Ecophenomenology and technology as Pharmakon: repairing our relationship to the world according to Abram and Stiegler

• Autor(a) principal: Daly, Nicholas Joseph
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/50346
• topic: David Abram; Filosofia; Bernard Stiegler; Domínio/Área Científica::Humanidades::Filosofia, Ética e Religião

This dissertation reads the works of two contemporary philosophers together in order to build new and synthetic conversations about nature, technology, artistic expression, and consciousness. The first philosopher, David Abram, is a pioneer of 'ecophenomenology', which brings the phenomenological writings of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty into dialogue with contemporary ecological concepts and environmental philosophy. Abram argues that humans have a fundamental psychological need for sensuous, bodily, and reciprocal encounters with the natural world (what he terms the 'more-than-human' world). The second philosopher is Bernard Stiegler, known as a famous philosopher of technology and former student of Jacques Derrida. Using a very broad definition of technology, Stiegler came to notoriety for defining humans as 'always, already technological', arguing that our consciousness has always been shaped by technology. His later work explores how new technologies limit human spirit while simultaneously creating unprecedented opportunities for self-expression, artistic expression, and political realities. By reading these philosophers together, the dissertation argues that despite differences in academic discipline, genre, language, and cultural context, these thinkers address the same basic issues about human consciousness which opens possibilities for environmentalists, artists, and technologists to address global climate chaos, industrial populism, and disruptive technological innovation. By turning the authors’ concepts back unto philosophy itself, the thesis also speaks to the ecological and pharmacological dynamics of philosophical encounter.