AFF ANSWERS

2AC PERMUTATION

Perm solves --- combining tech thought and their ontological reorientation opens spaces for new interpretations of beingSawicki 87 --- Faculty of Philosophy @ Williams College (Jana, “heidegger and foucault: escaping technological nihilism”, Philosophy Social Criticism, 13:155, Sage Publishing)//trepka

Heidegger also responds to the danger of technology by reviving the pre-modern understanding of technology as craft or art (techné). His reference to the Greek definition of techné as a form of poi6sis (bringing forth) may be interpreted in several ways. An interpretation that links his method to Foucault’s would suggest that Heidegger refers to pre-modern technology simply to highlight and circumscribe modern technology and thereby release us from its grasp. But there is also a basis in Heidegger’s writings for interpreting the revival of techné as a call for us to supplement and enrich modern technological ways of revealing with those of an artful praxis that is both technical and contemplative . As Don lhde

has pointed out, artistic technologies reveal objects without reducing them to

serviceability. They defamiliarize the real and utilize imagination to

proliferate the possibilities for how things can appear.2°

The permutation solves --- engaging with the standard operation of technology first is key to effectively engage essencePistone 10 --- Faculty, Writing Program, Rutgers University (Renee, “A Critical Examination of Heidegger’s Thoughts: Technology Places Humanity in Shackles Hindering Our Natural Thinking Process and Our Connection to Being”, http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/cis/article/view/5182/4782)//trepka3.1 Technology and Superficiality Rojcewicz (2006) chronicles the use of language to describe technology and its superficiality in the seminal work entitled, The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger. Clearly, Heidegger desires to carefully articulate his reasoning that technology is an obstacle to humans re-connecting with Being

(Rojcewicz, 2006). Heidegger defines technology utilizing specific words as one scholar suggests, “Heidegger believes that we need to understand the correct or standard definition of

technology before we can grasp the true definition of technology (Godzinski, 2005).

The use of words, or etymological source for words, helps us clarify key definitions for words; therefore, our language serves to explain the meaning of technology, in relation to Being. Certainly, our language demonstrates the superficial nature of technology in our world. We can use language to help describe the complexity and to communicate meanings and definitions. Heidegger looks at the word techne and notes, “for the Greeks, techne meant a revelation of something, an uncovering or a bringing-forth (Heidegger, 1977). Catherine Frances Botha’s, “Heidegger, Technology, and Ecology” explores the concept of techne as knowing (Botha, 2003). Therefore, Botha would likely agree that technology is an essence that is revealing.

Permutation solves --- by combining the frenzied rationality of the plan with a speculative questioning, the essence of technology is brought more effectively to the forefrontHeidegger 77 --- German Philosopher (Martin, “The Question Concerning Technology”, http://simondon.ocular-witness.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/question_concerning_technology.pdf)//trepkaThe poetical brings the true into the splendor of what Plato in the Phaedrus calls to ekphanestaton, that which shines forth most purely. The poetical thoroughly pervades every art, every revealing of coming to presence into

the beautiful. Could it be that the fine arts are called to poetic revealing? Could it be that revealing lays claim to the arts most primally, so that they for their part may expressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew our look into that which grants and our trust in it? Whether art may be granted this highest possibility of its essence in the midst of the extreme danger, no one can tell. Yet we can be astounded.

Before what? Before this other possibility: that the frenziedness of technology may entrench itself everywhere to such an extent that someday, throughout every- thing technological, the essence of technology may come to presence in the coming-to-pass of truth. Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflec- tion upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection on art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth after which we are questioning. Thus questioning, we bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer preoccupa- tion with technology we do not yet experience the coming to presence of tech- nology, that in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the coming to presence of art. Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes. The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For ques- tioning is the piety of thought.

Permutation solves --- combining calculative thought for short-timeframe impacts with meditative thought about the plan solves the impactBeistegui 5 --- Lecturer in Philosophy at Warwick University (Miguel, “The New Heidegger”, http://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/the-new-heidegger/ch5-the-saving-power-of-art)//trepka

Given what we’ve just said in the previous chapter, we understand how there can be – indeed how there must be – a proximity between calculative thinking , as the thinking born of

the forgottenness of being, and the meditative thinking that is directed towards that forgottenness itself.

This is because calculative and meditative thought share a common essence – the essence of truth. Both are children of truth. But whereas the former constitutes the concealment (or the non-essence) of the essence of truth (as unconcealment), the latter directs itself back towards this essence.

Only a very thin line separates the two. Yet this line is also an abyss. Calculative thought, Heidegger insists, is not to be supplanted by meditative thought. It has its own great

usefulness , and remains indispensable : we cannot , and should not, do away with the type of thought that plans and investigates. Similarly, it would be foolish to ‘ attack technology blindly’ , and short-sighted to ‘condemn it as a work of the devil’. We depend on

technical devices, which make our lives more practical and easier. But we should not find ourselves ‘ so shackled to these devices that we fall into bondage with them’.

1AR PERM

Permutation enables us to rethink technology in the face of existential threats --- this solves ontological reorientationNemes 11 (Naomi, “On Martin Heidegger’s “The Memorial Address””’, WordPress, http://naomi-n-nemes.com/about_collegewriting_memorial.html)//trepka

Heidegger is not optimistic about man's ability to escape his thoughtless fate. He sees technology as virtually unstoppable at this point, and is not actually suggesting that technology be abandoned all together, as if he were

some nature idealist in a trite morality play. He is not encouraging man to "destroy the evil computers before they enslave us all." In fact, he sees technology as a potentially

positive thing that "challenges us to ever greater advances " and could be the greatest thing to ever happen to mankind--but only if we learn to put technology into perspective. What Heidegger is calling for is a new autochthony to preserve meditative thinking and so preserve mankind's special nature. He believes this new autochthony can even be rooted in technology . There are two things mankind must do in order to achieve this. The first step Heidegger calls releasement toward things. This is simply putting technology into perspective and not allowing technology to control our lives or define our

inner being. This first step happens when we strip modern advancements of the bloated importance we have bestowed upon them, reducing them to their appropriate

uses and nothing more.

AT: PERM IMPOSSIBLE

The permutation solves – renewable energy isn’t intrinsically Enframing – the plan and the alt are compatible and solvesKarumidze, 2010 - Director of US-Caucasus Institute, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia (Zurab, “Sustainable Development and Humanities,” http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CDcQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifsdeurope.com%2Fgetdoc%2F23%2F2_Sustainable%2520Development%2520and%2520Humanities.pdf&ei=KAm8U_uRN4akPciCgNAB&usg=AFQjCNG_YwZfsIAQ37mThQQ3XD4g5HHM3g&sig2=-fX0SgAPhl0ZtEgLlcG2ww ) DSThe challenge for SD is to rethink the idea of modern technology in order to deconstruct the Enframing and retrieve technology as techne and poiesis. On the face of it, the technology of renewable energy is not Enframing , it does not utilize the environment as an object for consumption, but rather – it is more like techne: participation in the being of the environment, a kind of reciprocity, an exchange and the dialogue with it. But as soon as the renewable energy is regarded as the only bases of SD, it may turn into the Enframing again: a mere technological tool of opening up the truth, the un-concealment of what really is, and thus block the “shining- forth and holding-sway of truth.” To avoid this, we should regard renewable energy technologies as just one of the constituents of a larger fusion, which provides a wider picture of what is; this larger fusion is made up of technology, biology, ethics and esthetics. This will bring us closer to the holistic picture of the world, analogous to that of the ancient Greek, where techne (poiesis) was not a separate function of the society, but a unifying force that brought religious, political and social life together; humanity had the sense of connectedness with the All of Being. Keeping renewable energy and innovative technologies within this larger fusion and broader picture of the world is the destination of the Humanities within the context of the SD.

2AC PARADOX PERM

Only the perm solves --- embraces the paradox of a politics of BeingSelkirk 11 --- Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME (Alexander, “The paradox of Heideggerian politics”, http://gradworks.umi.com/34/80/3480046.html)//trepkaHeidegger is often said to be the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, but the political import of his thought is by no means easily discernible. He has been associated with a striking variety of political positions,

from left to right, West to East, peaceful to violent. This dissertation argues that this variety is best understood as deriving from two discreet inflections: a particularist-revolutionary inflection and the quietist-awaiting inflection. The “paradox” of Heideggerian politics is the necessary proximity of these two inflections to one another. The proximity derives from the treatment of actually existing “everyday” arrangements and institutions as at once essentially paltry, ephemeral, and evanescent and yet also constituting the only available

route to the most important question, the question of being. Of the two inflections, the “particularist-revolutionary” treats the everyday as the product of arbitrary and willful historical human activity and thus calls for a revolutionary retrieval of unexhausted resources from a people's “ownmost” history. The “quietist-awaiting” inflection, however, regards the existing status quo as having been granted by the unfathomable endowments of Being and therefore entails a submission to the political order as it has been determined and a quietist waiting for a new dispensation of Being. Through supplying textual interpretations of several of Heidegger's most important

writings, the dissertation argues that the ambiguous political import of Heidegger's thought derives from his characteristic approach to fundamental ontology. It concludes that Heidegger's bequest to his successors is the requirement, for which his thought does not supply adequate means,

to negotiate the tension between the demand for the revolutionary transformation of politics and the retreat from politics.

2AC ALT CAN’T SOLVE

Alt can’t solve the environmentStory 11 --- BA, Boston College 2004 MA, Fordham University, 2007 (David, “NATURE, NIHILISM, AND LIFE IN HEIDEGGER AND NIETZSCHE: NATURALISTIC METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS”, Proquest)//trepka

While Heidegger’s ambitious overhaul of the Western philosophical tradition is in many ways of a piece with some ecocentric environmental philosophies and ecophenomenologies, and though in places he appears to offer the fundaments of a non-anthropocentric ethic through notions such as “letting be” (Gelassenheit) in his later philosophy, his approach to nature is unique and can only be assimilated with or collapsed into extant approaches with great difficulty and distortion. I argue that Heidegger’s thought cannot be so easily construed as a viable environmental philosophy. His analysis of human existence in Being and Time, his “History of Being” explicated in works from the 1930s, and his ambiguous position on the ontological status of life, animals, and the latter’s relation to human beings paint a dualistic picture of the relationship between humanity and nature. In my analyses of nature-related themes in his early and later works, of his accounts of nihilism, Nietzsche, and Western metaphysics, and of his treatment of the concepts of life and the animal, I aim to expose the fundamental problems with his philosophy of nature. These problems are chiefly 1) Heidegger ignores the concept of evolution, 2) he rejects the concept of value entirely, and 3) he does not adequately deal with the concept of life and the human/animal divide. While Heidegger does effectively critique scientific naturalism, he does not resolve the residual problem of articulating a vision of nature in which humans, animals, and other beings fit along a common ontological continuum. Though he offers promising sketches of a neo-Aristotelian philosophy of life in his earlier work and appropriates the ideas of pioneering biologist Jakob von Uexkulll, he abandons these projects in the late 1920s and never works out a coherent philosophical biology.

AT: ONTOLOGY

No impact to ontology and security is key to uphold BeingOrr 14 (“‘BEING AND TIMELESSNESS’, EDITH STEIN’S CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGERIAN TEMPORALITY”, Modern Theology, https://www.academia.edu/4104510/Being_and_Timelessness_Edith_Steins_Critique_of_Heideggerian_Temporality)//trepka

Stein agrees that Dasein’s experience of anxiety (Angst) signals that it has been brought face-to-face with nothingness itself. But she is quick to deny Heidegger’s claim that this mood is dominant, insisting that prior to it lies a more prevalent

mood of fundamental existential security : ‘normally’, she notes, ‘we go through life almost as securely as if we had a real grip on our existence’.39 Yet according to Heidegger, this attitude to life is to be dismissed as entirely unreasonable given Dasein’s exposure to nothingness. What this would imply, claims Stein, is that the fundamental sense of existential security reveals Dasein to be in the grip of a delusion, so that the rational human approach ought to consist in (again quoting

Heidegger) ‘a passionate ... consciously resolute anxiety-stricken freedom toward death.’40 She strongly rejects this inference by reverting to the earlier account of the perduring quality of the Ichleben that withstands and unifies the ceaselessly fluctuating character of conscious experience. Heidegger rejects the self’s sense of existential security as a superficial mark of Dasein’s lostness in ‘the One’ (das Man). But for Stein, it is in fact an entirely warranted—and more phenomenologically credible—counterpoint to the anxiety that Heidegger takes to be Dasein’s existentially determinative mood. It is here that one reaches the very core of Stein’s disagreement

with Heidegger’s interpretation of the transcendental temporality that frames Dasein: The undeniable fact that my being is limited in its transience from moment to moment and thus exposed to the possibility of nothingness is counterbalanced by the equally undeniable fact that despite this transience , I am, that from moment to moment I am sustained in my being, and that in my fleeting being I share in enduring being ... This security [is] the sweet and blissful security of a child that is lifted up and carried by a

strong arm … For if a child were living in the constant fear that its mother might let it fall, we should hardly call this is a ‘rational’ attitude.41 Stein proceeds to position her account of the self’s awareness of temporal contingency as the first premise in an argument that seems to have been

adapted from Aquinas’ argument for God’s existence from the contingency of creaturely existence.42 The temporal contingency of the ‘I’ that introspection lays bare suggests an ultimate reliance on a source of being that is not itself contingent: The security which I experience in my fleeting existence indicates that I am immediately anchored in an ultimate hold and ground. Everything temporal is as such fleeting and therefore needs an eternal hold or

support.43 Furthermore, since the ultimate source of received being cannot itself receive being, it follows that no separation can be drawn between what it is and that it

is: this being, Stein concludes, ‘must be its very act of existing’ .44

2AC LATOUR

No impact to Being and only the K destroys it --- prevents constructive engagement with the worldLatour 12 --- professor at Sciences Po Paris (Bruno, “We Have Never Been Modern”, Harvard University Press, http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=xbnK8NzMsm4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=being+authenticity+heidegger+latour&ots=_SdPdms6-f&sig=kFWXvvaLNSgZsMiwOfBsBKJmW1M#v=onepage&q=who%20has%20forgotten%20being&f=false)//trepka

Who has forgotten Being? No one, no one ever has, otherwise Nature would be truly available as a pure ‘stock’. Look around you: scientific objects are circulating simultaneously as subjects objects and discourse. Networks are full of Being. As for

machines, they are laden with subjects and collectives. How could a being lose its difference, its incompleteness, its mark, its trace of Being? This is never in anyone’s power; otherwise we should have to imagine that we have truly been modern, we should be taken in by the upper half of

the modern Constitution. Has someone, however, actually forgotten Being? Yes: anyone who really thinks that Being has really been forgotten. As Levi-Strauss says, ‘the barbarian is

first and formost the man who believes in barbarism.’ (Levi-Strauss, [1952] 1987, p. 12). Those who have failed to undertake empirical studies of sciences, technologies, law, politics, economics, religion or fiction have lost the traces of Being that are distributed everywhere among beings. If, scorning empiricism, you opt out of the exact sciences, then the human sciences, then traditional philosophy, then the sciences of language, and you hunker down in your forest – then you will indeed feel a tragic loss. But what is missing is you yourself, not the world! Heidegger’s epigones have converted that glaring weakness into a strength. ‘We don’t know anything empirical, but that doesn’t matter, since your world is empty of Being. We are keeping the little flame of Being safe from everything, and you, who have all the rest, have nothing.’ On the contrary: we have everything, since we have Being, and beings, and we have never lost track of the difference between Being and beings.

We are carrying out the impossible project undertaken by Heidegger, who believed what the modern Constitution said about itself without understanding that what is at issue there is only half of a larger mechanism which has never abandoned the old

anthropological matrix. No one can forget Being, since there has never been a modern world, or, by the same token, metaphysics. We have always remained pre-Socratic, pre-Cartesian, pre-Kantian, pre-Nietzschean. No radical revolution can separate us from these pasts, so there is no need for reactionary counter-revolutions to lead us back to what has never been abandoned. Yes, Heraclitus is a surer guide than Heidegger: ‘Einai gar kai entautha theous.’

2AC DEATH BAD

Life is intrinsically value --- biological death destroys any hope of ontological improvementPaterson 3 - Department of Philosophy, Providence College, Rhode Island (Craig, “A Life Not Worth Living?”, Studies in Christian Ethics, Sage)//trepka

Only Personal Life? As we have seen above, human life is often perceived only as an

instrumental good at the service of the person. It is said that human life, as such, is not a basic human

good, and is merely a necessary means utilised in the promotion of other goods. When human life itself fails to live up to our expected requirements, it can ultimately be dispensed with. Merely being a living member of the species, Homo sapiens, is considered to offer no valid ground for ascribing to all humans an ‘inviolability’ that

protects them from being intentionally killed.16 Lying behind such accounts are forms of threshold sufficiency criteria used to establish whether or not individual human beings are able to qualify as human persons. On one side of the threshold is considered to be a

human life worthy of being valued since that life instantiates feature(s) X . . . Z. A human life with feature(s) X . . . Z is alone considered worthwhile, since it instantiates that which is sufficient to attribute real value to human existence. Thus, there are effectively two primary categories of human life to be identified: ‘personal life’ manifesting feature(s) X . . . Z, and ‘non-personal life’ that is incapable of manifesting feature(s) X . . . Z. Human life is valued as long as it is capable of instantiating the feature(s) sufficient to constitute personal life. Mere non-personal life (not worth living and thus not worthy of full protection from intentional killing) is thus heavily contrasted with personal life (worth living and thus alone worthy of full protection from intentional killing). Jonathan Glover, James Rachels, Peter Singer, Helga Kuhse and John Harris all subscribe to the notion that what is truly valued is not human life as such but personal life, life that is capable of manifest- ing the sufficient feature(s) X . . . Z — rationality, self-awareness, consciousness, etc., or some

composite thereof.17 They therefore identify certain attributes that alone are sufficient to warrant the classification of being a person. The voice of John Locke can be seen to echo strongly in these approaches, for he defined a person as ‘a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself’.18 In the conclusions reached by the above-mentioned authors, all would argue that patients suffering from advanced forms of senility, or the permanently comatose, cannot be regarded as persons, and will not therefore be classified as being possessed of lives truly worth living. Since they are not properly capable of being categorised as persons, they cannot be accorded the same protections that we

ascribe to those we do identify as persons.19 The principal difficulty with such theories of the worth of human life, however, stems from an inadequate justification upon which to make such a determination that an individual human life Y must contain those sufficient feature(s) X . . . Z in order to qualify for the status of being regarded by others as a ‘person’.20 With regard to non-philosophical usage, people in general do not make a distinction between attributions of the status ‘person’ and attributions of the status ‘human being’. Basic patterns of usage point not to the widespread understanding of being a person as actually having ‘self-awareness . . . X . . . Z’ but rather to a widespread under- standing that being a person is treated synonymously with being a particular kind of being (by virtue of his or her membership in that distinct class of being). ‘Y is a human being’, and not, say, a horse or a cat, is interchangeable with ‘Y is a person’, since ‘Y is recognisably one of us’.21 This assertion of an interchangeable understanding between ‘person’ and ‘human being’, is borne out by the prevailing definitions offered by the Oxford English Dictionary, where the noun ‘person’ is viewed as referring to (1) an individual human being, and (2) human beings distinguished from other things, especially lower animals. Of 1 course it is right to be wary of dictionary definitions. They are clearly not definitive. Nevertheless, I think that the patterns of usage wit- nessed by the OED are supportive evidence for the proposition that people generally do not use ‘person’ and ‘human being’ to refer to differences in kind between ‘human persons’ and ‘human non-persons’, such that the former are entitled to have their lives regarded as worthy of being fully protected by negative

prohibitions while the latter are not.22 Consider further a common reaction to patients suffering from advanced senility, or to patients in a permanent vegetative state. Often we will say that the patient is in a profoundly damaged/disabled condition, or that a patient’s quality of life is at a minimum, and so on. Often we will be deeply disturbed by the gap that exists between the condition of the patient and his or her flourishing as a human being. No one (except the perverted) would want to be placed in

such a condition. Human life is very imperfectly manifested in such a condition.23 Yet, it

simply does not follow that we would generally seek to infer from this debilitated state of being that the patient has ceased to be a person and has therefore undergone

such a change in kind that we now regard the patient as a ‘non-person’.24 Our ready ability to identify with ‘human non-persons’ in a way that we do not seem able to identify with ‘non-human non-persons’ seems to offer additional testimony as to why we continue to view such ‘human non-persons’ as persons simpliciter despite their profoundly damaged state of being.25 This ready ability to make such identification helps to make sense of the observation that people can and do seek to defend and promote human life without seeking an explanation for protecting or preserving human life in those who are profoundly damaged beyond an appeal to that good itself

(i.e. when asked to explain actions such as continuing to feed a severely demented Alzheimer’s patient).26 As such a basic good, an indispensable constituent of our being, human life itself is capable of providing an adequate explanation for rendering actions of this kind properly intelligible to us in a way that actions of this kind cannot be explained for ‘non-human non-persons’.27 Still, it can be argued that the above account is simply the product of muddled conventional thinking, conventional thinking spurred on by the impact of understandable but

ultimately irrational sentiment concerning the state of patients in those kinds of condi- tion.28 There is, however, good philosophical reason to affirm that those pre-philosophical apprehensions that we have concerning the use of the terms ‘person’ and ‘human being’, are indeed sound. This can be achieved by positing a credible account of what it is to be a human person by virtue of being a

member of the species, Homo sapiens. It explains why our basic identification with profoundly damaged ‘human non-persons’ is not merely a product of convention, sympathy, or compassion, but is ultimately ontological in nature.29 Aquinas quoted and affirmed the definition of what it is to be a person, as stated by Boethius. A person is ‘an individual substance of a rational nature’.30 The definition offered by Boethius is inherently more satisfactory than the definition offered by John Locke, for it is able to account for our understanding of what can be termed our ‘species solidarity’ — a solidarity that points against the classification or treatment of profoundly damaged human beings as sub-personal (semihominem) and whose lives are consequently judged to be of less worth than the rest of us.31 Rather than focusing on the idea that the individual must be actually rational (conscious, self-aware, etc.) in order to be thought of as a person (as with John Locke), this definition clearly points to a second basic understanding of what

it is to be a person.32 A person is an individual who is a member of a class of being characterised by those attributes. When we reflect on the nature of our species Homo sapiens, it is clear that our species is a kind that is rational, self-aware, and so on. This holds true even if some members of that species are incapable of rational thought, lack self-awareness, and so on.33 Jenny Teichman supports this central

line of argumentation when she states that ‘the idea that a creature can have a rational nature without being rational . . . does not appear to me to be any more intrinsically problematic than the idea that all cattle are mammals — even the bulls’.34 Teichman, therefore, challenges the idea that the way in which we classify our own kind ought to be treated any differently from the way we classify other things. Does a dog cease to be classified as a dog when it has lost its bark? Does a pail cease to be classified as a pail when it is no longer capable of holding water due a large hole in its bottom? If not, why should the very senile or the permanently comatose be classified as non-persons even if they are deeply defective with respect to an exercisable capacity for rational thought or a capacity for self-awareness?35 We can therefore credibly argue that ‘non-persons’ in a state of severe impairment are still fully members of the same species to which we all belong. The very senile or permanently comatose do not become members of a different species. Through their ‘natural kind’ they still speak to us as members of the same species via a common shared human nature and continue to make many of the same moral claims upon us, for example, a right not to be intentionally killed by other persons in acts of non-consensual euthanasia.36 When Aristotle stated that we are by nature ‘rational animals’, he was not making a statement particular to those fully functional members of the human species at the height of their faculties. He was, rather, defining the essential universal nature of the species.37 He was pointing out what the nature of being a member of the human species entails simply by being a recognisable member of that species. It is a credible principle of reasoning to state that by virtue of the basic kind of being a thing is, the archetypal characteristics of that kind can be ascribed to any member of that kind, even though not every member of that kind, may, as a matter of fact, actually manifest those archetypal characteristics.38 Therefore, it can be stated that all members of our species can justifiably be said to participate and share in the rightful protection offered to the archetypal members of our species because of what they essentially are, irrespective of the particular circumstances of any given member.39 Why then should being profoundly damaged detract from the moral status of certain human beings if they are by virtue of their nature as

fully human as the most fully flourishing members of our species? Such damage does not render them a member of a different species, for differences between humans concerning levels of intelligence, levels of consciousness, levels of coherence or inco- herence in thoughts, etc. are all questions of degree and not of kind.40 It is not a question of a decline in, or non-presence of, an ability that is capable of rendering a substantial

change in the nature of a human being. Rather, it is only the event of death itself that is capable of bringing about a substantial change in the kind of thing that we are. It is death that brings about a fundamental ontological change in status, for a corpse is no longer an individual with a human kind of nature.41 By virtue of the status of being a member of the human species, then, that status can indeed be said to be one of being a person simpliciter. All persons are entitled to the same basic types of immunity from intentional killing as are accorded

the archetypal mature members of the species. It can, in consequence, never be morally

justified to intentionally kill human beings on the ground that individual lives are judged to be insufficiently worthwhile in order to qualify for the kinds of protection that Rachels, Singer, Kuhse and Harris would reserve only for humans who are actually capable of individually exercising those attributes of our kind. Life’s Inherent Value A common link is drawn between a patient’s right to refuse treatment and the right of a patient to assess the quality of his or her own life. Such a right, it is claimed, is tantamount to an assessment of the worth of life, such that a patient with a low life quality can commit suicide, be assisted in that goal, or be euthanised.42 Here, I would argue, that this train of thought posits a mistaken frame of reference for the moral evaluation of the duties we have towards the preservation of human life. It carries plausibility, firstly, because it trades partly on the looseness or ‘open texture’ of language, and secondly, because it expands upon an appropriate sphere of decision-making in which patients are indeed intimately involved in the assessment of the burdens and benefits of treatment.43 No reasonable person would say that a life of less complete, less perfect, human flourishing is better than a life of more complete, more perfect, human flourishing.44 A life endowed with more flourishing, that realises more profusion in various horizons of possibility, is a fuller life than a life that is impaired in its ability to flourish. In that sense there can be said to be more ‘quality’, a greater instantiation of

good, in the former than the latter.45 But it is an illicit move to go from that sense of flourishing and its diminishment, to the conclusion that a life is not worth living, for there is quite simply no critical threshold that can be crossed, such that a

diminishment in flourishing ceases to instantiate any inherent good genuinely worth preserving.46 An appeal can be made (and usually is) to various forms of con- sequentialism to justify the conclusion that certain lives are not

worth living. Consequentialism purports to offer an answer by posing a common denominator to reckon with these factors, but the com- plexity of human value, most significantly the incommensurability of certain goods, defies all such levelling attempts.47 W. D. Ross, Charles Fried, Ronald Dworkin, and other proponents of mixed consequentialist systems, simply propose prima facie duties without explaining exactly what it is about the nature of the process of human reasoning that determines the strength of certain values, such that the duty to respect them is overridden in some situations, but not in others.48 Perhaps an appeal to convention may provide some sort of guide. However, this just retreats into a form of sub- jectivity,

taking comfort in the fact that a practice may be widely spread. This will not do when we consider the course of human history that has thrown up radically evil forms of convention, e.g. eugenics, mass killing , etc.49 Again, if a life is judged not worth living, what is it about death

that is supposed to be judged objectively commensurable to staying alive? How is it calculated? Perhaps intuition can attempt to supply an answer. However, a thoroughgoing appeal to intuition here simply negates the ability we have to use practical reason to inform our decision-making and guide our choices. But this will not do, for it is tantamount to saying that in the very situations where human reason is most crucially needed it is of no use to us! In reality, such a thoroughgoing appeal to intuition readily degenerates into a form of a posteriori rationalisation to justify choices already opted for on the basis of sub-rational emotion.50 While use of language sometimes leads

us to suspect that lives are often evaluated in terms of their overall worth, we should nevertheless be very suspicious of attempting to extrapolate from statements that (1) ‘doing X is a valuable part of A’s life and that A’s life is diminished by not being able to do X’, to (2) ‘A’s life is no longer worth living and it is therefore right to intentionally end it because A cannot do X’. Such inferences only seem plausible because there is a shift in the correct locus of evaluation, especially in the framework of medical decision-making, from the worthwhileness of certain treatments to the worthwhileness of certain lives.51 The correct question to be focused upon, should be whether a proposed treatment for a patient would be worthwhile; not whether a patient’s life would be worthwhile. The distinction between the worthwhileness of certain treatments and the worthwhileness of certain lives is no mere semantic ploy, for it legitimately seeks to address what the scope of decision-making concerning the preser- vation of life and health should be. In doing so, it provides for a sphere of delimitation where patient choice concerning treatment can reasonably be made.52 The responsibility for safeguarding and promoting the good of health lies primarily with the patient and not with the medical profession. That patient assessment should be centred squarely on the impact of proposed treatments, however, is not tantamount to endorsing the idea that we can truly judge the worth of our own lives. The capacity to choose crucially brings with it the responsibility of making choices that do in fact serve to promote rather than under- mine the ends of integral human flourishing. Given the diversity of choices that are consistent with human flourishing, there will often be considerable leeway in a patient’s

deliberation. Yet, leeway does not endorse license, and there are limits on the shaping of reasonable choice concerning the refusal or withdrawal of treatments.53 The non-consequentialist framework being espoused here is not one advocating the naïve preservation of life at all costs, for in many cases it is indeed licit to withhold or withdraw life-preserving treat- ment.54 More precisely, there cannot be said to be a duty to undergo a treatment that is not worthwhile (offering no reasonable hope of benefit to the patient), or that is considered medically futile.55 Without offering any exclusive listing of factors, Germain Grisez and Joseph Boyle helpfully list several factors that would offer reasonable grounds for justifying the withdrawal or non-provision of a medical treatment: a risky or experimental treatment; avoidance of significant further pain or trauma associated with treatment; the impact that 52 a treatment may have on the patient’s participation in activities or experiences the patient values; conflicts with deep-seated moral or religious principles to which the patient is committed to; a treatment psychologically repelling or repugnant to the patient; compelling burdens on family or finances.56 Such a framework for decision-making can indeed be abused and can result in the refusal of treatments that would seem to offer considerable benefits to patients without significant burden being attached to them. This will come as no surprise, and indeed can result in decisions that are directly suicidal in nature. However, the question that needs to be faced here is that there need be no essential incompatibility between, on the one hand, placing severe restraints on interference with the persistent choice of patients, even though they are intentionally suicidal, and yet, on the other, still uphold the respect due to the good of human life.57 It is a ‘brute fact’ that interference would be visited with all manner of difficulty, not least the fact that successful treatment usually requires the active co-operation of the patient. The problems that would be visited by enforcing treatments against the vehement will of a patient would be immense. Effects on the morale of the patient, family, and professions would be considerable. One only has to consider the impact of force feeding against a person’s will to see the traumatic means that may have to be resorted to. Further than that, the imposition of such an overt act of countermanding a patient’s decision, would serve only to undermine the already tested repu- tation of the medical profession in the eyes of the public, suspicious of paternalistic interventionism by physicians, and with it, a concomitant perception of disregard for the dignity of the individual patient.58 For those reasons, then, the general decision not to overrule a patient’s suicidal intent to end life by refusal or withdrawal of treatment, other than by means of, say, persuasion, will sometimes happen. Yet, this does not amount to a policy of condoning the aiding and abetting of a

suicide. Rather, it represents a principled decision to intentionally act for a good objective, the common good of patients, and the community generally. This good objective being acted for may practically permit the consequence of resultant death as an unintended yet fair side effect of a good intention. This is a sensible and principled way of responding to the reality, particularly in the context of medicine, that in order to prevent the execution, even of a serious wrong, there is only so much that can reasonably be done to protect patients from the consequences of their own wrongful decisions. Better off Dead? A Concluding Caveat Supporters of suicide and assisted suicide claim that we can justifi- ably argue that it makes sense to say that a person would be ‘better off dead’ rather than continuing to live, say, a life of severely diminished quality. Such

value judgements, it is said, are compara- tively sound.59 Yet, how is it possible for death to benefit the person who dies? Death destroys the person. How can we produce a benefit, therefore, if we

destroy the self, the potential beneficiary? One of the commonest lines of argumentation made here is termed the ‘deprivation account’. Key exponents include Thomas Nagel, Harry Silverstein and Fred Feldman.60 The argument advanced basically trades on a parallel question concerning death, arguing that a person can be posthumously harmed by his or her future loss, even though death means that the person is no longer actually in existence to experience it.61 For example, suppose Charles Dickens’s life would have included more literary achievement if he had lived for a few more years. Because literary achievement is a good, Dickens can be said to have had a less good life overall than he would have had if he had lived longer. Living a less good life is a harm to the person. By excluding those future possible achievements, then, Dickens’s death can be said to be a harm to him, for it prevented a life that would have been better than it was.62 Trading on this parallel, it is then argued that death can be a benefit in a comparison of future possible lives. Suppose a person’s life would go on containing severe suffering and pain. That person would be better off having a shorter life than having a life of prolonged misery. Since living a better life is a benefit, it is said that living the shorter life, here, is a benefit, since it is the better life. By interfering with the infliction of evils, the person’s death can therefore be said to be a

genuine benefit to him or her, since it prevents a worse life being lived.63 By engaging in such comparisons of future lives, the conclusion is reached by deprivation theorists that death is only an evil for the person if the future lost is one that offers better prospects for the person than death itself. Death itself is typically conceived of as the destruction of the self ; the non-existence of the self; the non-state of non-being.64 How can we respond to this assessment that death can be said to benefit a patient when the patient’s future prospects in life seem so grim? The non-state that death brings in its wake is seen as being preferable to the continuance of life. Yet, are persons who make and act upon such calculations objectively justified in opting for death? Can it truly be a rational act for a person to choose the destruction of self over the continuation of self, even a self racked by the severe impositions of pain and suffering?65 Philip Devine attempts to criticise the logicality of a decision to self-kill by stating what he considers to be the obscurity of what we can know about death.66 He argues that if rational choice requires that a person knows what he or she is choosing (a leap in the dark not sufficing), then it cannot be rationally possible to intentionally choose death because of the ‘opaqueness of death’.67 As Devine says, ‘. . . a precondition of rational choice is that one knows what one is choosing, either by experience or by the testimony of others who have experienced it or something very like it’.68 Death cannot be

rationally commensurated against, for we do not know what we are comparing life to. Life cannot simply be judged an overall evil and acted against by intentionally embracing death, for the ‘overall evil of life’ cannot be rationally traded in for the ‘opaqueness of death’. For Devine, choosing death is simply akin to leaping into the bowels of radical uncertainty that cannot function as a useful ground for objective rational choice.69 While I agree with Devine’s conclusion that intentionally opting for death is ultimately an unreasonable act, I think his reasoning

for supporting that conclusion lacks credibility, since the epistemic premise of his argument here is faulty. First, it can be stated that even if death really is shrouded in mystery, it is sometimes possible to make rational decisions without our knowing exactly what we are choosing. Consider a quiz programme in which the contestant is asked to take a fixed prize of cash or a mystery gift. The participant opts for the mystery gift. This risk seems perfectly reasonable.70 Can this not function as an analogy for a patient faced with the prospect of suffering and pain who opts for the ‘mystery’ of death? Second, I crucially do not think that the mystery option is the actual choice placed before us, for I think

that we can have sufficient relevant knowledge about death to understand important impli- cations of the choice being opted for. Unlike Devine, I think that the unreasonableness of opting for death arises precisely because we do know enough about what is being chosen to make it an objectively

irrational choice.71 What we can know about death, based on natural human reason alone, is that it results in the destruction of the self. There will no longer be a

human being in existence. There will be no carrier of value or disvalue. There will be no subject in existence that is capable of bearing any of the kinds of predication typical of living human beings. Death is an event that results in the non-being of the human person that was.72 Unlike Devine, I would argue that an intention to bring about this non-state, given the relevant (if incomplete) knowledge we have about it, points to the incoherence behind the idea that death can really be said to be a benefit for the person who is dead, as argued for by contemporary deprivation authors.73 When we assert that a person is harmed or benefited by a state, this requires that there is actually a subject in existence who is capable of being the bearer of the value or disvalue. If a person must actually exist in order to be the subject bearer of harms and benefits that happen, then how can there be said to be a subject who is capable of being benefited posthumously by his or her death? This line of argumen- tation against deprivation accounts (that death can be a benefit) is convincingly argued for by John Donnelly and J. L. A. Garcia. If a person succeeds in

killing himself or herself, there can be no betterment ascribed to the person. For Donnelly, it is muddled to argue that a person can be said to be posthumously benefited or harmed if the person must first be destroyed as a prerequisite for the benefit.74 The irrationality of thinking that death can be a benefit for a person is further addressed by Garcia.75 If it is good to be without pain, as indeed it is under most circumstances, this presupposes the existence of the subject in order to instantiate that

good (any good). If a person can be ‘better off dead’, then the continued existence of the person must continue after death. Yet no one on the basis of reason alone can justifiably claim that death can allow for the continuation of the person qua person. To realise goods and to minimise evils requires the presence of that single constant, a live human being, who can possibly make sense of such value statements. For Garcia, therefore, it is quite illicit to jump from the evaluation of means to minimise, or be free from, the evils of suffering and pain, to the conclusion that the destruction of the

subject itself can make a person in any meaningful sense better off. Consequently, all that can reasonably be done is to seek to benefit persons in their present lives, that is to improve as best we can the extent of their flourishing within the framework of humanitarian means available at our disposal.76 Contrary to Donnelly and Garcia, Nagel argues that there are plausible exceptions that render such accounts sensible to us, notwithstanding the destruction of the subject. For example, Nagel argues that a person can be harmed posthumously by having his or her reputation harmed, and can therefore be said to be posthumously benefited by having his or her reputation restored. When all is said and done, therefore, it seems that we can reasonably talk of ‘benefiting the dead’.77 In reply, it can be stated that there are other plausible explanations of what is meant by the dead ‘being subjected’ to harms and benefits that do not presuppose that the dead can actually be said to experi- ence those harms or benefits. Thus, to take Nagel’s example con- cerning posthumous reputation, we can plausibly state that it is the reputation of a former person that is harmed, say, by an act of slander, and not a person as such.78 Similarly we can say that the reputation of a former person is benefited by nice things being said about the former person. The living seek to protect their reputations because they, while alive, identify with them and realise that the reputations they

identify with are capable of being posthumously harmed or benefited.79 If the above arguments are sound, (1) that we can have enough relevant knowledge of what death would entail, and (2) that the dead cannot really be said to be harmed or benefited, then I think they severely undermine the contemporary deprivation accounts of death. Contrary to those accounts, I would argue that it is death per se that is really the objective evil

for us, not because it deprives us of a prospective future of overall good judged better than the alter- native of

non-being. It cannot be about harm to a former person who has ceased to exist , for no

person actually suffers from the sub-sequent non-participation. Rather, death in itself is an evil to us because it ontologically destroys the current existent subject — it is the ultimate

in metaphysical lightning strikes .80 The evil of death is truly an ontological evil borne by the person who already exists, independently of calculations about better or worse possible lives. Such an evil need not be consciously experienced in order to be an evil for the kind of being a human person is. Death is an evil because of the change in kind it brings about, a change that is

destructive of the type of entity that we essentially are. Anything, whether caused naturally or caused by

human intervention (intentional or unin- tentional) that drastically interferes in the process of maintaining the person in existence is an objective evil for the person . What is

crucially at stake here, and is dialectically supportive of the self-evidency of the basic good of human life, is that

death is a radical interference with the current life process of the kind of being that we

are. In consequence, death itself can be credibly thought of as a ‘primitive evil’ for all persons, regardless of the extent to which they are currently or prospectively capable of participating in a full array of the goods of life.81 In conclusion, concerning willed

human actions, it is justifiable to state that any intentional rejection of human life itself cannot

therefore be warranted since it is an expression of an ultimate disvalue for the subject, namely, the destruction of the present person; a radical 79 ontological good that we

cannot begin to weigh objectively against the travails of life in a rational manner. To deal with the sources of disvalue (pain, suffering, etc.) we should not seek to irrationally destroy

the person , the very source and condition of all human possibility .82

2AC COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS

Cost-benefit analysis and specific policies are necessary and produce sustainable ocean practicesChan et al 11 --- Institute of Resource, Environment, and Sustainability, University of British Coumbia (Kai; Timothy McDaniels and Maria J. Espinosa-Romero are also from this institute; Denise M. Dalmer --- West Coast Aquatic, Port Alberni, British Columbia, “Structuring decision-making for ecosystem-based management”, ScienceDirect)//trepka

Ecosystem-based management (EBM) has been called, by national and international institutions,

the new approach to managing the human activities that affect marine ecosystems

[1]. This approach goes beyond traditional management based on single species and single sectors [2] and

recognizes deep connectivity amongst all elements of the ecosystem—including humans [3]—and the underlying processes of producing the services people need and want [4,5]. It is place-based and requires a coordinated effort to sustainably manage the human activities that impact ecosystems [2,5,6]. Although there have been various efforts to

define the key aspects, principles and guidelines [2,3,7] of what EBM is and requires, there is still a gap

between theory and practice [4,7,8]. Managers face political, legal, social and scientific difficulties

in implementing the complex concepts of EBM, which has come to be seen as daunting and expensive [4,7,9]. More science will not necessarily lead to the implementation of EBM [7]. This is reflected in research studies, which argue that the main challenges for the implementation of EBM include building a collective vision and objectives for EBM, designing metrics to evaluate the accomplishment of the objectives and

creating ocean governance frameworks [2], as well as bridging the gap between scientific concepts and operational goals [4]. Successful initiatives aimed at implementing

EBM (e.g., Great Barrier Reef in Australia, Puget Sound in United States, and Raja Ampatin Indonesia) show that meaningful involvement of stakeholders in the definition of objectives and in monitoring processes have been key elements for success [4,9]. Put differently, environmental management is never an exclusively science-based undertaking. Human values, articulated and pursued within appropriate governance processes, are at the heart of why EBM is important and

they define what EBM should achieve [10]. Because management is the process of making decisions [11], the implementation of EBM requires a participatory and systematic framework to identify the values of the constituents with respect to EBM and to make decisions that best satisfy those values. This framework would help managers anticipate and address the concerns of stakeholders and make more informed decisions about the use of natural resources [12]. In addition, if stakeholders see their values reflected they are more likely to trust the process and/or support

its implementation [12]. 1.1. The need to improve decision-making processes EBM proponents

have suggested the Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (IEAs) developed by the US

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as the most useful decisionmaking framework for marine management that integrates science to assist decisionmakers [13]. This framework, increasingly seen as central to EBM, is rooted in the decision analysis

field [9,13], and it implicitly recognizes the importance of systematic decision-making. The six steps of IEA include the following: (1) definition of objectives, threats to ecosystems and ecosystem management drivers; (2) development of indicators for ecosystem state; (3) establishment of thresholds for each indicator; (4)risk analyses to evaluate how indicators respond to human and environmental disturbances and the

probability that indicators will reach an undesirable state;(5) evaluation of management strategies to predict the effects on the indicators; and(6) monitoring management strategy outcomes [9,13]. Although IEA suggests stakeholder involvement [9,13], it does not require it; and although it suggests a systematic decisionmaking process, it does not pay detailed attention to the definition of objectives and of indicators specifically related to stakeholder values or objectives. Lack of attention to these aspects may contribute to the observed inconsistency between values, objectives, indicators and management decisions. For example, objectives may dismiss important values, scientists may suggest lists of indicators for EBM that may not be useful for managers to make decisions,

or may not even reflect management objectives and stakeholders values [10,14]. Structured decision-making(SDM) is a systematic process that can help stakeholders and managers construct the framework for EBM based on the values of the participants, which can be used to create, evaluate and select between alternatives

[15]. Structured decision-making refers to applied decision analysis conducted with stakeholders and technical specialists to gain insight of and guide management decisions. Since it is a well-explored field for multiple stakeholder planning processes, it provides

methodologies and approaches for each stage of the process. Additionally, it can help integrate science in a way that is useful for decision makers and meaningful for stakeholders.

Cost-benefit analysis is key to inform governmental policy --- protects the marine environmentPalumbi et al 8 --- Department of Biology, Stanford University (Stephen, also Paul Sandifer, David Allan, Michael Beck, Daphne Fautin, Michael Fogarty, Benjamin Halpern, Lewis Iczne, Jo-Ann Leong, Elliot Norse, John Stachowicz, and Diana Wall, “Managing for ocean biodiversity to sustain marine ecosystem services”, http://mcbi.marine-conservation.org/publications/pub_pdfs/Palumbi_etal_Frontiers_2009.pdf)//trepka

Using diversity to manage multiple, conflicting services Here, we propose a fundamental shift in orientation, one that would move us away from management of one service at a time and allow us to focus instead on the conservation of multiple services through protection of natural biodiver- sity. Biodiversity would become the central element tying management of different sectors together, constraining some sectors for the benefit of others, but ultimately pro- ducing a net benefit for all

sectors. We argue that consistent management across agencies to sustain natural biodiversity – via conservation of species richness, genetic diversity, species composition, and habitat diversity – will help to maintain ecosystem integrity and stability. Our approach establishes the maintenance of natural biodiversity (sus-

taining all of an ecosystem’s biological parts at functioning levels) as a common core principle, guiding decision mak ing in agencies at local, state, and federal levels. The suite of services provided by marine ecosystems can create management conflict and

overuse of the environ- ment through cumulative impacts, if different managers are

required to optimize for different services. For example, if improving waste management demands changes that decrease fisheries yield, then separate management for these services may generate regulatory conflict and the inability of either management body to reach its goals (Figure 3). Thus, a management focus on one service at a time may compromise the multifunctionality of the ecosystem. So, how can managers balance conflicting needs for

a given ecosystem, to produce many complex, linked services? We suggest an approach based first on the link between diversity and ecosystem function and, second, on experi- mental studies showing that increased biodiversity can simultaneously increase and stabilize multiple measures of ecosystem functioning (Hooper and Vitousek 1998; Duffy et al. 2003; Worm et al. 2006). In this approach, different agencies, regardless of their primary focus (eg fisheries, water quality, coastal zone management), would also be required to manage for sustained biodiversity, because sustained biodiversity would increase the likelihood that multiple, important ecosystem services would be sus- tained as well (Figure 3). Such clear mandates will proba- bly need to come in the form of amendments to existing

laws or new laws, or could be incorporated into compre- hensive ocean area-based management. Although politi- cally difficult, development of such mandates would gen- erate broadly parallel management goals in different agencies, creating much-needed coordination, as agen- cies would be managing for

similar outcomes. Coupled with a clear specification of other management objectives

and establishment of strategies for evaluation of trade-offs and conflicts among different ocean-use sectors, maintenance of biological diversity can serve as a focal point for the specification of management options and con- straints on human impacts. Maintenance of biodiversity cannot be the only approach to managing ecosystem ser- vices, because inflexible enforcement might limit many ongoing uses of ecosystems. Instead, it can serve as a way to evaluate the ecosystem impacts of management decisions, using a common currency that can be applied across agen- cies. It can also be used as a “tie-breaker” for different man- agement options that might both fulfill agency mandates, but have very different impacts on biodiversity. By evaluat- ing the impact of different human activities on ecosystem

functioning, a focus on biodiversity can serve as a critical indicator of ecosystem status. Implementation

would require a governance structure that coordinates among sec- toral managers.

Their critique of technology is too essentializing --- plan creates a productive useHongladarom 12 --- Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok (Soraj, “Don Ihde: Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives”, Fordham University Press, Springer)//trepka

Here one can see Ihde’s view on science and technology in a nutshell. Ihde is following the program of those who study science not as a static body of knowledge with its logical structure, but as a living, dynamic human enterprise with its ups and downs, successes and failures. His view that technology is both ontologically and historically prior to science shows that science itself is so imbued with technology, with certain ways of looking at the world, that it would be a folly to look 036at it as a disinterested body of knowledge as the older philosophy of science tends to do. By doing this, Ihde is painting a picture of Heidegger as perhaps a precursor of the social scientific study of science and technology.

Here is perhaps Heidegger’s positive contribution to both philosophy of science and philosophy of technology. His negative contribution for Ihde is of course that of

essentializing technology and his failure (though hardly a fault of his) to see the development of

newer technologies in the past two or three decades. That Ihde keeps on repeating that Heidegger fails to see how technologies develop after his death perhaps is intended to show that there are still some scholars who act as if

Heidegger were alive today. There could be some who still employ Heidegger’s tools to comment on and criticize these newer technologies. There is a reason for this. If one believes that Technology (with capital ‘‘T’’) has an enframing essence, then it has the essence timelessly. Consequently, these philosophers presumably would look at the newer technologies (the Internet, the genome project, etc.) as

yet other manifestations of the essence of Technology. But that would be too restrictive, and doing so would result in a rather complete failure to see how technologies interact with the changing times and how technologies and their social and cultural contexts depend on one another in a very dynamic way.

Problem solving and science are good --- allows ideas to progress beyond their original constructions that they criticizeReisinger and Steiner 5 --- Florida International University, USA AND Central Queensland University, Australia (Yvette and Carol, “RECONCEPTUALIZING OBJECT AUTHENTICITY”, Science Direct)//trepka

INTRODUCTION According to Kuhn, a ‘‘basic concept’’ within any discipline is an idea accepted ‘‘once and for all’’ by all members of its community (1970:17-18). The myriad discussions of authenticity within tourism literature, earlier surveyed by Wang (1999), indicate that, in Kuhnian terms at least, it is not yet a basic concept, a singular idea accepted once and for all. Authenticity has not yet become a ‘‘black box’’ in tourism, a ‘‘fact’’ whose origins and constructed nature have disappeared (Latour

1987:1-17). According to both Latour and Kuhn, the role of discipline black boxes or basic concepts is to allow progress in the development of knowledge. Once a research community agrees on what certain terms mean, it can use those terms to address and solve new problems, generate new concepts, and take the field in new directions. Kuhn says a basic concept allows research to progress, partly because it ends ‘‘the constant reiteration of fundamentals and partly because the confidence that they were on the right track

encourages [researchers] to undertake more precise, esoteric and consuming sorts of work’’ (1970:17).

2AC ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT GOOD

Only ecosystem management solves inevitable degradation --- risks extinctionPalumbi et al 8 --- Department of Biology, Stanford University (Stephen, also Paul Sandifer, David Allan, Michael Beck, Daphne Fautin, Michael Fogarty, Benjamin Halpern, Lewis Iczne, Jo-Ann Leong, Elliot Norse, John Stachowicz, and Diana Wall, “Managing for ocean biodiversity to sustain marine ecosystem services”, http://mcbi.marine-conservation.org/publications/pub_pdfs/Palumbi_etal_Frontiers_2009.pdf)//trepka

Compelling evidence is accumulating from terrestrial, freshwater, and marine systems to suggest that sus- tainable ecosystem services depend upon a diverse biota (Daily et al. 1997; Loreau et al. 2001; Tilman et al. 2001; Wall et al. 2004; MA 2005; Sala and Knowlton

2006; Worm et al. 2006; Butler et al. 2007; Hector and Bagchi 2007). In principle, such knowledge should be useful in guiding a national ocean policy that maintains the services provided by oceans into the future. But does know- ing the link between diversity and services usefully inform policy? We argue that

management to sustain biodiversity could provide a critical foundation for a practical, ecosys- tem-based management (EBM) approach to the oceans. Globally, 60% of ecosystem services are degraded (MA 2005). These ecosystems provide food, shelter, recycling, and other support mechanisms that human communities require, but fundamental services are declining as ecosys- tems are unraveled by

human impacts (Palmer et al. 2004). Marine ecosystems (Figure 1) provide a

constellation of services: they produce food , receive and assimilate wastes, protect shorelines

from storms, regulate the climate and atmosphere , generate tourism income, and provide

recre- ational opportunities (Covich et al. 2004; MA 2005). The extraordinary diversity of the world’s oceans – across the different levels of ecosystems, habitats, species, functional roles, and genetic

diversity (Carpenter et al. 2006; Sala and Knowlton 2006) – and the interconnections of marine,

coastal, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems make manag- ing ocean ecosystems crucial for long-term prosperity. Although degradation of ecosystems might be reversed through appropriate policies (MA

2005), there are sub- stantial information gaps in our understanding of ecosys- tem processes

(Carpenter et al. 2006), which impede prac- tical ideas about implementing policy. EBM involves incorporating knowledge of ecosystem processes into management, but defining EBM and speci- fying how it can be implemented has been difficult, par- ticularly for marine ecosystems (Arkema et al. 2006). Grumbine (1994) surveyed 33 definitions of EBM, and Arkema et al. (2006) detailed 17.

However, even with this large number of definitions, fewer than 10% of plans created by resource managers addressed priority EBM criteria, such as sustainability (Arkema et

al. 2006). Despite increasing agreement on the principles and criteria of EBM among academics, managers do not include these in current plans (Arkema et al. 2006). Calls for EBM usually include the need to create a balance between services and to incorporate input from all stakeholders, managers, and policy makers (Arkema et al. 2006). However, this com- plex balancing act requires a high level of coordination, a great deal of cooperation, and the ability of managers to enforce trade-offs among different services. How can such positive

interactions best be achieved? We posit that a common focus on management to conserve natural biodi- versity could provide a foundation for such interactions and a practical basis for beginning EBM.

2AC ANTHRO TURN

Heideggarian ontology is anthropocentric because it presupposes the human as the only being capable of experiencing the dasein – rectifies the Cartesian metaphysics they seek to escapeGeuss ’08 – Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, focuses on 19th and 20th century European philosophy, over eight books on continental philosophy (Raymond, “Cambridge History of Philosophy”, pp. 497-506, Cambridge University Press) //J.N.EAlthough Being and Time was considered by Heidegger to be a failure and was never completed, at the same time he thought it a necessary failure and one which presented a certain path of thought that needed to be followed through to the end by anyone who wished to go beyond it. Part I of Being and Time was supposed to reopen in a

preliminary way the question of Being. To ask about the meaning of Being, Heidegger argues, one needs first a theory of how this meaning could be understood, that is, a theory of human understanding as the mode of access to Being. A theory of human

understanding, though, is possible only in the context of a general theory

of what it is to be human . Given Heidegger’s view about the way in which traditional language and

concepts distort the question of Being, he believed he needed to invent a whole new vocabulary for describing human life and our forms of understanding. He uses the term Dasein (‘being-there’) to designate what we humans are. Dasein is thus to replace such previous terms as ‘rational animal’, ‘thinking thing’, ‘conscious- ness’, and ‘spirit’. The analysis of human life and of our forms of understanding is, therefore, for Heidegger ‘analysis of Dasein ’. In

Being and Time Heidegger discusses six features of Dasein , each of which re

fers to a way in which a human being is different from the ways in which

something (e.g. a chair, an animal, a stone) which is not a human being is. First, the essential features of Dasein are answers to the question ‘who?’ rather than (as is the case with non-human things) ‘what?’ Second, Dasein is a kind of being for whom Being is at issue, or is a concern. This means both that Dasein is defined by its concern for Being (part of this being its concern with asking and answering the

question ‘What is Being?’), and that Dasein is essentially concerned with its own Being, that is, with who (or what kind of person) it is. Third, Dasein is in each case irreducibly individual, is ‘in

each case my own’. Fourth, Dasein is its possibilities. Whereas a stone has certain real properties, and these are what it is important for us to know about if we want to know what the stone is, what it is important for us to know about a human being is that human being’s possible ways of being or acting. Just as it is central to this stone, let us say, that it weighs one kilo, it is central to being John Jones that he can speak French, can control himself in certain ways, can be generous, etc. Fifth, Dasein is always characterised by a complex kind of ‘understanding’ of Being, of itself, its own possibilities, the world it lives in, things in its world, other people, etc. The ‘understanding’ in question is not a matter of having the correct set of beliefs, bu tof being able to deal with the thing in question, whatever it is (myself, the world, other things), in a certain way. To be a person of a certain kind is to be an entity with certain possible ways of existing, and correspondingly certain way sofu nderstanding. Finally, Dasein is always being-in-a-

world: this means that a human always exists as a person who is thrust into a set of already existing objects, projects, and arrangements and one who is always already engaged in complicated dealings with the entities in such a world. To be a human, Heidegger claims, is to be a ‘thrown project’, by which he means what is important in specifying who Dasein is is the set of projects it has. To have projects means always to be running ahead of oneself to a future in which the next step of the project exists. It means understanding oneself and one’s world in ac ertain

way and having (or rather being) certain possibilities. To be me means to have the project of eating lunch soon, finishing this chapter, going to the cinema this evening. What I am now cannot be understood except by reference to these ways in which I am oriented towards an inherently uncompleted future. On the other hand these projects are not the free creation of Dasein ,but are taken over from the world into which it is thrown. I can only have the project of writing a book if the institution ‘book’ exists, and it is not an institution I brought into existence

1AR ANTHRO

Alt can’t solve – Heidegger doesn’t account for life forms like bacteria and viruses Heine 90 -- Professor of Religion and History as well as Director of the Institute for Asian Studies (Steven, "Philosophy for an 'Age of Death': The Critique of Science and Technology in Heidegger and Nishitani," JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdfplus/1399227.pdf?acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true//SL)Heidegger's views are similar to the idea of emptiness found in Christian mysticism and Buddhism. Buddhist and Christian mysticism maintain that dualism is an illusion associated with identifying either with the ego or with the body in which the ego is "housed" So long as one thinks that one is either ego or body, one will spontaneously struggle to defend them against threats posed by the "extemal" world. Moving beyond this defensive view of self requires that one experience oneself not as a "thing" at all, but rather as the emptiness or opening in which all things appear, including the intemal relations that constitute things.Once it is revealed that to be human means to be the openness in which things can manifest themselves and thus "be," it becomes possible to identify with and to care about all things, not just the ego body. Paradoxically, when one becomes "nothing" (the openness), one simultaneously becomes "everything," in the sense that one no longer identifies with and defends a particular phenomenon of the ego body but rather can identify with all things and "let them be." Mystics argue that their path is not a flight into otherworldly abstraction, but instead the most concrete way of encountering things. Spinoza, for example, maintained that at the most realized level of awareness one discems that each particular thing is God. Presumably, such ontological realization would elicit major changes in one's everyday treatment of things! Many deep ecologists shy away from the term mysticism, preferring instead to speak of profound intuition. Whatever term is used for this nondualist sense of connectedness, it may pose some problems for deep ecology. For one thing, the intuition that all things are interrelated manifestations of God (or, as Naess sometimes says, Atman) may support the ideal of "radical ecocentric egalitarian- ism," but what then is the decision procedure to be followed in the face of dilemmas, e. g., the altemative saving either a child or a deer? Naess maintains that our primary obligation is to our "nearest and dearest," including members of our own species. He also argues, nevertheless, that adjudication of conflicts between the needs of humans and nonhumans would he very different if we realized that we have a relationship with and obligation to not only humans but all forms of life. While appealing, however, such an idea does not address what is to be done with the many "life forms" that are so deadly to human beings, including viruses and bacteria.

2AC NAZIS

Heidegger’s philosophy is inherently anti-semitic --- recent developments and experts proveOltermann 14 --- Guardian and Observer's Berlin correspondent (Philip, “Heidegger's 'black notebooks' reveal antisemitism at core of his philosophy”, Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/13/martin-heidegger-black-notebooks-reveal-nazi-ideology-antisemitism)//trepkaHe is widely regarded as one of Europe's most influential 20th century philosophers whose writings inspired some

of the important thinkers of the modern era. But almost four decades after Martin Heidegger's death, scholars in Germany and France are asking whether the antisemitic tendencies of the author of Being and Time ran deeper than previously thought. The philosopher's sympathies for the Nazi regime have been well documented in the past: Heidegger joined the party in 1933 and

remained a member until the end of the second world war. But antisemitic ideas were previously thought to have tainted his character rather than touched the core of his philosophy – not least by Jewish thinkers such as Hannah Arendt or Jacques Derrida, who cited their debt to

Heidegger. This week's publication of the "black notebooks" (a kind of philosophical diary that Heidegger asked to be held back until the end of his complete work), challenges this view. In France the revelations have been debated vigorously since passages were leaked to the media last December, with some Heidegger scholars even trying to stop the notebooks' publication. In

Germany, one critic has argued that it would be "hard to defend" Heidegger's thinking after the publication of the notebooks, while another has already called the revelations a "debacle" for modern continental philosophy – even though the complete notebooks were until now embargoed by the publisher. The most controversial passages of the black notebooks are a series of reflections from the start of the second world

war to 1941. While distancing himself from the racial theories pursued by Nazi intellectuals, Heidegger argues that Weltjudentum ("world Judaism") is one of the main drivers of western modernity, which he viewed critically. "World Judaism", Heidegger writes in the notebooks, "is ungraspable everywhere and doesn't need to get involved in military action while continuing to unfurl its influence, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people". In another passage, the philosopher writes that the Jewish people, with their "talent for calculation", were so vehemently opposed to the Nazi's racial theories because "they themselves have lived according to the race principle for longest". The notion of "world Judaism" was propagated in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forgery purporting to reveal a Jewish plan for world domination. Adolf Hitler stated the conspiracy theory as fact in Mein Kampf, and Heidegger too appears to adopt some of its central tropes.

"Heidegger didn't just pick up these antisemitic ideas, he processed them philosophically – he failed to immunise his thinking from such tendencies," the notebooks' editor, Peter Trawny, told the Guardian.

Nazism disad --- their view of “being in the world” locks in discriminatory practicesBrody 14 --- New Yorker (Richard, “WHY DOES IT MATTER IF HEIDEGGER WAS ANTI-SEMITIC?”, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2014/03/why-does-it-matter-if-heidegger-was-anti-semitic.html)//trepka

According to Thomas Assheuer, writing in Die Zeit, “The Jew-hatred in ‘Black Notebooks’ is no

afterthought; it forms the foundation of the philosophical diagnosis.” In other words, these

newly published writings show that, for Heidegger, anti-Semitism was more than just a personal prejudice. In the Guardian, Philip Oltermann offers some choice passages: “World Judaism,” Heidegger writes in the notebooks, “is ungraspable everywhere and doesn’t need to get involved in military action while continuing to unfurl its influence, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people.” In another passage, the philosopher writes that the Jewish people, with their “talent for calculation,” were

so vehemently opposed to the Nazi’s racial theories because “they themselves have lived according to the race principle for longest.” The French philosopher Emmanuel Faye picks up on one notably insidious term in the new publications: We know that [Heidegger] speaks in his “Black

Notebooks” of the “worldlessness” of Judaism…. Jews aren’t just considered to lack a homeland, they are said definitively to be worldless. It’s worth recalling that worldlessness is an expression that Heidegger doesn’t even use for animals, which, in a 1929 lecture, he calls “world-poor.” In this complete dehumanization of Judaism, the Jews no longer have a place in the world, or, rather, they never had one. We also discover…that the

Heideggerian idea of “being-in-the-world” which is central to “Being and Time” can take on the meaning of a discriminatory term with an anti-Semitic intent. Oltermann adds that Heidegger also “argues that like fascism and ‘world judaism,’ Soviet communism and British parliamentarianism should be seen as part of the imperious dehumanising drive of western modernity.” Yet, in the magazine Prospect, the philosopher Jonathan Rée attempts to defend Heidegger by minimizing the significance of this idea: “One of his arguments is that Judaism, like Bolshevism and Fascism, participates in the corrosive calculative culture of

modernity, even though it goes back thousands of years.” This makes me wonder about Rée as well: Isn’t it a

priori anti-Semitic to consider Judaism “corrosive ”? And wouldn’t that idea, as Oltermann suggests, place anti-Semitism at the core of Heidegger’s philosophical conception of history?

Rejecting anti-semitism is a moral imperativeTezyapar 14 --- political and religious commentator, peace activist and an executive producer at a Turkish TV (Sinem, “MUSLIMS MUST DENOUNCE THE HOLOCAUST AND FIGHT AGAINST ANTI-SEMITISM”, http://www.sinemtezyapar.com/muslims-must-denounce-the-holocaust-and-fight-against-anti-semitism.html)//trepkaDarwinism, and its false implication that human beings are mere animals, classified as “superior”, “inferior” or

“non-human” is the basis for the pseudo-science of racism. When Hitler said, “Take away the Nordic Germans and nothing remains but the dance of apes”, he was referring to the falsehood of Darwinist ideas. (Carl Cohen, Communism, Fascism and Democracy, Random

House, New York, 1972, p. 408-409) While certainly, there are differences between people, to suggest that a group of people is inherently superior to another, and therefore has a right or moral imperative to subjugate the other, is a grossly mistaken idea. As a result of such pseudo-scientific fallacies and and neo-romanticist fantasies, six million Jews, innocent men, women and children over a vast swath of the European continent were dehumanized , corralled into ghettoes and exterminated by the conquering Nazis. According to their racial delusion, the Nazi herrenvolk would rule over a vast empire of slaves, with the conquered peoples being the hewers of wood and drawers of water, and with the Jewish people (not to mention anyone else who failed to measure up to the Nazis exacting Darwinian standards) having been eliminated from the face of the earth itself. The Nazis’ crude interpretations of Darwinism – influenced by agricultural practices such as animal husbandry – and their outlandish views of history such as Ariosophy, are all too familiar to anyone with even a rudimentary education, and there is no need to comprehensively explain their overall ideology. There are indeed people alive today, who survived this darkest period of human history, who can easily attest to the horrors they witnessed and experienced.

1AR NAZIS

Heidegger is bad – he implies that all technological advancement is bad, and strongly associates with NazismFeenberg, 2000 - holds the Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver (Andrew, “Constructivism and Technology Critique: Replies to Critics,” Taylor Francis ) DSI. Heidegger or Marcuse ... or BothI thank Iain Thomson for his generous and lucid explanation of some of the more obscure aspects of my book. The historical background he offers is accurate and useful, and I can agree with most of his interpretation of my contribution. It is true that I am deeply influenced by both Marcuse and Heidegger and that is something of a paradox given their quarrel. I have two points I want to make here in response to Thomson, and I will make them as briefly as I can, since I have far more disagreements with David Stump to deal with in the second part of this article.My first concern has to do with Thomson's attempt to portray Heidegger as a non-essentialist thinker with a historical theory of technology that can guide us today. I am not surprised that Thomson, who studied with Hubert Dreyfus, should come to the defense of Heidegger. Dreyfus himself has written several interesting articles in which he attempts a similar salvage operation. Like Dreyfus, Thomson refers us to a passage in Heidegger's essay, 'Building Dwelling Thinking', where the modern highway bridge functions as a 'thing' in Heidegger's eminent sense of the term (Dreyfus 11995, pp. 102-3J). It is true that in this passage Heidegger discusses modern technology without negativism or nostalgia and suggests an innovative approach to understanding it. Combining this unique example with his many obscure and ambiguous statements on technology in general, one can construct connections between Heidegger and Woodstock, as does Dreyfus, or, more plausibly, Heidegger and the Amish, as Thomson suggests here. But how plausible are these interpretations, really?I will admit to having learned something from looking at Heidegger in this way. His phenomenology of action suggests an understanding of technology as a lifeworld rather than a mere instrumental means, and this is a valuable contribution. There is something right about the notion of Gelassenheit loo, freely interpreted. As a result I do not condemn Heidegger absolutely as do many critics of his awful politics, and I have tried to make use of certain aspects of his thought in my own questioning of technology. But I am always held back from full assent to these redemptive views of Heidegger by two other aspects of his thought.On the one hand, his defenders have to admit that the highway bridge passage is the one and only instance in his whole corpus of a positive evaluation of a modern technology. Alongside this passage, there are dozens of others that reek of volkisch nostalgia for the good old days of thatch roofed huts, silver chalices, quill pens, humble jugs, wooden shoes, and suchlike trappings of the elitist anti-modernism of right-wing German intellectuals in the Weimar and Hitler period. There is even an amusing passage in the Parmenides lectures where Heidegger attacks the typewriter for alienating the hand from the word, apparently to the amusement of his students whom he asks for forebearance. (Thomson discusses this passage and tries to find in it an anticipatory critique of word processing. I am not persuaded.)I believe that this is not merely a nervous tic of an old mandarin, but theoretically

significant. Its significance lies in the fact that one finds no criteria for the transformation of modern technology anywhere in Heidegger. Despite all the efforts to complicate the picture with learned reflections on the word Wesen, the fact is that Heidegger envisages only three ways of making things, art, craft, and modern technology, and his critique of the latter for challenging nature and storing up its powers implies that almost everything we associate with industrial

society is bad . This was a common view in Heidegger's conservative academic milieu, as Hans Sluga convincingly argues, and Heidegger fits right in (Sluga [ 19931). This is not to reject out of hand attempts of Heideggerians such as Thomson to develop a philosophy of technology based on Heidegger, but it does suggest that they ought to admit the extent of their own originality with respect to the master. What they would lose in borrowed authority, they would more than regain in plausibility.On the other hand, there is Heidegger's peculiar fidelity to the Nazi response to what he called 'the encounter between global technology and modern man' (Heidegger [1961, p. 166]. His last word on the failure of the Nazi's in his final interview was to dismiss them as 'far too limited in their thinking' to understand and fulfill the promise of their own revolution (Heidegger [1977]). Thus Heidegger maintained a position on Nazism in some ways parallel to Marcuse's on communism: the revolution betrayed (in Germany, in Russia) was not the real revolution which we still await. There are of course differences. The Heideggerian 'revolution' no longer had any political content after his brief experience in politics. And, there are controversial but intellectually respectable reasons for believing that Marcuse's revolution would be worth waiting for while it is incomprehensible how any intelligent person could continue to maintain even so much as a critical relationship to Nazism after World War II.

1AR DEATH BAD

Death is inherently biological --- means existence precedes essenceFisher 99 --- University of New England, New South Wales, Australia (Josie, “Re-examining death: against a higher brain criterion”, Journal of Medical Ethics, http://jme.bmj.com/content/25/6/473.full.pdf)//trepka

While there is increasing pressure on scarce health care resources, advances in medical science have blurred the boundary between life and death. Individuals can survive for decades without

consciousness and individuals whose whole brains are dead can be supported for extended periods. One suggested response is to redefine death, justifying a higher brain criterion for death. This argument fails because it conflates two distinct notions about the demise of human beings - the one, biological and the other, ontological. Death is a biological phenomenon . This view entails the rejection of a higher brain criterion of death. Moreover, I claim that the justification of the whole brain (or brain stem) criterion of death is also cast into doubt by these advances in medical science. I proceed to argue that there is no need to redefine death in order to identify which treatments ought to be provided for the permanently and irreversibly unconscious. There are already clear treatment guidelines.

Death is always worse than a loss of being --- even Heidegger agreesCUPFS 12 ---- Cardiff University Philosophy and Film Society (“SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK, Charlie Kaufman”, http://zooetrope365.wordpress.com/tag/death/)//trepka

If we are to live “authentically”, according to Heidegger, we must continually project our existence

towards the horizon of our death. We need to acknowledge that we are essentially finite; that our death, as the complete loss of Being-in-the-world, is something we must face totally alone because it can never grasped by a Being-still-there. Even when we experience the deaths of others, we are brought no closer to an understanding of what death means for us. To be authentically we must recognise that death is our own unavoidable potentiality (2). We must confront the fact that we are always thrown towards possibilities which are ultimately our own because only we can be responsible for facing up to death and making sense of our existence as a Being-towards-death. Heidegger argues that this entails cultivating a mood of “anxiety” – a mode of living founded upon an anticipation of death which fully recognises one’s finitude and individuality, and refuses to conform to the common attitudes – the idle talk of “the they” or the consolations of

religion – which tranquilize us about these facts. Whilst some aspects of Heidegger’s position may not be entirely convincing – his rejection of the significance the death of others may have for our

own self-understanding, for example – the idea that an acknowledgement of our finitude can profoundly affect our self-interpretation strongly resonates. In Synecdoche, New York, the character of Caden is painfully aware of his own mortality. His body seems to be turning against him and talk of or references to death abound in his world. This raises an important point – although the Epicurean imploration not to fear death is most probably sound advice, to cast death from our minds as “nothing to us” seems an even more difficult feat for the ill person who is acutely aware that the end may come sooner than hoped. Caden quite readily

acknowledges that he is a Being-towards-death. However, this does not mean that he is leading what Heidegger would call an authentic existence. It seems that rather than cultivating a mood of “ anxiety ” and anticipating death in a way that leads him to an appreciation of life as transient, towards recognition of the temporality of Being, he desperately clings to the ‘reality’ of the everyday by representing and recreating it again and again as a piece of theatre. Caden even hires an actor, Sammy, to play himself in his life-

drama, deferring the responsibility of honestly confronting death onto another person. “We’re all hurtling towards death,” Caden says, “yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die, each of us secretly believing we won’t.” It seems that although Caden is able to accept that death is the horizon towards which we all are thrown, he fails to appreciate that all our living moments are unique, irreversible and leading us closer to the end. In the film, months and years seem to pass Caden by without him noticing that life has moved on. In his attempt to capture a moment of absolute truth in art before it is too late, he neglects to project himself into a future which cannot be held back.

The result is that as he nears his death, he is radically alienated from his mode of existence. He realises that in life, unlike in theatre, there are no rehearsals, there are no second chances, and there is no director or audience there to validate your performance. Synecdoche, New Yorkhas quite a reputation for being divisive in the responses it provokes. Some find it depressingly bleak. One film professor, Daniel Shaw (3) argues that as a film it is ‘profoundly deadening’. For Shaw, the character of Caden – desperate for meaning yet embittered by the world – represents the passive nihilism which Nietzsche so derided. Professor of philosophy and religion David Smith disagrees (4). He sees Kaufman’s mix of tragic insight and comic farce as a platform to inspire reflection upon strategies for a sort of ‘naturalistic transcendence’ in our ways of relating to the basic limits of human existence; namely, death and the impossibility of adequately representing our world linguistically. Personally, I would say that to experience the film as ‘profoundly deadening’ suggests that one has

missed out on its invitation for us to think about our lives differently. Although Caden may fail to form what Heidegger would term an authentic existence, this need not be the fate of everyone. If we follow Heidegger on this point, death is something we must confront. But the way we interpret our existence as Being-towards-death is ultimately down to us.

2AC TECH THOUGHT GOOD

Technology is good – it has ended an age of suffering and tragedy, and is too deeply ingrained to be removedKelly, 2013 - Illinois Wesleyan University (Mike, “In Defense Of Technology,” http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1021&context=tis ) DSDuring the Middle Ages, i.e. the "Dark" Ages, man's worldview was largely dominated by mysticism, irrationality, and collectivism. The universe was widely perceived as epistemologically unknowable and meta physically malevolent, dooming man to suffering and tragedy . Given the widespread political and social instability, as well as the ravages of un stoppable plagues and warmongering nations, such conclusions were not totally unreasonable. The Enlightenment and its corollary, the Scientific Revolution, delivered western civilization from the Dark Ages into an age of reason, science, and individualism. What was once perceived as un knowable, uncertain, and malevolent, became knowable, certain, and be nevolent. The universe became a place where man could flourish, instead of rot in his own misery. As science took hold, the world seemingly became more knowable, more livable, and more suitable for the pursuit of human desires and happiness. This rational, scientific, and individualist worldview was reborn in the Scientific Revolution, and its subsequent development of technology.Technology is the application of scientific knowledge for practical

purposes . It allows society to become more intelligent and more advanced. Each accomplishment is utilized, and then used further as a stepping-stone for the next great achievement. Each good new invention, method, idea, or application of existing knowledge makes life easier and ultimately proves to be beneficial for society.To say the least, technology has played an important part of hu man life, and in nearly every human endeavor. Yet, amidst its record as a tool enabling man to live in a world that was otherwise thought to be unlivable, technology has come under strict scrutiny in modern society. Among such scrutiny has been claims that technology has destroyed valu able knowledge, created an environment of social isolationism, led to en vironmental degradation, and resulted in mass destruction and killing that would otherwise not be possible. These claims misunderstand technology and its role in human endeavors.

2AC SCIENCE GOOD

A scientific understanding of the world is inevitable and good – it has saved millions of lives and reduced sufferingNewton, 2010 - Public Information Project Director for the National Center for Science Education (Steven, “In Defense of Scientific Methodology,” 4/26/2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-newton/in-defense-of-scientific-_b_552602.html ) DSThe rot begins with his first sentence. Dossey accuses scheming educators of trying "to inculcate children with the scientific method." As someone who has taught college-level earth sciences for over a decade, I plead guilty. There is great value in "inculcating"--or "teaching," to use the technical term--students about scientific methodology and nature of science, and there are wonderful websites, such as undsci.berkeley.edu, to help students understand these important topics.What does Dossey have against teaching students about the methodology of science? "The way science is currently defined and taught," he contends, "is a profound violation of how today's youngsters ... see the world." So what?Students come to the classroom with a host of misconceptions about the world. If you ask first-year college students a few basic questions about the natural world, you will quickly discover pervasive ignorance. What causes the seasons? Most students think summer is caused by the Earth being closer to the Sun. Why is the sky blue? A very small percentage of students can answer in terms of wavelengths of light. Which falls faster, a heavy weight or a light weight? Most think the heavier object falls faster.It is the proper job of science educators to help these student see the world as it really is, rather than to reinforce their prejudices. Biology students should learn that the theory of evolution is correct and that vaccines do not cause autism; astronomy students should learn the world will not end in 2012; chemistry students should understand why homeopathic claims about "water memory" are not true. Science education can--and should--help students understand reality.Yet Dossey believes "the way kids are taught science these days constitutes a form of child abuse." He compares forcing children to learn scientific methodology to an "infliction of a false identity," and compares this to Native American children in white-run schools being forced to give up their culture.Nothing could be further from the truth. As Carl Sagan memorably argued in his essay "The Wind Makes Dust," science in an inherently human endeavor , part of all cultures. Hunter-gatherers relied on deep knowledge about the natural world; in order to hunt, they had to recognize, from careful study and experience, the tracks of certain animals, and to judge how much time had passed since those tracks were made. A scientific understanding of the world brings food to the

table --especially if you have to hunt that food. And it's not just hunter-gatherers who benefit from scientific methodology. Although Dossey thinks the scientific method is the "main legacy of traditional science," I can point to another legacy: the millions upon millions of people alive right now because of medical advances made possible through scientific discoveries. From vaccines to anesthesia, science has reduced human

suffering and needless deaths, and produced longer and better lives. It is hard to

imagine why anyone would be against such a legacy.

2AC SECURITY GOOD

Security is key to rights and emancipation Dillon 96 – Professor and researcher on politics, security, and war in Lancaster University (Michael, “Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought”, Book published by Routledge Pg 10, 09/1996, Proquest Ebrary)//BDIn taking security as its focus of concern, this study not only reflects my background as a student of foreign and defence policy making within the discipline of International Relations. It also reflects a wider concern, prompted initially by International Relations’ security preoccupation, with the way in which modern understandings of politics as such seem to be so generally reliant, foundationally, upon security. Without security, we are taught by Hobbes for example amongst others, there can be no political subject whatsoever. Without security, moreover, there can be no discourse of the rights of those subjects. Without the discourse of the rights of subjects— whether individual or collective— there can be no modern conception, either, of freedom and emancipation through the advancement of the knowledge and understanding of subjects, by which they not only secure their rights, but also resolve conflicts between them over the enjoyment of those rights. For the very right to be— more precisely the right to begin and to endure by having that right secured, somehow— is not simply the axiomatic foundation of any other right whatsoever. It is constitutive of the rights-bearing subject as such. This applies whether one is speaking of the right of an individual (born or unborn), of the right of a State, or of the right of a so-called Nation or People.

2AC WAR DISCOURSE GOOD

War is key to education and ethicsBurke 07 – Political theorist and international relations scholar (Anthony, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason”, Theory and Event Vol. 10 No. 2, July 2007 Pgs 44-49, Project Muse)//BDThe idea that national identities could be built and redeemed through war derived from the 'romantic counter-revolution' in philosophy which opposed the cosmopolitanism of Kant with an emphasis on the absolute state -- as expressed by Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Bismarkian Realpolitik and politicians like Wilhelm Von Humbolt. Humbolt, a Prussian minister of Education, wrote that war 'is one of the most wholesome manifestations that plays a role in the education of the human race', and urged the formation of a national army 'to inspire the citizen with the spirit of true war'. He stated that war 'alone gives the total structure the strength and the diversity without which facility would be weakness and unity would be void'.45 In the Phenomenology of Mind Hegel made similar arguments that to for individuals to find their essence 'Government has from time to time to shake them to the very centre by war'.46The historian Azar Gat points to the similarity of Clausewitz's arguments that 'a people and a nation can hope for a strong position in the world only if national character and familiarity with war fortify each other by continual interaction' to Hegel's vision of the ethical good of war in his Philosophy of Right.47 Likewise Michael Shapiro sees Clausewitz and Hegel as alike in seeing war 'as an ontological investment in both individual and national completion...Clausewitz figures war as passionate ontological commitment rather than cool political reason...war is a major aspect of being.'48Hegel's text argues that war is 'a work of freedom' in which 'the individual's substantive duty' merges with the 'independence and sovereignty of the state'.49 Through war, he argues,the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their indifference to the stabilization of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so the corruption in nations would be the product of a prolonged, let alone 'perpetual' peace.50

2AC WOLCHER

The alternative devolves into endless naval gazing over every instance of calculation - technological thinking can be good – the permutation binds a reformist criticism to the affWolcher ‘04 – Writing in the Washington Law Review (“The End of Technology: A Polemic” Louis E. Weber http://projects.ischool.washington.edu/lawsymposium/docs/wolcher.pdf) //J.N.EWith all due respect to Martin Heid egger, who tended to disparage the 10. language of means and ends, 13 the question of technology’s ultimate end is the right one to ask because it self-consciously appropriates the terminology of technological thinking (the means-end relationship) in order to question technology on its own terms. If there is something about the essence of

modern technology that has inflicted a wound on humanity, then it alone

is the sword that can heal that wound . For the essence of modern technology is not something abstract and distant from us on the contrary, it is in us and around us in the form of our world. In an operational and result-oriented world like ours, a fact is the projection of a method for finding it, and a method is the projection of a human purpose. 14 This double insight into the intimate relation between facts and purposes, Is and Ought, gives critical reason the chance to disentangle the terms of the relati on, interrogate the mostly hidden purposes of modern technology for their meaning, and yes, also assess modern technology’s ultimate rationality. The questionability of technology’s cont ribution to ultimate ends is an ancient theme. In the Charmides , 15 one of his earliest dialogues, Plato describes Socrates as expressing considerable doubt about the ultimate end of technological progress. After discussing with Critias the meaning of the kind of wisdom that knows where its own knowledge ends, and hence where its ignorance begins, Socr ates relates a troubling dream that he had. The dream concerns a society where everything is extremely well ordered, technologically speaking. Unable to tell whether the dream came through “the horn or the ivory gate” 16 (that is, whether its content was bad and false, or good and true) Socrates goes on to describe what he dreamt: The dream is this. Let us suppose that wisdom is such as we are now defining, and that she has absolute sway over us. Then, each action will be done according to the arts or sciences, and no one professing to be a pilot when he is not, no physician or general or anyone else pretending to know matters of which he is ignorant, will deceive or elude us. Our health will be improved; our safety at sea, and also in battle, will be assured; our coats and shoes, and all other instruments and implements will be skillfully made, because the workmen will be good and true. Aye, and if you please, you may suppose that prophecy will be a real knowledge of the futu re, and will be under the control of wisdom, who will deter deceivers and set up the true prophets in their place as the revealers of the future. Now I quite agree that mankind, thus provided, would live and act according to knowledge, for wisdom would watch and prevent ignorance from intruding on us in our work. But whether by acting according to knowledge we shall act well and be happy, my dear Critias this is a point which we have not yet been able to determine . 17 Here, at the beginning of Western philosophy, we witness a mind troubled by the relation between tec hnical efficiency and ultimate human ends: a

mind willing to question that relation. Socrates knew that so long as we question something exclusively in terms of what it immediately provides us in comfort or material well- being, we are thinking technologically, not philosophically. Accordingly, the italicized words in the previous paragraph indicate that Socrates was unsure how (or even whether) science and technology, viewed as means, contribute to the ul timate end of living a good life. In this kind of questioning he is not alone in the history of Western philosophy. Consider the brilliant twen tieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who expressed his own doubts on the question rather more succinctly: “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.” 18 If a Luddite is defined as someone who yearns to shatter the instruments of technology so as to return society to a supposedly pre- technological Eden, 19 then it must be said that neither Socrates nor Wittgenstein were Luddites. They were thinkers trying to get beneath the glitter of technological progress to reach what is primordial about it. In Socrates’ case, the primordial is t echnology’s apparent indifference (or irrelevance) to what human beings ought to do with their lives, as opposed to how they should do what they happen to have decided to do. In Wittgenstein’s case, the primordial is a function of science’s commitment to methodological rigor: th e scientific need to predetermine the realm of questions that can be sen sibly put to the world also narrows the range of permissible answers, thus ensuring that none of these questions and answers will ever touc h what he calls the ultimate “sense” and “value” of the world. 20 A question like “What is the end of technology?” thus needs to be thought down to its roots before any decently thoughtful answer to it can be attempted. Most of the time we tend to leap over what is simple and original, and get hung up on the complicated and derivative. And so it is with technology: we tend to leap immediately into seemingly intractable political controversies like technological progress versus the threats that it poses to our privacy, or the preconditions for inducing investment in future technology versus the needs of the poor, in undeveloped and developed regions alike, to enjoy the benefits of present technology. These problems are admittedly pressing a nd difficult, but they stand no chance of being solved, or even properly understood, so long as the question that grounds them remains unasked. Preceding all questions about particular aspects of technolog y (including the manifold that is sometimes called “law and technology”) is this one: What is technology? As a grounding question, the question just asked does not merely seek to uncover correct information about technology’s instrumentalities and support institutions. Before thinki ng about personal computers, cell phones, global positioning satellites, and “smart” bombs before inquiring into the laws of patents, copyrights, trademarks, and unfair competition, which institutionally ser ve modern technology’s tendency to colonize ever-greater spheres of social life by transforming its instruments into saleable commodities before any of this, thought should endeavor to grasp technology’s essence .

AT: ALTRUISM

Human nature in inherently selfish – double bind – either the alternative can’t solve or the alternative destroys freedomJohnson, 2012 - Master's degree in Evolutionary Anthropology, doctoral student in the history of science at University of British Columbia (Eric, “Ayn Rand on Human Nature,” 10/5/2012, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/2012/10/05/ayn-rand-on-human-nature/ ) DS“Every political philosophy has to begin with a theory of human nature,” wrote Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin in his book Biology as Ideology. Thomas Hobbes, for example, believed that humans in a “state of nature,” or what today we would call hunter-gatherer societies, lived a life that was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” in which there existed a “warre of all against all.” This led him to conclude, as many apologists for dictatorship have since, that a stable society required a single leader in order to control the rapacious violence that was inherent to human nature. Building off of this, advocates of state communism, such as Vladimir Lenin or Josef Stalin, believed that each of us was born tabula rasa, with a blank slate, and that human nature could be molded in the interests of those in power.Ever since Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand has been gaining prominence among American conservatives as the leading voice for the political philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism, or the idea that private business should be unconstrained and that government’s only concern should be protecting individual property rights. As I wrote this week in Slate with my piece “Ayn Rand vs. the Pygmies,” the Russian-born author believed that rational selfishness was the ultimate expression of

human nature.“Collectivism,” Rand wrote in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal “is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it pleases.” An objective understanding of “man’s nature and man’s relationship to existence” should inoculate society from the disease of altruistic morality and economic redistribution. Therefore, “one must begin by identifying man’s nature, i.e., those essential characteristics which distinguish him from all other living species.”As Rand further detailed in her book The Virtue of Selfishness, moral values are “genetically dependent” on the way “living entities exist and function.” Because each individual organism is primarily concerned with its own life, she therefore concludes that selfishness is the correct moral value of life. “Its life is the standard of value directing its actions,” Rand wrote, “it acts automatically to further its life and cannot act for its own destruction.” Because of this Rand insists altruism is a pernicious lie that is directly contrary to biological reality. Therefore, the only way to build a good society was to allow human nature, like capitalism, to remain unfettered by the meddling of a false ideology.“ Altruism is incompatible with freedom , with capitalism and with individual rights,” she continued. “One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.” She concludes that this conflict between human nature and the “irrational morality” of altruism is a lethal tension that tears

society apart. Her mission was to free humanity from this conflict. Like Marx, she believed that her correct interpretation of how society should be organized would be the ultimate expression of human freedom.

AT: ALT SOLVES

Their attempt to impose a single identity on debate replicates technology – it perpetuates a dominant form of thought where other ways of revealing are deniedCole ’08 - Philosophy and Religious Studies, Ball State University (Daniel, “Heidegger and Social Ecology”, http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/virtualpress/stance/2008_spring/9Heidegger.pdf, Stance Volume 1 April 2008) //J.N.EHeidegger also contends that technological thinking perpetuates itself, and in those

societies where it is the dominant form of thought, other ways of revealing

beings are denied and considered illegitimate . 18 This is at least in part because the

technological thinking is not a mere activity in which humans engage, but rather drives and challenges people to think about the world in a certain way. Heidegger uses the example of a forester who goes into the forest to acquire lumber and is under the economic constraints of the lumber industry. 19 The forester must allocate his time and energy in the most efficient manner in order to meet standards and goals that exist outside of him; he is a professional forester to the extent that he is driven by profit.

Technological thinking, like the logic of domination, is a social phenomenon. Organizing beings and making them into useful objects is part of the societal norms in places where technological thinking has become dominant. That technological thinking works to exclude other ways of revealing leads into Staudenmaier’s charge of Heidegger as an anti-humanist. For Staudenmaier, rejecting anthropological means-ends organizing is a rejection of humanist concerns. “Letting things be” and giving up technology in favor of experiencing oneness with nature is problematic for Staudenmaier; not only can this lead to the justification of genocide, but it is a renunciation of

human ends. 20 As mentioned earlier, Heidegger does not encourage a flight from machinery, nor does he believe in a Self or oneness of all beings. Here, I shall argue that he does not even set ecological ends higher than human ends to show that he is not an anti-humanist. In order to do this, I will turn to Heidegger’s explication of causality and how technological thinking is reductive. It is not that thinking about how to achieve one’s ends and utilizing things to achieve those ends should be entirely rejected;

rather, for Heidegger, we should think of nature as being more than just something to use and existent only for human use. Heidegger’s critique of technological thinking runs into a discussion of how we conceptualize causality; this is because technological thinking is so focused on instrumentality and “wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality.” 21 Heidegger traces the doctrine of causality back to Aristotle’s four causes that we have treated as though it “had fallen from heaven as a truth as clear as daylight,” at least insofar as philosophy’s teaching goes. 22 As we will see, Heidegger not only thinks the four causes are themselves reductive, but that technocrats—those think technologically and work to keep its reign in place—only pay attention to one of the four. For Heidegger, the four causes are co-responsible for a thing’s existence and the thing is indebted to all of these four causes for its existence. 23 But, uniting the four causes for a being’s existence is the cause of Being i tself. 24 Those four causes that are responsible for something being revealed are: (1) the causa materialis, the material from which the thing is made; (2) the causa formalis, which is the shape the material is put in; (3) the causa finalis is tied to Greek concept of telos, which Heidegger translates as that which circumscribes and gives bounds to the thing; 25 and (4) the causa efficiens which is the being which brings about the change that transforms the material into the final thing (usually understood to be the craftsman who makes the thing). 26 Heidegger, though, disagrees with the traditional characterization of the causa efficiens. He believes that it is the making itself that is responsible. 27 I will now explain in greater detail these four causes

and how in technological thinking the understanding of responsibility is reduced by looking at his example of a sacrificial silver chalic e. In Aristotle’s doctrine of four causes, the causa materialis is thought to be co-responsible with the other causes for a thing’s existence. Heidegger’s example of a silver chalice explains that the silver from which it is made is partly responsible for its lying there ready for use. 28 Silver makes possible its existence, for without it, it would not exist at all. If the chalice were made of something else, it would be a different chalice. In technological thinking, raw materials are not responsible for a thing’s existence, they are simply unrefined matter to be manipulated. The causa materialis alone is not responsible for a thing’s existence, for it must combine with the idea or form of something else in

order to be what it is. “But the sacrificial vessel is indebted not only to the silver. As a chalice, that which is indebted to the silver appears in the aspect of a chalice and not in that of a brooch or a ring.” 29 In order for the

chalice to be the thing it is, then, it requires an idea or form of chalice-ness to which it is then shaped. As with the causa materialis, technological thinking does not consider the form responsible for a thing’s existence.

AT: BARE LIFE

Alt fails --- there is no single source that enables the sovereign control of bare life that they criticize --- the hybrid nature of power makes change impossible Dillon and Reid 2000 --- Professors of Politics and International Relations (Michael, Julian, Jan-March, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, Issue 1, “Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency”)//trepka

To conclude: This confluence of sovereign and governmental power has no center that might be captured. It has no single source that might be located and cut off. Neither does it have a

defensive curtain wall that might be fatally breached. It is subject to no historical law that will guarantee its success or bring

about its end. It operates according to no historical teleology that will result in a

just and equitable order for all. It is a viral, self-reproducing , hybrid strategic

operation of power that poses new challenges to political and democratic thought because of the ways in which it threatens to exhaust what politics and democracy might be about. "If you want to help people in the disaster zone," John Ryle advises in the epigraph to this article, "you have to think politically." The problem is, How does one think politically now in respect of this novel hybrid terrain of power that is radically productive of bodies-in-formation rather than

comprised of a fixed universe of preformed bodies transacting mechanical exchanges of intersubjectivity? Where states, too, are nodes in networks of power operating as the switching mechanisms that

command the zone of indistinction between inside/outside , nomos/physis, so that the

changing fitness criteria of the politics and economics of our current liberal peace may effect the rugged landscapes that populations, as complex adaptive life-forms, must negotiate? Here an order that newly poses the question of the political and all its cognate issues--power, freedom, equity, justice, and the "good society"--operates. Bidding to resolve or replace these with the imperatives of performativity demanding disposability on behalf of territorialized political sovereignty, intimately if often also conflictually allied with a more generically utile adaptability, such abiding human questions are in fact all powerfully reinvigorated once more.

AT: TECH THOUGHT BAD

Heidegger’s philosophy collapses on itself – if focusing on technology loses its essence, then focusing on the essence loses other contexts and complexitiesIhde, 2010 - American philosopher of science and technology, and a post-phenomenologist (Don, “Heidegger’s Technologies: One Size Fits All,” Heidegger's Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives, Google Books) DSIn this chapter, I first revisit Heidegger's reception and continuation of influence within the philosophy of technology, filling in several gaps left out in the introduction. Some three and a half decades since his death, while there is some evidence that Heidegger is virtually the only still strongly visible philosopher of technology of his generation, there is also evidence that this reputation is fading. Following my revisitation, I then turn to a postphenomenological analysis concerning Heidegger's blindness to distinctions and multistabilities that may be found in technologies. Indeed, I contend that while he claims that attending to the particularities of technologies as anthropological-instrumental entities blinds one to the "essence" of technology, the inverse is also the case . To attend to the "essence" of technology, I argue, blinds Heidegger to the differing con- texts and multidimensionalities of technologies that a pragmatic-phenom- enological account can better bring forth. So, first I revisit Heidegger's reception and impact.

AT: POIESIS – ABLEISM TURN

Their conception of poetry relies upon ableist notions of ‘vision’ and ‘sound’ – their authorŠišovski ’13 – graduate engineer-architect and graduate professor of philosophy at Euro-Balkan university (Jordan, “MARTIN HEIDEGGER ON POETIC DWELLING”, September-October, 2013, Blesok no. 92, Peer Reviewed, *we don’t endorse gendered language) //J.N.Ee. Images Heidegger considered that the poet uses the most appropriate tool for this expression of the invisible through the visible, the image. He considers that poetry speaks in images because: Because poetry takes that mysterious measure, to wit, in the face of the sky, therefore it speaks in "images." This is why poetic images are imaginings in a distinctive sense: not mere fancies and illusions but imaginings that are visible inclusions of the alien in the sight of the familiar. The poetic saying of images gathers the brightness and sound of the heavenly appearances into one with' the darkness and silence of what is alien. By such sights the god surprises us. In this strangeness he proclaims his unfaltering nearness. (2001: 223-224) The poetic image it can be added, nor is a

meteorological description of the weather, nor some journalistic coverage of an event or place. The poet

takes the event and turns it into an inner image of reality, into an icon of

the unspeakable . The man is an image of the divine. The man is an icon of the Deity! Thus arises their

coming together. Furthermore, interpreting the poem, Heidegger says: "The shade of the night"—the night itself is the shade, that darkness which can never become a mere blackness because as shade it is wedded to light and remains cast by it. The measure taken by poetry yields, imparts itself—as the foreign element in which the invisible one preserves his presence—to what is familiar with the sights of the sky.

Language is political – ableist metaphors reinforce violent hierarchies that make their advocacy meaninglessBrown ’14 (Lidya, disabilities advocate, “Ableism/Language”, April 12th, 2014, http://www.autistichoya.com/p/ableist-words-and-terms-to-avoid.html?spref=fb) //J.N.EThis page has received tens of thousands of pageviews since it launched, and has been simultaneously the subject of a number of angry and accusatory comments and letters as well. I never wrote an introduction to this page before, so I'm going to take the time to briefly do so now. The most frequent accusations that I receive in response

to this page can fall into three general accusations that I am a) attempting to police everyone's language, b) obsessed with being politically correct, and or c) extremely hypersensitive to imagined insults and slights. I contend that none of these accusations are true. Language is inherently political. Both as individuals and as larger social and cultural groups, it is self-evident that the language we use to express all sorts of ideas, opinions, and emotions, as well as to describe ourselves and others, is simultaneously reflective of existing attitudes and influential to developing attitudes. The terms that are listed below are part of an expanding English-language glossary of ableist words and terms. I have chosen to include words or phrases that I

know of or that are brought to my attention that meet two criteria: 1) Their literal or historical definition derives from a description of disability, either in general or pertaining to a specific category of disability, and 2) They have been historically and or currently used to marginalize, other, and oppress disabled people. The rationale for including some of these words may be readily apparent to many visitors as meriting inclusion on this list, such as for "retarded" and "invalid." For others, however, there may be the lingering suspicion that I have opted to be overinclusive and thus,

extremely hypersensitive and obsessed with being politically correct. The reason that I have listed words that may

not readily come to mind when asked to consider "insults and slurs targeting disability" is precisely because so much of this ableist language is utterly pervasive both in everyday colloquy and formal idiom with hardly any notice or acknowledgement, even by fellow disabled people not using the language as part of any reclamation project. On that note, the list is not intended to condemn or scold disabled people who use any of the words included in the spirit of reclamation or as self-descriptors. Its primary purpose is to serve as a reference for anyone interested in learning about linguistic microaggressions and everyday, casual ableism. And to the observation that some of the terms offered as alternatives carry analogous meanings, I have stated that the reason some words are included while others are not is because some words have oppressive histories and others do not. For example, the word "dumb" has a disability-specific history (referring to people who cannot speak, and often used to refer to Deaf people), whereas the word "obtuse" does not (deriving from a meaning of "beating against something to make it blunt or dull"). Granted, there will always be folks, disabled or not, who will disagree with the existence, purpose, and or scope of this glossary for a variety of reasons. This brief essay is not intended as a thorough examination of and response to every possible criticism, which would merit an entire series of essays to adequately discuss. My hope is that the glossary will continue to serve as a resource for those interested in its purpose and contents, and that criticisms of this page might now be more nuanced and more informed, given this background and explanation. + As a side

note, it should be obvious to most readers that political correctness has little, if anything, to do with basic human decency and respect for others, and my primary concern is, in fact, basic human decency and respect for others. Also note that I emphatically insist on referring to myself and my community as autistic, which is assuredly not the politically correct terminology. ++ As another side note, it is my intention to eventually expand the entries on this page to either further explain each term's history and or to link to other pages, such as the Ableist Word Profiles from Forward: Feminists with Disabilities (FWD), that have already done so. Glossary of Ableist Phrases This is a list of ableist words and terms for reference purposes. Some of the entries are slurs, some are descriptions of disabled people, some are slang that derive from ableist origins, and some are common metaphors that rely on disability and ableism. This is a living document, constantly growing, expanding, and changing. If I've missed something, please let me know! One important note: Many people who identify with particular disabilities or disability in general may use descriptors from this list in an act of reclaiming the language. You may well too! BUT if you do not identify with a particular disability/disabled identity, it's probably appropriative to use some of those terms. (Some examples are mad and crip.) After the list of ableist words and terms, I have included lists of alternatives to ableist slurs, descriptions, and metaphors, if you're interested in unlearning the patterns of linguistic ableism in your own language.

Blind to ____ / turn a blind eye to ____ / blinded by ignorance/bigotry/etc.

Refers to Blind people or people with visual impairments . Bound to a wheelchair (wheelchair bound) Refers to people with physical or mobility disabilities. Confined to a wheelchair Refers to people with physical or mobility disabilities. Crazy Refers to people with mental or

psychiatric disabilities. Cretin Refers to people with intellectual disabilities. Cripple/Crippled (by ____) Refers to people with physical or mobility disabilities. Daft Refers to people with mental or psychiatric

disabilities. Deaf-Mute Refers to Deaf people or people with hearing

impairments. Deaf to ____ / turn a deaf ear to ____ / etc. Refers to Deaf

people or people with hearing impairment s . Derp (also herp-derp and variations) Refers to people with intellectual disabilities. Diffability Can refer to any person with a

disability. Differently abled Can refer to any person with a disability. Dumb Refers to Deaf people or people with hearing impairments, people with speech impairments, or people with linguistic or communication

disorders or disabilities. Handicap(ped) Refers to people with physical or mobility disabilities.

Handicapable Usually refers to people with physical or mobility disabilities, but can also mean any person

with a disability. Harelip Refers to people with cleft-lip palette or similar facial deformities. Idiot(ic) Refers

to people with intellectual disabilities. Imbecile Refers to people with intellectual disabilities. Insane or Insanity Refers to people with mental or psychiatric disabilities. Invalid Refers to people with physical or

mobility disabilities or chronic health conditions. Lame Refers to people with physical or mobility disabilities.

Loony/Loony Bin Refers to people with mental or psychiatric disabilities. Lunatic Refers to people with

mental or psychiatric disabilities. Madhouse/Mad/Madman Refers to an institution housing people with

mental or psychiatric disabilities. Maniac Refers to people with mental or psychiatric disabilities.

Mental/Mental Case Refers to people with mental or psychiatric disabilities. Mongoloid Refers to people with intellectual disabilities and specifically Down Syndrome. Derives from a double-whammy of racism

AND ableism, from the belief that people with Down Syndrome look like people from Mongolia. Moron(ic) Refers to people with intellectual disabilities. Nuts Refers to people with mental or psychiatric disabilities.

Psycho Refers to people with mental or psychiatric disabilities. Psychopath(ic) Refers to people with

mental or psychiatric disabilities. Psycho(tic) Refers to people with mental or psychiatric disabilities.

Retard(ed)/[anything]-tard Refers to people with intellectual disabilities. [you belong on the] Short-bus/ that's short-bus material/etc. Refers to people with intellectual, learning, or other

mental disabilities. Simpleton Refers to people with intellectual disabilities. Spaz(zed) Refers to people

with cerebral palsy or similar neurological disabilities. Specially Abled Can refer to any person with a

disability. Special Needs Usually refers to people with learning, intellectual, or developmental disabilities,

but can mean any person with a disability. Stupid Refers to people with intellectual disabilities (i.e. "in a

stupor"). Suffers from ____ Can refer to any person with a disability. Wacko/Whacko Refers to people with mental or psychiatric disabilities.

Exclusion of disabled bodies is the root cause of violenceSiebers 2010 (Tobin, professor of English, University of Michigan, Disability Aesthetics, pgs 23-28)

Disqualification as a symbolic process removes individuals from the ranks of quality human beings, putting them at risk of unequal treatment, bodily harm, and death . That people may be subjected to violence if they do not achieve a prescribed level of quality is an injustice rarely questioned. In fact, even though we may redefine what we mean by quality people, for example as historical minorities are allowed to move into their

ranks, we have not yet ceased to believe that non quality human beings do exist and that they should be treated differently from people of quality. Harriet McBryde Johnson's debate with Peter Singer provides a recent example of the widespread belief in the existence of non quality human

beings (Johnson). Johnson, a disability activist, argues that all disabled people qualify as persons who have the same rights as everyone else. Singer, a moral philosopher at Princeton University, claims to the contrary that people with certain disabilities should be euthanized, especially if they are . thought to be in pain, because they do not qualify as persons. Similarly, Martha Nussbaum, the University of Chicago moral philosopher, establishes a threshold below which "a fully human life, a life worthy of human dignity:' is not possible (181). In particular, she notes that the onset of certain disabilities may reduce a person to the status of former human being: "we may say of some conditions of a being, let us say a permanent vegetative

state of a (former) human being, that this just is not a human life at all" (181). Surprisingly little thought and energy have been given to disputing the belief that nonquality human beings do exist. This belief is so robust that it supports the most serious and

characteristic injustices of our day. Disqualification at this moment in time justifies discrimination, servi- tude, imprisonment, involuntary institutionalization, euthanasia, human and civil rights violations, military intervention, compulsory sterilization, police actions, assisted suicide, capital punishment, and murder. It is my

contention that disqualification finds support in the way that bodies appear and in their specific appearances-that is, disqualification is justified through the accusation of mental or

physical inferiority based on aesthetic principles. Disqualification is produced by naturalizing inferiority as the justification for unequal treatment, violence, and oppression.

According to Snyder and Mitchell, disability serves in the modern period as " the master

trope of human disqualification ."4 They argue that disability represents a marker of otherness that establishes differences between human beings not as acceptable or valuable variations but as dangerous deviations. Douglas Baynton provides compelling examples from the modern era, explaining that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States

disability identity disqualified other identities defined by gender, race, class, and nationality. Women were deemed inferior because they were said to have mental and physical disabilities. People of color had fewer rights than other persons based on accusations of biological inferiority. Immigrants were excluded from entry into

the United States when they were poor, sick, or failed standardized tests, even though

the populations already living there were poor, sick, and failed standardized tests. In every case, disability identity served to justify oppression by amplifying ideas about inferiority already attached to other minority identities. Disability is the trope by which the assumed

inferiority of these other minority identities achieved expression. The appearance of lesser mental and physical abilities disqualifies people as inferior and justifies their oppression. Thanks to the work ofBaynton and others, it is now possible to recognize disability as a trope used to posit the inferiority of certain minority populations, but it remains extremely difficult to understand that mental and

physical markers of inferiority are also tropes placed in the service of disability oppression. Before disability can be used as a dis qualifier, disability, too, has to be disqualified. Beneath the troping of blackness as inbuilt inferiority, for example, lies the troping of disability as inferior. Beneath the troping of femininity as biological deficiency lies the troping of disability as deficiency. The mental and physical properties of bodies become the natural symbols of inferiority via a process of disqualification that seems biological, not cultural-which is why disability discrimination seems to be a medical rather than a social problem. If we consider how difficult it is at this moment to disqualify people as inferior on the basis of their racial, sexual, gender, or class characteristics, we may come to recognize the ground that we must cover in the future before we experience the same difficulty disqualifying people as inferior on the basis of disability. We might also recognize the work that disability performs at present in situations where race, sexuality, gender, and class are used to disqualify people as physically or mentally

inferior. At the current time we prefer to fix, cure, or eradicate the disabled body rather than the discriminatory attitudes of society. Medicine and charity, not social justice, are the answers to the problems of the disabled body, because the disabled body is thought to be the real cause of the problems. Disability is a personal misfortune or tragedy that puts people at risk of a nonquality existence-or so

most people falsely believe. Aesthetics studies the way that some bodies make other bodies feel. Bodies, minimally defined, are what appear in the world. They involve manifestations of physical appearance, whether this appearance is defined as the physical manifestation itself or as the particular appearance of a given physical manifestation. Bodies include in my definition human bodies, paintings, sculpture, buildings, the entire range of human artifacts as well as animals and objects in the natural world. Aesthetics, moreover, has always stressed that feelings produced in bodies by other bodies are involuntary, as if they represented a form of unconscious communication between bodies, a contagious possession of one body by another. Aesthetics is the domain in which the sensation of otherness is felt at its most powerful, strange, and frightening. Whether the effect is beauty

and pleasure, ugliness and pain, or sublimity and terror, the emotional impact of one body on another is experienced as an assault on autonomy and a testament to the power of otherness. Aesthetics is the human science most concerned with invitations 'to think and feel otherwise about our own influence, interests, and imagination. Of course, when bodies produce feelings of pleasure or pain, they also invite judgments about whether they should be accepted or rejected in the human community. People thought to experience more pleasure or pain than others or to produce unusual levels of pleasure and pain in other bodies are among the bodies most discriminated against, actively excluded, and violated on the current scene, be they disabled, sexed, gendered, or racialized bodies. Disabled people, but also sex workers, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people, and people of color, are tortured and killed because of beliefs about their relationship to

pain and pleasure (Siebers 2009). This is why aesthetic disqualification is not merely a matter for art critics or museum directors but a political process of concern to us all. An understanding of aesthetics is crucial because it reveals the operative principles of disqualification used in minority oppression. Oppression is the systematic victimization of one

group by another. It is a form of intergroup violence. That oppression involves "groups," and not "individuals:' means that it concerns identities, and this means, furthermore, that oppression always focuses on how the body appears, both on how it appears as a public and physical presence and on its specific and various appearances. Oppression is justified most often by the attribution of natural inferiority-what some call "in-built" or "biological" inferiority; Natural inferiority is always somatic, focusing on the mental and physical features of the group, and it figures as disability. The prototype of biological inferiority is disability. The representation of inferiority always comes back to the appearance of the body and the way the body makes other bodies feel. This is why the study of oppression requires an understanding of aesthetics-not only because oppression uses aesthetic judgments for its violence but also because the signposts of how oppression works are visible in the history of art, where aesthetic judgments about the creation and appreciation ofbodi~s are openly discussed. Two additional thoughts must be noted before I treat some analytic. examples from the historical record. First, despite my statement that disability now serves as the master trope of human disqualification, it is not a matter of reducing other minority identities to disability

identity. Rather, it is a matter of understanding the work done by disability in oppressive systems. In disability oppression, the physical and mental properties of the body are socially constructed as disqualifying defects, but this specific type of social construction happens to be integral at the present moment to the symbolic requirements of oppression in general. In every oppressive system of our day, I want to claim, the oppressed identity is represented in some way as disabled, and although it is hard to understand, the same process obtains when disability is the oppressed identity. "Racism" disqualifies on the basis of race, providing justification for the inferiority of certain skin colors, bloodlines, and physical features. "Sexism" disqualifies on the basis of sex/gender as a direct representation of mental and physical inferiority. "Classism" disqualifies on the

basis of family lineage and socioeconomic power as proof of inferior genealogical status. 'Ableism" disqualifies on the basis of mental and physical differences, first selecting and then stigmatizing them as disabilities. The oppressive system occults in each case the fact that the disqualified identity is socially constructed, a mere convention, representing signs of incompetence, weakness, or inferiority as undeniable facts of nature. Second, it is crucial to remember the lessons of intersectional theory. This theory rightly focuses on how oppressive systems affect the identity of the oppressed individual, explaining that because individuality is complex, containing many overlapping identities, the individual is vulnerable to oppressive systems that would reduce the individual to one or two identities for the purpose of maintaining power and control (Collins 208),5 Intersectional theorists restore a complex view of the individual and fight against creating hierarchies between different identities. For example, the debate whether it is worse to be black or female is viewed as divisive and

unproductive. My tactic here is similar. I want to look at identity not from the point of view of the oppressed individual but from the point of view-limited as it may seem and significant

because limited-of oppressive systems. Disability is the master trope of human disqualification, not because disability theory is superior to race, class, or sex/gender theory, but because all oppressive systems function by reducing human variation to deviancy and inferiority defined on the mental and physical plane. Intersectional analysis shows that disability identity provides a foundation for disqualification in cases where other minority identities fail because they are known to be socially constructed for the purposes of domination. It

is not clear why disability has proven so useful a trope for maintaining oppression, but

one reason may be that it has been extraordinarily difficult to separate disability from the naturalist fallacy that conceives of it as a biological defect more or less resistant to social or cultural intervention. In the modern era, of course, eugenics embodies this fallacy. Eugenics has been of signal importance to oppression because eugenics weds medical science to a disgust with mental and physical variation, but eugenics is not a new trend, only an exacerbation of old trends that invoke disease, inferiority, impairment, and deformity to disqualify one group in the service of another's rise to power. As racism, sexism, and classism fall away slowly as justifications for human inferiority-and the critiques

of these prejudices prove powerful examples of how to fight oppression the prejudice against disability remains in full force, providing seemingly credible reasons for the belief in human inferiority and the oppressive systems built upon it. This usage will continue, I expect, until we reach a historical moment when we know as much about the social construction of disability as we now know about the social construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Disability represents at this moment in time the final frontier of justifiable human inferiority.

AT: TECH CREATES WEAPONS

Technology is good – it is key to learning and education which solves every impactKelly, 2013 - Illinois Wesleyan University (Mike, “In Defense Of Technology,” http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1021&context=tis ) DSReading is an essential part of learning, and with the use of tech nology' everyone can learn more. Technology catalyzes reading, it does not inhibit it. With paper, people are limited physically by how much they can carry. With technology, people can carry all of their readings with them, as well as download them on the go. Currently, anyone can reach information quicker than ever before. This allows society to expand and develop ideas faster. If we combine this with our high level concepts, society is now be coming more intelligent and creating even more, higher level black boxes. Computers help us to create these high level black boxes and allow us to automate things that are not intellectually challenging, allowing society to focus more on new concepts, rather than spend time learning what we already know. This is all only possible with the help of technology.

Technology helps people live longer and healthier. Technology does not kill us,

we kill each other . With inventions like the pacemaker or the MRI, can anyone say that technology itself is killing us? Sure, technol ogy includes basic and advanced weaponry, but weapons are not the cause of violence. Weapons are only a means of expressing violence and they would not exist without those who seek to do harm in the first place. Ad vancements in medical technology have empirically increased our lifespan in ways that would not have been possible in pre-technological eras. This has been shown to be the case time and again, with the ravages of treat ments such as bloodletting and the lobotomy, as well as the eradication of polio in the past century, serving as examples.Technology has and will continue to create a better environ ment for society . It has and will continue to make society more intelligent through its aiding of abstraction. Technology has and will continue to help everyone contribute to society, regardless of one's extroverted or introvert ed disposition . Medical technology has and will continue to expand the duration and quality of our lives. Society has and will continue to flourish from technology and its benefits. It has and will continue to do all these things, only on the condition that technology is no longer blamed for phe nomena of which it is not responsible.

AT: MYSTIFICATION

Mystification doesn’t make sense – we have a clear and identifiable critiqueCole ’08 - Philosophy and Religious Studies, Ball State University (Daniel, “Heidegger and Social Ecology”, http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/virtualpress/stance/2008_spring/9Heidegger.pdf, Stance Volume 1 April 2008) //J.N.ETo close the paper, I will address a possible objection to this paper that would claim that Heidegger’s prescription to technological thinking is somehow mystical. I will do this by drawing connections between the ending of “The Question Concerning Technology” and Frye’s “loving

perception.” As we have seen, Heidegger’s critiques are not misanthropic or mystical; and in

this final section, by showing some parallels to Frye’s work, we will see that his prescription for ecological thinking is neither misanthropic nor mystical and can help frame how we think about environmental ethics. For Heidegger, overcoming the dangers of technological thinking lies somewhat paradoxically in resisting the drive to master the technological, which itself would be thinking technologically. 39 It requires, on one hand, an openness and safekeeping of “the- coming-to-pass of truth.” 40 It should be noted,

however, that Heidegger does not want us to flee from technology and never affect it, but rather not to reduce nature solely into what we want. Technological objects

can take nature into its responsibility without changing it, e.g., a windmill

can harness the energy without overcoming the wind and changing it into

a mere resource . 41 This helps to emphasize that his critique is of an extreme and, he thinks,

ever widely practiced technological thinking and not technological objects. His recommendation to wait and accept the emergence of truth finds a parallel attit ude in Marilyn Frye’s work. She writes that “the loving eye is contrary to the arrogant eye,” which acknowledges the independence of the other.” 42 She prescribes that if we want to see women, we should gaze lovingly at them and wait. 43 It is not by mastering them or by manipulating them in such a way that they reveal something about themselves that we

already want to see; rather it is by a non-reductive acceptance of their being. The critiques of Heidegger of technological thinking, Warren of the logic of domination, and Frye of arrogant perception, as well as their recommendations to end oppression, show that Heidegger’s philosophy is better suited to social ecology and not deep ecology. For those who find Staudenmaier’s argument against the historical use of deep ecology persuasive, this changes how one ought to appraise Heidegger’s philosophy.

AT: SCIENCE WRONG

Scientific realism is a necessity – other conceptions of reality prevent survivalSankey, 2004 - Associate Professor and Head of Department at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne (Howard, Scientific Realism: An Elaboration and a Defence, philsci-archive.pitt.edu/304/1/Sci_Rsm_Elaboration_%26_Defence.rtf ) DSOur place in nature: the realist perspectiveThe basic argument for realism takes off from a founding intuition about our place in nature. We human beings are sentient, intelligent organisms. We inhabit a pre-existing natural world. We interact causally with this world. But we did not invent, construct or create it. We must act in the world in order to survive. To assure our survival, we must acquire knowledge of the way the world is. For knowledge about the way the world is enables us to reliably undertake actions which promote our survival. Thus, the realist concludes, we are creatures who inhabit an objective reality, of which, given our survival, we have the capacity to acquire genuine knowledge.This is the perspective of realism, spiced, I should say, with a dash of evolutionary naturalism. The perspective is fundamentally opposed to views which conceive reality on the basis of human mental representation, such as belief or experience. The realist sees humans and their inner life as but a small part of a vast reality. Any view which takes human thought or experience as the basis of reality, or the concept of reality, profoundly misunderstands our place in the natural world. From the realist perspective, such a view commits the fundamental error of anthropocentrism (cf. Smart 1963; also Hooker 1987: 264ff).

Scientific realism has a common sense basisSankey, 2004 - Associate Professor and Head of Department at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne (Howard, Scientific Realism: An Elaboration and a Defence, philsci-archive.pitt.edu/304/1/Sci_Rsm_Elaboration_%26_Defence.rtf ) DSRealism and common senseThe second strand in the argument for scientific realism turns on an appeal to common sense and the realism implicit in ordinary common sense. By ‘common sense’, I mean our ordinary, prereflective awareness of our immediate surroundings and of the broader world which extends beyond those immediate surroundings. This is a world that is made up of material objects of all shapes and sizes, of which we have more or less immediate knowledge by means of our sensory experience of those objects. It is a concrete world of mind-independent objects with which we interact causally by means of bodily movement and action, but which is nonetheless beyond the immediate control of our powers of volition. It is also a world in which misperception and illusion have their place in the ordinary course of events, but in which a robust sense of reality nevertheless sustains a reasonable degree of practical certainty that things are by and large as they seem.Realism about ordinary everyday objects and our epistemic access to such objects provides the starting-point for the commonsense realist component of the argument for scientific realism. Common sense gives rise to a body of beliefs

about the objects in our environment and our epistemic and practical interactions with these objects. On the whole, we may assume that this body of beliefs is true. The point is not that our commonsense beliefs are certain, indubitable or infallible. Rather, commonsense beliefs are prima facie justified. They have an epistemic priority, which makes it difficult to dislodge them by rational argument. Any attempt to eliminate or overthrow such beliefs is to be regarded with extreme suspicion. Any argument that purports to show that common sense is to be discarded thereby shows itself more than likely to be unsound or invalid.

Scientific realism has the only explanation for the success of scienceSankey, 2004 - Associate Professor and Head of Department at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne (Howard, Scientific Realism: An Elaboration and a Defence, philsci-archive.pitt.edu/304/1/Sci_Rsm_Elaboration_%26_Defence.rtf ) DSSuccess and truthAs we have just seen, commonsense realism contains the seeds of scientific realism. There is a further sense in which this is the case. In the course of everyday practical activity, we routinely employ inference to the best explanation in seeking to understand why various events occur. Such reasoning is the basis of the best-known argument for scientific realism, the so-called success or ‘no miracles’ argument. The reasoning that forms the basis of one of the major arguments for scientific realism is therefore reasoning of a commonsense kind.The classic formulation of the success or ‘no miracles’ argument is due to Hilary Putnam:The positive argument for realism is that it is the only philosophy that doesn’t make the success of science a miracle. That terms in mature scientific theories typically refer (this formulation is due to Richard Boyd), that the theories accepted in a mature science are typically approximately true, that the same term can refer to the same thing even when it occurs in different theories – these statements are viewed by the scientific realist not as necessary truths but as part of the only scientific explanation of the success of science, and hence as part of any adequate scientific description of science and its relations to its objects. (Putnam 1975: 73)In this passage, Putnam argues that realism is the best explanation of the success of science. (Strictly, he says it is the only explanation, but this is a form of inference to the best explanation.) Putnam’s argument turns on the claim that a philosophy of science which denies that theoretical entities are real, or that scientific theories are true or approximately true, must treat the success of science as a miracle that is incapable of explanation. An explanation which treats the success of science as an inexplicable miracle is an unsatisfactory explanation of such success. By contrast, scientific realism provides a compelling explanation of the success of science. On the whole, the unobservable entities postulated by theories exist, and scientific theories are true or approximately true. Given the reality of the entities to which scientific theories refer, as well as the truth or approximate truth of such theories, it is only to be expected that science should manifest the striking degree of empirical success that it does. Because scientific realism provides a compelling explanation of the success of science, while alternative approaches provide an unsatisfactory explanation, we should accept scientific realism as true.

The scientific method is good – uses a number of tests to prove objectivitySankey, 2004 - Associate Professor and Head of Department at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne (Howard, Scientific Realism: An Elaboration and a Defence, philsci-archive.pitt.edu/304/1/Sci_Rsm_Elaboration_%26_Defence.rtf ) DSSuccess and methodIn the appraisal of a scientific theory, and the choice between alternative theories, scientists employ a variety of methodological norms, or rules of method, as I shall call them. They consider whether a theory is confirmed by the evidence, accurately predicts novel facts, unifies phenomena from disparate domains, and so forth. If a theory is certified by such rules of method, then a scientist is rationally justified in accepting the theory. Certification by rules of method therefore provides the basis for epistemic warrant in science.The scientific realist wishes to defend the epistemic realist thesis that scientific inquiry leads to rational belief and knowledge about the transempirical world. The realist must therefore argue that use of the rules of method gives rise to theories which scientists are warranted in accepting as true or approximately true. For this reason, while I am favourable to the revisions of the success argument noted above, I suggest that emphasis should be placed instead on application of the success argument at the level of the methods of science.