Michael Eldred Knihy

Upon its publication in Germany in 1983, this author's book stirred both critical acclaim and consternation, attracting a wide readership. He finds cynicism the dominant mode in contemporary culture, in personal and institutional settings; his book is both a history of the impulse and an investigation of its role today, among those whose earlier hopes for social change have crumbled and faded away.

"This little book takes on a series of questions posed by M.G. Michael and Katina Michael. The responses are not conclusive, but rather intended to make the profound challenges presented by the Digital Age visible. These include: How does consciousness differ from psyche? What is the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and the mind? How are visions of transhumanism to be assessed? Why is it important to distinguish between 'what' and 'who'? Who are we to become in the cyberworld? How do the cyberworld and the gainful game of capitalism intermesh? Are ubiquitous surveillance, Überveillance and the loss of privacy inevitable in the Digital Age? Are questions of ethics questions of power?" -- Publisher

Challenging the linear perception of time, Eldred presents a pre-spatial, three-dimensional understanding that reshapes human identity and existence. This alternative view allows for a deeper engagement with our temporal experience, fostering a sense of belonging and a more profound connection to movement and the psyche. However, this engagement is complicated by societal constructs of value, which often dictate our actions and interactions. Eldred's exploration invites readers to reconsider their relationship with time and the underlying forces shaping their lives.

This book explores the evolution of digital existence, tracing its roots from Pythagorean and Platonic thought to Cartesian science, and its impact on today's digital economy and telecommunications. It offers a philosophical examination of how our understanding of being has transformed in the digital age, including a reinterpretation of quantum indeterminacy.

The cyberworld fast rolling in and impacting every aspect of human living on the globe today presents an enormous challenge to humankind. It is taken up by the media following current events through to all kinds of natural- and social-scientific discourses. Digitized technoscience develops at a breakneck pace in all areas accompanied by sociological analysis. What is missing is a philosophical response genuinely posing the basic ontological question: What is a digital being's peculiar mode of being? The present study offers a digital ontology that analyzes the dissolution of beings into bit-strings, driven by mathematized science. The mathematization of knowledge reaches back to Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, and continues with Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz. Western knowledge from its inception has always been driven by an unbridled will to efficient-causal power over all kinds of movement and change. This historical trajectory culminates in the universal Turing machine that enables efficient, automated, algorithmic control over the movement of digital beings through the cyberworld. The book fills in the ontological foundations underpinning this brave new cyberworld and interrogates them, especially by questioning the millennia-old conception of 1D-linear time. An alternative ontology of movement arises, based on a radically alternative conception of 3D-time.

How are core social phenomena to be understood as modes of being? This book offers an alternative approach to social ontology. Recent interest in social ontology on the part of mainstream philosophy and the social sciences presupposes from the outset that the human being can be cast as a conscious subject whose intentionality can be collective. By contrast, the present study insistently poses the crucial question of who the human being is and how they sociate as whos. Such whoness is a clean-cut departure from the venerable tradition of questioning whatness (quidditas, essence) in philosophical thinking. Casting human being hermeneutically as whoness opens up new insights into how human beings sociate in interplays of mutual estimation that are simultaneously social power plays. Hitherto, the ontology of social power in all its various guises, has only ever been implicit. This book makes it explicit. The kind of social power prevalent in capitalist societies is that of the reified value embodied in commodities, money, capital, & co. Reified value itself is constituted through an interplay of mutual estimation among things that reflects back on the power interplay among whos. In this way a new critique of capitalism becomes possible.

Freedom, value, power, justice, government, legitimacy are major themes of the present inquiry. It explores the ontological structure of human beings associating with one another, the basic phenomenon of society. We human beings strive to become who we are in an ongoing power interplay with each other. Thinkers called as witnesses include Plato, Aristotle, Anaximander, Protagoras, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Schumpeter, Hayek, Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, et al.

Marx und Heidegger - zwei ungeliebte, große Söhne des deutschen Geistes. Vor allem die offizielle, universitäre, deutsche Philosophie tut sich mit dem denkerischen Erbe der beiden sehr schwer. Im Zeitalter der anrollenden Flutwelle digitaler Technik und der Globalisierung des Kapitalismus ist es an der Zeit, Marx und Heidegger radikal zusammenzudenken.