Of all the writings Heidegger published after Being and Time, "The Question Concerning Technology" (1950) is surely the most widely taught and discussed. It is not hard to understand why. Since 1950, our dependence on technical devices, and the environmental consequences of tech- nological manipulation of nature, have only become more oppressive, and Heidegger's essay provides an intuitively powerful expression of the uneasiness we feel. All the same, the text is one of Heidegger's most obscure, and so it is not easy to assess what Heidegger says about technology and his stated hope of establishing a "free relation" to it through a "thinking" that is other than philosophy. How should we take the measure of a kind of thinking that seems to shun traditional measures like reason and logic for one that has been forgotten since the time of Parmenides? This is the challenge of Heidegger's approach to technology.
Steven Crowell is Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor of Humanities (Emeritus) and Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus) at Rice University. A fourth-generation Californian, he received his BA from UC Santa Cruz in 1974, an MA from Northern Illinois University in 1976, and a PhD from Yale in 1981. After teaching at Fordham for a year, he moved to Rice in 1983. He is currently developing a normativity-first account of reason which brings together issues in philosophy of mind, meta-ethics, and metaphysics. Crowell does not own a smart-phone, has no presence on social media, and has an index finger that touch
screens refuse to recognize as one.