[OPEN ACCESS] Renxiang Liu, “Prescience and Patience: A Reassessment of Technoscience in Light of Heidegger”

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Abstract: In this paper, I respond to contemporary debates on technoscience by asking about how science and technology are fusible. This directs me to Heidegger’s critique of calculative thinking in modern technology and science: it turns things into objects of representation so that they may be ordered and manipulated. The unilateral availability of objects for the subject is achieved by attending to what Heidegger called the “mathematical” in things, i.e., conceptual schemes pre‑delineated before encountering things. To imagine an alternative, I transform the phenomenological account of temporality into a thing‑centric account of the unfolding of things at their own rhythms. What matters is to be patient for such rhythms, to enter a relation of mutual availability. This is in effect becoming the paradigm in contemporary practices of technoscience. The inquiry shows what is problematic (prescience) and what is promising (patience) in the technoscience that is still taking shape in our age.

Table of Contents: Studia Phaenomenologica, Volume 24/ 2024: Phenomenology and the Sciences