This book reconstructs Heidegger’s philosophy of time by reading his work with and against a series of key interlocutors that he nominates as being central to his own critical history of time. In doing so, it explains what makes time of such significance for Heidegger and argues that Heidegger can contribute to contemporary debates in the philosophy of time. Time is a central concern for Heidegger, yet his thinking on the subject is fragmented, making it difficult to grasp its depth, (...) complexity, and promise. Heidegger traces out a history that focuses on the conceptualisations of time put forward by Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Husserl—an “alternative history of time” that challenges how time has been defined and studied within both philosophy and the sciences. This book explores what happens when we take seriously Heidegger’s claim that these seven figures are essential to any understanding of time, setting out what this can tell us about existence, possibility, and philosophy as a historical discipline. Heidegger’s Alternative History of Time will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on Heidegger, phenomenology, the philosophy of time, and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The recent renewal of interest in the philosophy of Henri Bergson has increased both recognition of his influence on twentieth-century philosophy and attention to his relationship to phenomenology. Until now, the question of Martin Heidegger’s debt to Bergson has remained largely unanswered. Heidegger’s brief discussion of Bergson in Being and Time is geared toward explaining why he fails in his attempts to think more radically about time. Despite this dismissal, a close look at Heidegger’s early works dealing with temporality reveals (...) a sustained engagement with Bergson’s thought. In The Origin of Time, Heath Massey evaluates Heidegger’s critique of Bergson and examines how Bergson’s efforts to rethink time in terms of duration anticipate Heidegger’s own interpretation of temporality. Massey demonstrates how Heidegger follows Bergson in seeking to uncover “primordial time” by disentangling temporality from spatiality, how he associates Bergson with the tradition of philosophy that covers up this phenomenon, and how he overlooks Bergson’s ontological turn in Matter and Memory. Through close readings of early major works by both thinkers, Massey argues that Bergson is a much more radical thinker with respect to time than Heidegger allows. (shrink)

This dissertation explores Levinas’s phenomenology of death in order to unveil the religious dimension in his ethical thought through examining the political moment of the third party. I argue that death is neither a pure phenomenon transparently intelligible in the noema-noesis structure of intentionality nor a mere non-phenomenon totally irrelevant to the phenomenological investigation. Rather, death is a para-phenomenon whose unfathomable feature calls into question Levinas’s two important philosophical precedents: 1) Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, in a methodological sense, and 2) Heidegger’s (...) ontological interpretation of death, in a thematical sense. On the one hand, Levinas faces in the para-phenomenality of death the failure of phenomenology in the sense that phenomenology fails to capture a para-doxical feature of death in terms of a noetico-noematic correlation. On the other hand, Levinas ceaselessly contests Heidegger’s ontological thematization, which neutralizes the para-phenomenality of death and thereby reduces the enigmatic mystery of death into the heroic mastery of death; in sum, the para-phenomenality of death is subsumed under the doxical architecture of ontology. By appealing to the para-doxical character of death, this dissertation claims that the architectonic structure of Heidegger’s ontology dissimulates or covers up a more primordial and exigent signification of the death of the other than the ontological mineness [Jemeinigkeit] of death. Therefore, Levinas’s phenomenology of death justifies its raison d'être not in its adroit achievement to thematize death but rather in its failure to thematize and make sense of it since the ethical meaning of death emerges from the miscarriage of the doxical-ontological thematization of death. In order to disclose the ethical signification of death that remains concealed, obscured, and suppressed in the “Sein-topped" architecture of ontology, Levinas endeavors to uncover what ontology has covered up—i.e., the brutal nakedness of being [être] that is concretized in the ethical encounter with the other who commands: “Thou shalt not kill.” This primordial interdiction obsesses and overwhelms me [moi] more than the anxiety [Angst] for my death does, as if the death of the other would matter to me even more than my own. The ethical signification of death comes from the primordial call inscribed in the face of the other, which makes me vigilant, restless, and non-indifferent to the death of the other. However, the advent of the third party puts into question my exclusive, unconditional, or unquestioned responsibility for the other and orders what the other orders: “Me voici.” Nevertheless, the political interrogation of the third party never compromises the ethical structure but, on the contrary, makes it possible for ethics to remain ethical without relapsing into an impotent, silent, or angelic form of ethics, which entails violent, apolitical, and anti-ethical rapprochements. This dissertation insists that the radical peculiarity of Levinas’s phenomenology of death culminates in his para-doxical conception of religion, “rapport sans rapport,” in which the ethical rapport always remains as a question par excellence within the political context. To be religious does not require an ontological question of “to be or not to be,” of being or non-being; rather, it is otherwise than being, beyond essence, or beyond the conatus essendi, in which Levinas recognizes the primordial signification of death, such as substitution, sacrifice, or dying for others. (shrink)