For my debut podcast I’m delighted to have with me Johannes Niederhauser PhD. Johannes is a Heidegger scholar, currently teaches philosophy at Birkbeck College and will soon publish his first book on Heidegger’s phenomenology of death. Johannes is also the impresario of the Dead Philsophers Club, which he hosts at the Library Members club in London. Please check out his fascinating lectures and interviews at Classical Philosophy on youtube, Instagram and Patreon.

In today’s discussion, Johannes and I explore Heidegger’s statement in The Thing that in the modern age, ‘the frantic abolition of distance brings no nearness’. We explore Heidegger’s notion from the personal realm of online interactions before expanding it out to encompass the global nature of drone warfare, ballistic missile defence and nuclear war. How do these Techniks, as Heidegger would put it, stem from a pathological spatial abstraction and what can be done to counter this?