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A Musical Retrieve Of Heidegger, Nietzsche, And Technology: Cadence, Concinnity, And Playing Brass, Babette Babich Jan 1993

A Musical Retrieve Of Heidegger, Nietzsche, And Technology: Cadence, Concinnity, And Playing Brass, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

A discussion of Heidegger's analysis of the essence of modern technology as a version of what Heidegger names Nietzsche's highest will to power read together with Heidegger's understanding of Nietzsche's statement of the nihilism of our day. It is argued that Heidegger's philosophic questioning of technology is inevitably foreclosed by his stylized, hermetic reading of Nietzsche's expression of the will to power. Thus it is necessary to read Heidegger's critique of technology in the light of rather than against Nietzsche's critique of science and culture. This entails a reading of Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche against Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche. But …


Functional Explanation And Metaphysical Individualism, Justin Schwartz Jan 1993

Functional Explanation And Metaphysical Individualism, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

A number of (present or former) analytical Marxists, such as Jon Elster, have argued that functional explanation has almost no place in the social sciences. (Although the discussion is framed in terms of a debate among analytical Marxists, the point is quite general, and Marxism is used for illustrative purposes.) Functional explanation accounts for what is to be explained by reference to its function; thus, sighted organism have eyes because eyes enable them to see. Elster and other critics of functional explanation argue that this pattern of explanation is inconsistent with "methodological individualism," the idea, as they understand it, that …