BOOK REVIEW Mark Coeckelbergh: Human Being@Risk. Enhancement, Technology, and the Evaluation of Vulnerability Transformations, Springer, Dordrecht-New York, 2013, 218 pp., $129 Pieter Lemmens Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 To be alive is to be vulnerable. That is probably the most basic truth all living creatures confront, from the smallest to the greatest and from the most primitive to the most complex. As Hans Jonas states in the introduction to his wonderful treatise, The Phenomenon of Life, the paradoxical, still enigmatic fact that vital substance by some original act of segregation has isolated itself from the general fabric of things and set itself over against the world introduced the tension of ‘to be or not to be’ in the indifferent continuum of material existence. With life, Jonas observes with Friedrich Nietzsche, being appears as being in an emphatic sense for the first time. Life means mortality, it is existence affirmed but as such, given the inherent and continuous threat of relapsing back into non-being (all living creatures’ ultimate fate anyway), it is existence as concern. Being alive as being free from the identity with matter implies having its own being as a burden and this means—hazarding some Heideggerian jargon—being a being that is always at risk. What distinguishes human life in this respect is the fact that it is consciously aware of this condition and is therefore able to act upon it. And this is precisely what technology is all about, according to the Flemisch philosopher of technology Marc Coekelbergh. In his competent new book Human Being@Risk. Enhancement, Technology, and the Evaluation of Vulnerability Transformations, Coeckelbergh zooms in on this human condition of vulnerability or riskiness in an attempt to develop a both descriptive and normative philosophical anthropological framework that will allow us to address the multiplicity of new risks and threats that we face due to the avalanche of new and emerging technologies—which are ultimately invented, as Coeckelbergh maintains, to deal with our vulnerabilities. Technologies are designed and employed to decrease our vulnerability—and technology is the human way of P. Lemmens (&) Department of Philosophy and Science Studies, Faculty of Science, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: p.lemmens@science.ru.nl 123 Hum Stud DOI 10.1007/s10746-014-9308-2