Gregory B. Sadler is featured in the latest episode of the History of Philosophy Audio Archive discussing Martin Heidegger’s crucial 1954 essay “The Question Concerning Technology” - The ideas are very potent, and are as applicable today as they were during the Atoms for Peace era, if not more so.

Beneath the idiosyncratic German of Heidegger’s (frankly) tortured prose style are powerful reimagining of how human beings transform nature and bring-forth new things into being - things (beings standing-forth in unconcealment in Heideggerese) which inevitably graduate from being mere instrumental means, to circumscribing, expeditionary, purposive forces and forceful perspectives (enframing) which challenge the natural world to stand naked before the subject (Dasein) and reveal itself to be an enormous stockpile of unmanifest but extractable and exploitable power - the rightly-famous concept of the standing-reserve.

Greg does a remarkable job leading us (and me, many many years ago) by the hand through this rather thorny piece of philosophical writing, which to me has always been a massive intellectual diamond at the bottom of the rather dank coal shaft of Heidegger’s endlessly self-referential metaphysical/phenomenological lexicon. If these words mean nothing to you, then don’t worry, Greg will explain.