A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Notes

1. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, p. 58; see also E. Husserl (1969). Formal and Transcendental Logic. Trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff), p. 234: “experienced being ‘is there,’ and is there as what it is, with the whole content and mode of being that experience itself, by the performance going on in its intentionality, attributes to it.” See also Inwood, M. (1999). A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 159–60; and Moran, D. (2000). An Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge), p. 6.

2. Radicalizing Husserl’s project, Heidegger argued that Husserl’s understanding of consciousness as an immanent sphere of intentionality was itself an example of a theoretical model inappropriate to the phenomenon it seeks to describe. Seeking to eradicate Husserl’s residual Cartesianism, Heidegger proposes his notion of Dasein or “being-here” – i.e., the making-intelligible of the place in which one finds oneself – as a maximally neutral description of the phenomenon that Husserl’s “consciousness” seeks to describe.

3. “Mental representation” is a doubly dubious concept phenomenologically, because I do not typically experience representations at all, let alone as taking place in my “mind,” as if consciousness were some sort of container for representations of a world exterior to consciousness. As Husserl already recognized, “experience is not an opening through which a world, existing prior to ...