Philosophy Today

Volume 65, Issue 2, Spring 2021

Philosophy after Automation

Howard Caygill
Pages 325-338

Heidegger and the Automatic Earth Image

The article reflects on Heidegger’s admission in the 1966 Spiegel Interview that he was shocked by images of the Earth taken from space. It asks what these images were and shows that far from testifying to the encounter of planetary technics and the modern human they evince the meeting between an improvised automated technology of image capture and contingency.