Heidegger and the Age of Information: Towards an Ontology of Life

What is thinking? What is life? And how are we to live? Heidegger and the Age of Information: Towards an Ontology of Life asks to what extent these timeless questions have to be reformulated in a world shaped by globalization, biotechnology and surveillance.

Influenced by Martin Heidegger's later thinking and Reiner Schurmann's interpretation of Heidegger, Charles Bonner's original and timely study uses Foucault's critical ontology of ourselves to better understand the place assigned to life in the 21st century. By using an ontological framework, Bonner draws on metaphysical arguments and principles and explores what fundamental "theory of being" underlies our age of information. In search of the basic ontological assumptions that structure our reality, he investigates the decisive features and traits shaping increasingly precarious world historical situation.

Such an approach presents a creative and critical interpretation of information; one that reflects on our understanding of life and its diminished place in information age. As Heidegger showed, our mastery of nature does not extend to being itself. We do not determine the shape of our reality according to our needs or demands: being manifests itself and we respond. Heidegger and the Age of Information presents a provocative investigation into the question of being and an important new reading of Schurmann.

Charles Bonner is Visiting Lecturer of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, USA and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Providence College, USA.