{
    "id": "gatherings-15-04",
    "type": "article-journal",
    "title": "Thinking Ontological Difference in the Atomic Age",
    "author": [
        {
            "family": "",
            "given": "Benjamin Brewer"
        }
    ],
    "container-title": "Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual",
    "issued": {
        "date-parts": [
            [
                2025
            ]
        ]
    },
    "volume": "15",
    "URL": "https://staging.heidegger-circle.org/gatherings/article/15-04/",
    "ISSN": "2164-3345",
    "publisher": "Heidegger Circle",
    "language": "en",
    "page": "79-113",
    "abstract": "This paper argues that the “atomic age” was a central con-\r\ncern of Heidegger’s from 1945 to the late 1950s. It begins by presenting\r\nevidence that Heidegger may have been involved in the Kampf dem\r\nAtomtod movement, an anti-nuclear protest movement that gained\r\nwide public support in the German Federal Republic from 1957–58. The\r\nsecond part of the paper reexamines Heidegger’s writings on nuclear\r\nenergy and technology, which it argues were paradigmatic examples of\r\ntechnology’s ontological structure that allowed him to make key dis-\r\ntinctions between different modes of destruction and of futurelessness.\r\nIn the final part of the paper, I argue that Heidegger’s own response to\r\nthe challenge of the atomic age for thinking is ambivalent and that this\r\nambivalence points to fundamental difficulties for Heidegger’s concep-\r\ntion of thinking, ontological difference, and the essence of the human\r\nin this period."
}