This page contains links to items on the internet about sceince and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).
The links below are ordered chronologically with the most recent additions at the top.
If the scientist's description of nature is true, then the word of the scientist becomes final. Any other description of reality would have to displace that of modern science, by demonstrating that the scientific description is wrong and its own correct. The real problem, therefore, is not with the understanding that modern science correctly represents nature, but with this restricted conception of nature as correctly representable in only one fashion.
No minimizing is intended, however, of the great benefits that can and do flow from the 'calculative thinking' of scientific inquiry. Nevertheless, Heidegger foresaw that such benefits could have a human cost, for they affect the way cultural life teaches people to be human and communicates to them the sense of the wholeness, integrity, and goodness of the world, the self, and human communities.
From the start Heidegger saw the scientific culture of modernity as the 'Age of the World Picture' in which the 'real' is constituted by the theoretical representations of modern science rather than as a revelation of what constitutes the foundational structure of what is, or what Heidegger called, 'ontology'.
From Metaphysical Review, Vol. 2, Dec. 1, 1995, No. 5.
Send additions, corrections or whatever to that_pete (at) yahoo.com or mail a msg from this form. Don't forget to put your comments in context (what page, what you are going on about, etc.)! Include your email address so that I can reply.