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century B.C. It was Plato and Aristotle who started to lose sight of the question of being. They effectively shifted the problem to a new set of questions: “How can we know beings?” and “How are beings related to one another?” The medieval philosophers, such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, were not much better, following closely in the footsteps of Plato and Aristotle. But it was really Descartes who achieved the modern shift in knowledge, putting the human knower over and above the material world, separate from nature and matter as the set of objects to be known and controlled.

77

Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Heidegger, Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1977), p. 221.

78

Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 31.

79

Heidegger made this remark in an interview with Der Spiegel, entitled “Only a God Can Save Us,” translated by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo in Philosophy Today 20 (4th April, 1976), pp. 267-285.

80

David West Reynolds, Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary (New York: DK Publishing), p. 25.

81

Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 214.

82

See Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, p. 193.

83

Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, p. 301.

84

Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 31.

85

See Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Chapter 4, 1253b20-35, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, translated by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1131. For more of Aristotle’s theory of technology, see his Physics, Book II, Chapter 1, 192b10-193b20, in Basic Works, pp. 236-38.

86

Heidegger writes: “Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free into its own essence. To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from boundless spoliation” (“Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Basic Writings, p. 328).

87

I would like to thank Bill Irwin, Jason Eberl, Kevin Decker, and Elizabeth Cooke for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this chapter, and Chris Pliatska for many discussions of Star Wars.

88

See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975 [1694]), Book 2, Chapter 27; John Barresi, “On Becoming a Person,” Philosophical Psychology 12 (1999), pp. 79-98; Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms (Montgomery: Bradford, 1978); Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Scott Glynn, Identity, Intersubjectivity, and Communicative Action (Athens: Paideia Project, 2000).

89

Most thinkers doing work in psychology, philosophy of mind, and the neurosciences subscribe to the idea that “the mind is what the brain does.” Those doing work in artificial intelligence alter this by saying that “the mind is what something that functions like the brain does.” Since personhood is an extension of one’s mind, it is safe to say that for these folks personhood is what the brain (or something that functions like it) does as well. See Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991); Hans Hermans et al., “The Dialogical Self: Beyond Individualism and Rationalism,” American Psychologist 47 (1992), pp. 23-33; Eric Kandel et al., eds., Principles of Neural Science (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000).

90

See Dennett, Consciousness Explained; Ned Block, “Troubles with Functionalism,” in Ned Block, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 268-305; Philip Johnson-Laird, Mental Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1984).

91

See George Boolos and Robert Jeffrey, Computability and Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and James Robert Brown, The Laboratory of the Mind: Thought Experiments