Overview

Taking the Heideggerian critical ontology of technology as its base, this volume looks at postcolonial modernization and development in the global south as the worldwide expansion of the western metaphysical understanding of reality. We live today in an increasingly globalizing technological society that Martin Heidegger described in the middle of the last century as ‘the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man.’ Consequent upon this cultural-intellectual globalization, the ahistorical, violent, individualistic, calculative and capitalistic logic of the metaphysics of technology is permeating the life-world, even of the world’s poorest peoples, in ways they could neither choose nor control. This volume questions the political ethics and justice of post-war development discourse in the light of the egalitarian aims of modern societies, cultural freedom of communities and nations and the ecological limits of the planet. The final chapters discuss the alternative proposal of development as various conceptions of good life and equitable human flourishing amidst equally flourishing non-human life and non-living beings. This unique volume is the first book-length treatment of the ontology of modernization and development in the global south from a Heideggerian stance.

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Siby K. George is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India. A Master’s degree graduate from the University of Madras, Chennai, he holds a doctorate in philosophy from the North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India. He has previously been Lecturer at the National Institute of Technology, Silchar, and before that, Coordinator of the UNFPA supported Population and Development Education project of the Government of India at the State Resource Centre, NEHU, Shillong. His area of research is twentieth century Continental Philosophy and he studies development, pain, community, environment, subjectivity and so on from a phenomenological point of view, which is not inattentive to non-western contexts. His papers include “Birth of the subject: The ethics of monitoring development programmes” in Journal of Global Ethics (2008); “Development and the other: On the bearing of egalitariansensibility on development” in Economic and Political Weekly (2010); and “Imagining post science: Heidegger and development communication” in Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture (2013).

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