An early intuition of Heidegger. From the Homme plante to the dilemma of music

Abstract

In 1957 Martin Heidegger highlighted how the computer language could be a poor imitation of the human language. The computer, infact, can reproduce only the logical and mathematical skills of the human mind, not the feelings and the ethics. Neither Julien Offray de La Mettrie, who in 1758 theorized the figure of the so called Machine man, had advanced the hypothesis that a machine could reproduce the psychic and intellectual abilities of a human being. This hypothesis is affected by some of the unique characteristics of the human species, among which the sensitivity for music.