid mixture” of the empirical and the a priori (9, 13). . . .