Age Of Techniques Research Articles

¿Existencia auténtica en la época de la técnica?

En sus escritos tempranos Heidegger plantea que la existencia fluctúa entre un modo de ser auténtico e inauténtico. Una de las diferencias que se establece entre estos modos de la existencia consiste en la manera en la que se experimenta el tiempo en uno y otro. El presente artículo pretende proponer un enlace entre las nociones de temporalidad heideggeriana y, a la luz de dicho enlace, establecer los rasgos que la existencia auténtica podría adquirir en la época de la técnica. Para lograr este propósito, retomaré una cita de Borges con el fin de esbozar cómo podría pensarse una relación entre las dos nociones de temporalidad. Una vez esbozada la relación, se revisarán algunas de las tesis heideggerianas sobre la época de la técnica que nos ofrezcan las herramientas para reflexionar acerca de los matices que adopta la existencia auténtica en nuestra época. En ese sentido, sugiero que la serenidad puede concebirse como la manera en la que la existencia auténtica actúa. La serenidad no es pasividad del hombre frente a la técnica, sino un modo de responder al acontecer del ser, una manera genuina de actuar acorde a la época.

Out of the Cave of the Cyclops

ABSTRACTDespite the deep respect that readers continue to discover in the great twentieth-century texts of hermeneutics, the academic career and reputation of Gadamer's philosophical version has fallen into the shadows; it seems a long time since the heady days that it could claim universality as an intellectual koiné. This decline is a genuine shame, because at the peak of its reputation it held out the promise of returning the power of humanistic judgement to greater recognition against the domination of method in an age of technique. Gadamer teased out the unreflective meta-logic of the Western traditions of prudence as an alternative paradigm and powerful antidote to our rationalist excesses. This paper offers one strategy for salvaging that effort and recuperating an important role for philosophical hermeneutics in the academy.

Imaginary scenarios: Literature and Democracy in Europe

The main focus in this paper is on the European public intellectual: literary writers presenting their critical ideas and imaginaries on society, and critiquing the (dis)function and (dis)agreement in politics. The concept ‘imaginary scenario’ will be implemented to investigate imaginative scripts and settings constructed by authors to visualize democratic structures, as such commenting on political and social events and ideas. Two European writers from different nation-states, the French M. Houellebecq (Submission) and the Portugese Gonçalo M. Tavares (Learning to pray in the age of technique) build their novels around a Vorstellung of how (future) individuals and people in power could act and speak. Similarities and differences in these author’s strategies and visionaries will be examined. The ‘imaginary scenario’ is based on Charles Taylor (2004) and Elena Esposito (2007), and as surreal-perspective evidently tells something about the experience of the present. Our claim is that these European writers have to be considered in a critical context beyond the save haven of autonomy: in their novels they address the reader as citizen and invite him to reflect on democratic practices. Thus, these European scenarists prompt us to reconsider what it means to live in the EU and to reflect on its political realities and perspectives.

Ernst Jünger and the problem of nihilism in the age of total war

As a singular witness and actor of the tumultuous 20th century, Ernst Jünger remains a controversial and enigmatic figure known above all for his vivid autobiographical accounts of experience in the trenches of the First World War. This article will argue that throughout his entire oeuvre, from personal diaries to novels and essays, he never ceased to grapple with what he viewed as the central question of the age, namely that of the problem of nihilism and the means to overcome it. Inherited from Nietzsche’s diagnosis of Western civilization in the late 19th century, to which he added an acute observation of the particular role of technology within it, Jünger would employ this lens to make sense of the seemingly absurd industrial slaughter of modern war and herald the advent of a new voluntarist and bellicist order that was to imminently sweep away timorous and decadent bourgeois societies obsessed with security and self-preservation. Jünger would ultimately see his expectations dashed, including by the forms of rule that National Socialism would take, and eventually retreated into a reclusive quietism. Yet he never abandoned his central problematique of nihilism, developing it further in exchanges with Martin Heidegger after the Second World War. And for all the ways in which he may have erred, his life-long struggle with meaning in the age of technique and its implications for war and security continues to make Jünger a valuable interlocutor of the present.

Relational Dynamics of MSM Population

The aim of present study was to cast a glance on the dynamics of interpersonal relationships of Men who have sex with Men (MSM). Sample of 50 MSM were selected through purposive sampling technique age ranged from 16 to 40 years from Bharosa (Trust on MSM). Thematic Apperception Test (Indian adaption by Dr. Uma Roy Chowdhary) was administered on the participants. Result revealed that conflicting interpersonal relationships of MSM with their significant others specially father.