This essay discusses the normative significance of the spatial dimension of conflict events. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with political actors – politicians, officials, and activists – and on Heidegger’s account of spatiality in Being and Time, I will argue that the experience of conflict space is co-constituted by the respective conflict participants, as well as the location where the conflict unfolds. Location and conflict parties’ (self-)understandings ‘open up’ a space that enables and constrains ways of seeing and acting. Yet, (...) a purely transcendental phenomenology will remain oblivious to the quasi-transcendental, societal structures of power that shape a person’s conflict experience. To illuminate these facets of the phenomenon, phenomenology has to join forces with critical theory. Introducing Garland-Thomson’s feminist distinction of fit/misfit, I will illustrate how power shapes conflict space in manifold ways. The essay thereby fills a gap in the philosophical literature that rarely analyses political conflict as a phenomenon sui generis. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between Heidegger’s critique of educational comportment and his analysis of space in Being and Time. It posits that providing an educational corrective to the practice of tacit rational, described as ‘circumspection’ in Being and Time, would provide an opportunity to reorient Dasein toward clearer awareness of the spatial context. A phenomenological approach to education might be framed as a process that reorganizes how changes are anticipated by comported expectations. Addressing conditions of spatial comportment in education (...) reveals that while models of learning illusorily claim to provide infinite opportunities, contingent upon mastery of delimited knowledge, a phenomenological approach to education begins by first delimiting illusions of possibility. (shrink)

The ‘body’ has remained the pivotal and essential mechanism for analysis within disability scholarship. Yet while historically conceptualized as an individual’s fundamental feature, the ‘disabled identity’ has been more recently explained as a function of ‘normalcy’ through social, cultural political, and legal discriminations against difference and deviancy. Disability studies’ established tradition of consultation with philosophical endeavour remains apparently unwilling to exploit or utilize Martin Heidegger’s understanding of ‘Being’ and interpretation of Dasein as a possible framework for unravelling the complexities of (...) contemporary discrimination and oppression of those others. This paper in tracing Heidegger’s explanation of humankind, inspired by arguments proposed by Cerbone (Int J Philos Stud 2:209–230, 2000) and in consultation with Levin (The body: classic and contemporary readings, Blackwell, Malden, 1999), Aho (2009), Malpas (Heidegger’s topology: being place, world, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008), and Rae (Hum Stud 33:23–39, 2010) among others, will interpret the ‘embodied’ reality of ‘Being,’ of being-disabled-in-the-world as primarily involved within the practical context and structured according to impersonal, normative social norms, rather than detached, theoretical contemplation or observance. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article begins with an account of an improvised classroom in a refugee camp. From this account, and building on Heidegger's' analysis of spatiality, two fundamental characteristics are identified as: first, that classrooms are 'sanctioned-off' from the world, and secondly, that educational situations involve attention to the world.Arendt's distinction between education and politics is presented not only as a normative call to action, but also, and perhaps primarily, as a phenomenology of education as a basic human activity. The article turns (...) to Mollenhauer's account of the emergence of a pedagogical sphere in early modernity, and particularly to his notion of representation, to understanding the way things of the world appear in classrooms.The article proposes the concept of liminality to describe the classrooms as neither 'inside' nor 'outside' the world, and could therefore offer their inhabitants opportunities for imaginative exploration, as well as ethical encounters. (shrink)

This article surveys the state of the literature in English‐language scholarship on Heidegger's early work (1919–29). The survey falls into roughly two halves. The first is devoted to scholarship on Heidegger's intellectual development during the 1920s, focusing on four themes: Heidegger's relationship to Husserl; Heidegger's early phenomenology of religious life; Heidegger's appropriation of Aristotle; and Heidegger's retrieval of Kant's First Critique. The second half focuses on work on the early Heidegger that has arisen out of the reception of his early (...) thought into mainstream Anglophone philosophy. It examines Hubert Dreyfus's interpretation of Heidegger, the status of “das Man” and social normativity, Heidegger's concept of death, Heidegger's conception of authenticity, and truth (with a very brief overview of further topics). (shrink)