Eldred The Digital Cast of Being

Metaphysics, Mathematics, Cartesianism, Cybernetics, Capitalism, Communication
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-3-11-031947-7
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 137 Seiten

We live today surrounded by countless digital gadgets and navigate through cyberspace as if it were the most natural thing in the world. This digital cast of being, however, comes from a long history of philosophical and mathematical thinking in which the Western will to productive power over movement has attained its consummation. This study traces the digital dissolution of beings from the Pythagoreans, Plato and Aristotle's ontology via Cartesian mathematical science through to our digitized economy and telecommunications. With an appendix reinterpreting quantum mechanical indeterminacy phenomenologically.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Eldred, Michael

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Angewandte Ethik & Soziale Verantwortung Medienethik
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Metaphysik, Ontologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften Medienphilosophie, Medienethik, Medienrecht
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Phänomenologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Table of contents;5
2;1. Approaching the question concerning digital being;9
3;2. Number and being;15
3.1;2.1. Aristotle’s ontology of number and geometric figure;15
3.2;2.2. Heidegger’s review of Aristotle’s thinking on modes of connectedness from discreteness to continuity;17
3.3;2.3. The crucially important analogy between logos and number for the appropriation of beings: arithmological knowledge;22
3.4;2.4. Prelogical access to beings in their being;23
3.5;2.5. The essentially ‘illogical’ nature of time;26
3.6;2.6. Bridging the gulf between the discrete and the continuous;28
3.7;2.7. Cartesian rules for an algebra of magnitudes in general as foundation for the modern mathematical sciences;30
3.8;2.8. The calculative assault on movement and time through infinitesimal calculus;33
3.9;2.9. Time and movement in Aristotle’s thinking;36
4;3. Digital beings;45
4.1;3.1. The appropriation of the truth of beings, digital interpretation of world-movement and its outsourcing through executable, cyberneticmachine-code;45
4.2;3.2. Digital beings arbitrarily reproducible in the electromagnetic medium;50
4.3;3.3. Loss of place in and connectedness of the electromagnetic network;51
4.4;3.4. The forgetting encouraged by digital code and automated cybernetic control in the robotic age;53
4.5;3.5. The onto-theological nexus in abstract thinking, cybernetic control and arithmological access tomovement and time;56
5;4. Spatiality of the electromagnetic medium;59
5.1;4.1. A stampable mass;59
5.2;4.2. Dasein’s spatial being-in-the-world: approximation and orientation;60
5.3;4.3. Abstraction from bodily experience in cyberspace through reduction of place to numeric co-ordinates;64
5.4;4.4. Dreaming in cyberspace;65
5.5;4.5. Inside and outside the digital electromagnetic medium;66
5.6;4.6. Spatiality of Dasein with regard to the global electromagnetic medium;67
5.7;4.7. The global network: geometric or purely arithmetic;70
5.8;4.8. Difference between Aristotelean/Platonic and digital ontology and the latter’s specifically totalizing nature - Merely an oppressive over-presence of digital beings?;72
6;5. Digital technology and capital;77
6.1;5.1. Two exemplary industries at the forefront of the digitization of beings: telecommunications and banking;77
6.2;5.2. Globalization driven from afar by the digital casting of being;80
6.3;5.3. Does the essence of capital correspond to the essence of technology?;81
6.4;5.4. The casting of the totality of beings as valuable and capital as value power play;82
6.5;5.5. Time in a capitalist economy;84
6.6;5.6. The global power play measured by money-value and its movement;87
6.7;5.7. Recovery of the three-dimensional, complexly interwoven social time of who-interplay;91
6.8;5.8. Fetishism;92
6.9;5.9. A capitalist economy is not merely complex, but simply ontologically playful;94
6.10;5.10. The capitalist value-play an essential limitation to cybernetic technology;97
6.11;5.11. Recapitulation: Digitization of the economy;100
7;6. A global communication network?;105
7.1;6.1. What is communication in a global network?;105
7.2;6.2. Communication among digital beings themselves;108
7.3;6.3. The intermeshing of the movement of digital beings in the global network and the movement of value as capital;108
7.4;6.4. An alternative message from outer cyberspace;109
8;7. Appendix: A demathematizing phenomenological view of quantum mechanical indeterminacy;115
8.1;7.1. The Heisenberg indeterminacy principle reinterpreted;115
8.2;7.2. The necessity of introducing three-dimensional, ecstatic time;124
8.3;7.3. The phenomena of movement and indeterminacy in relation to continuity, discreteness and limit;130
8.4;7.4. A mundane example to help see movement in threedimensional time;135