The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 12, 2007

Philosophical Trends in the XXth Century

Hannah Arendt: The Work of Technology

Tracing the historical and theoretical distinctions between labor and work from the early Greeks to the present, Hannah Arendt presents a compelling analysis of the nature of our technological crisis. Western culture has been formed through a dominant understanding of human existence and instrumental thinking that have inevitably led to a crisis in the way we understand ourselves and relate to the world. Owing much to her contemporary, Martin Heidegger, Arendt sees the roots of the environmental crisis to be embedded in our inheritance of thinking and building.