Research
From Ontology to Anthropotechnics: Humanism, Media and Domestication of Being
In this essay, we intend to approach how Peter Sloterdijk relates to the thinking of Martin Heidegger when questioning the humanist definition of man and proposing the notion of Anthropotechnics. To this end, the article begins by exposing Heidegger's conception of Technique and Humanism, and Ernst Jünger's influence on this issue. Then, when dealing with the question of being and ontological difference, the peculiar treatment that Sloterdijk offers to the ontological question is presented by articulating the history of being with a kind of genealogy of the clearing, bringing to the foreground certain intuitions of Friedrich Nietzsche about the beginnings of the human species. To conclude, Sloterdijk's thinking is developed, culminating in what he calls ontoanthropology, a notion presented in the work La Domestication de l’Être, and possible applications to issues related to biotechnology and contemporary media - which allows us to think a machinic history of being under the doubly complex bias of anthropology and ontology.
Social Sciences, Complexity and Sociology of the Present in Edgar Morin
The article intends to revisit the contribution of the french thinker Edgar Morin (1921-) to the construction of a plural and open method of research in Social Sciences. We will have as theoretical-epistemological basis the sociology of the present, an approach of social phenomena developed by the author during three decades, from the 1940s to the 1970s, constituting the matrix of complex thinking. The present work defends the idea that the central categories of the present sociology, such as phenomenon, crisis and event, as well as the so-called living method of empirical research are still fundamental today in the sense of proposing an opening of the social sciences to phenomena increasingly more complex and multidimensional. This presupposes the researcher's subjective and objective engagement, narrative ability, and sensitivity to grasp revealing detail.
