On the status of technology in Heidegger’s “Being and Time”
On the status of technology in Heidegger’s “Being and Time”

Summary/Abstract: The major importance attributed by Heidegger to the ontological status of the tool has allowed a series of challenging insights into its role and significance in Being and Time, leading to a questioning upon the very existence of an autonomous phenomenology of technology in it. In what follows, we chose to thematize two of the most recent attempts to evaluate the status of technique in the 1927 Grundwerk. Graham Harman’s approach is situated within the broader context of a recent trend in continental philosophy designated as speculative realism, whereas Peter-Paul Verbeek’s is largely inspired by Don Ihde’s postphenomenological account of technology. The extreme diversification of these two hermeneutic projects renders their treatment on a common ground quite difficult. Nevertheless, we argue that both of them share several common points, despite their fundamental and unbridgeable gap. Harman’s and Verbeek’s efforts to refine the hermeneutic access to one of the most influential sections of Heidegger’s major work exemplify a vivid interest in Being and Time itself, but also in the contemporary phenomenology of technology in general.

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