Arendt claims that evil is banal and its perpetrators merely shallow. Deliberate evil she takes to be extremely rare. However, nonrare examples of deliberate evil, whose aim is to spoil one's story, abound in everyday life. Arendt also makes forgiveness personal, not requiring repentance. This prompts a consideration of certain personal relations among philosophers. Heidegger's relation to Husserl shows a betrayal of teacher by student. His seductive and philosophic power over Arendt, a betrayal of student by teacher, should not be (...) dismissed in terms of reductive Freudian notions. Faced with a real feminine predicament, Arendt made the wrong choices: in her exoneration of Heidegger, her report on the Eichmann trial, and her exculpatory doctrine of evil. (shrink)

This article takes Heidegger's design distinctions for human being [Dasein] including affectivity, understanding, and speech, and, using these distinctions, generates a Heideggerian definition of empathy [Einfuehlung]. This article distinguishes empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and empathic speech (or responsiveness). It also looks at characteristic breakdowns.

Most works about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger either disregard Heidegger’s attachment to National Socialism or assume the ‘minimalist’ view that his attachment was a brief political aberration of no consequence for his philosophy. This paper contends that the minimalist view is not only factually wrong but also that its assumption promotes methodological errors and poor philosophy. To assess this contention we examine two important texts from one of the more fertile fields in current philosophy: Jeff Malpas’s Heidegger’s Topology: Being, (...) Place, World (2006) and Heidegger and the Thinking of Place (2012). Malpas claims that Heidegger’s rejection of National Socialism spurred, or was concomitant with, new directions in his philosophy. These claims are wrong. The paper concludes that any work about Heidegger’s philosophy must first acknowledge and understand his enduring attachment to National Socialism. (shrink)

This article examines the possible contributions the existentialist tradition might make to environmentalism. I note, first, that Martin Heidegger is a questionable ally, both because his relationship to technology is ambiguous, while his affiliations with the Nazis were not. But the larger existentialist tradition is valuable for the environmental movement because it opens up a field of possibilities for human creativity. Sartre serves as exemplary for the way he struggled with the dialectic between individual autonomy in his early philosophy of (...) freedom, and the needs of the collective as he confronted them in his later turn toward Marxism. But the demands of the collective are more reasonably confronted in the larger legacy of Hegel than in the more limited form they took in Sartre's Marxism. The article concludes that Sartre's struggles can be enlightening to those of us who now seek the joyful wisdom of existential freedom for the individual even as we confront the demands that environmental degradation will place on the collective. (shrink)

Zeev Sternhell and Hans Sluga show that fascism and Nazism were part of an early twentieth?century intellectual rebellion against universalism, liberalism, and Enlightenment rationalism. Western technology, values, and political institutions were seen as outmoded, but instead of wanting to return to the traditions of the past, as conservatives wished, these intellectuals thought that fascism could transcend modernity. Sorel, Heidegger, and other fascist modernists offered different radical solutions to what was conceived of as the decadence of liberal Western civilization. It remains (...) an open question whether the discontent with modernity is an intellectual construction or a result of actual defects in modern life itself. (shrink)

To examine Heidegger's pedagogy is to be invited into a particular era and cultural reality—starting in Weimar Germany and progressing into the rise and fall of the Third Reich. In his attempt to reform the German university in a strictly hierarchical, authoritarian and nationalistic mold, Heidegger addressed one group of students and professors and not another. The petit‐bourgeois student and the future philosophers he invited with his ‘logic of recruitment’ into the corps of instructors, would share his coded language with (...) its built‐in taboos and censorship. The result was a rhetoric of absolute self‐reference and a semiotic of pure propaganda, based on the evocation of the ancient Greeks in which the philosopher meant to project all that was properly Germanic. Heidegger's rhetoric is exclusionary; its politics and its philosophy are interpenetrating. His lecture courses grew increasingly poeticized, and thus mired in ambiguity, evasion, elision, avoidance, grandiloquence. Parallels are drawn in this essay between Heidegger and our time. Is Heidegger's insistence on autocratic controls within the German university comparable to the corporate positions taken today by some educators? How does the shifting relation between disciplines affect the role of the specialist? How might the sciences morales or humanities, along with the much maligned ‘humanism’, be redefined morally and holistically? (shrink)

This article seeks to analyze the modes of composition of the so-called dialectical phenomenology, proposed by Herbert Marcuse in 1928. It is one of his first writings, in which the author seeks to think of a theory of action whose starting point are the historical analyses derived from the historical materialism of Marx and Engels, orchestrated with the existential analytic provided by Being and time, by Heidegger. In order to interpret this pioneering philosophical architecture, we will first show how Marcusean (...) method establishes the understanding of a historical situation. In the second section, we analyze how Marcuse interprets, in a very original way, the ontological aspects of Dasein. In the last part, it is about showing how Marcuse operates a junction of both analyses in order to argue the need for a transforming action on the unveiled social alienation. Together, these three movements seek to emphasize the social concern that has always occupied Herbert Marcuse’s philosophical reflections. (shrink)

Heidegger’s 1927 call to provide “a special hermeneutic of empathy” is linked with his later commitment at the Zollikon Seminars to engage explicitly with issues in psychodynamic therapy with psychiatrists. The task of providing a special hermeneutic of empathy is one that Heidegger assigns in Being and Time, but on which he does not deliver. Inspired by the assignment, this article applies the distinctions of Heidegger’s Daseinanalysis to human interrelations. This article generates a Heideggerian account of empathy as a multi-dimensional (...) process that delimits and illuminates the field of possibilities of authentic human relationships. The multiple dimensions of empathy include affectedness (Befindlichkeit), understanding of possibility, interpretation, and speech, the latter including listening. The result is a reconstruction of a Heideggerian account of empathic human relations in the sense that it goes beyond what Heidegger explicitly says to what the Heideggerian method of inquiry can contribute to understanding and implementing the process of empathy. In particular, a two-by-two matrix is built and engaged in detail, cross referencing the four possibilities of authentic and inauthentic relationships with the individual and the other. A specifically Heideggerian analysis of the multi-dimensional process of empathy is the result. The clinical relevance of Heidegger’s work is made explicit as empathy is positioned as the foundation of clinical practice as exemplified in psychodynamic psychotherapy. (shrink)

Most of what has been written about Buber and education tend to be studies of two kinds: theoretical studies of his philosophical views on education, and specific case studies that aim at putting theory into practice. The perspective taken has always been to hold a dialogue with Buber's works in order to identify and analyse critically Buber's views and, in some cases, to put them into practice; that is, commentators dialogue with the text. In this article our aims are of (...) a different kind. First and fundamentally, we demonstrate the political and social ontological basis of Buber's thought; that is, we show that Buber, the philosopher of dialogue, held an authentic dialogue with his time, and demonstrate that Buber's work, in this case I and Thou, holds a dialogue with its Zeitgeist; that is the text dialogues with its Zeitgeist. This approach leads us to our second aim, which is to demonstrate that Buber's thought remains relevant to our times, particularly when it serves as a dialogical educational tool with which to resolve conflict of all types and to aid dialogue towards peace in inter-community relations. (shrink)

This article provides a historical overview of the Existential-Phenomenological tradition in psychiatry and psychotherapy, tracing its development from its origin in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophical thought, through its major European psychiatric proponents and schools, to its emergence as an influential approach in North America after World War II. The emphasis is on the implicit themes that provide continuity within this movement as well as on the distinctive contributions of individual thinkers. We conclude with a discussion of the present status (...) and future prospects of this tradition. (shrink)

The claim that, in some nontrivial sense, nursing can be identified with caring has prompted a search for the philosophical foundations of care in the nursing literature. Although the ethics of care was initially associated with Gilligan's ‘different voice’, there has more recently been an attempt – led principally by Benner – to displace the gender perspective with a Heideggerian one, even if Kant is the figure to whom both Gilligan and Benner appear most irretrievably opposed. This paper represents the (...) first half of a double-edged project: initially, to point out that Heidegger explicitly disowns any ethical implications for his ontological thinking, and to argue that no ethical theory (including an ethics of care) can be derived from Being and Time; and then to argue that Kant's categorical imperative is not only compatible with the ethics of care but actively entails it. In this, Heideggerian, part of the argument, I consider three attempts to wrest an ethics from Being and Time– those of Benner, Olafson and Guignon – suggesting that, for different reasons, they all fail. Benner systematically confuses the ontological with the ontic, not recognizing that care, concern and solicitude have ‘deficient’ modes as well as positive ones, and that Heidegger's ontology retrieves the possibility of an ethics-in-general without at any point implying an ethics-in-particular (whether of care or justice). Olafson does recognize this, and to that extent admits his failure, but his efforts to amplify Heidegger's thought in such a way as to generate an ethical theory involve both the importing of Kantian premises, and an appeal to some rather doubtful empirical observations. Guignon resorts to Heidegger's discussion of authenticity, and the idea that authentic Dasein ‘may choose its hero’, suggesting a morally reassuring list of heroes who might fit the bill. However, there is nothing in Heidegger's account of this choice that justifies his confidence, and I conclude by proposing that we should take Heidegger at his word when he says that ontology has ‘no result, no effect’. (shrink)

: This article compares translation and commentary practices surrounding the texts associated with French feminism with those of contemporary French women philosophers more generally. Many of the latter, discussing the history of philosophy, ask questions such as "How do texts play against the means they supply themselves?" and "How are philosophical forces, and the institutions of commentary, countered, destabilized, deregulated?" Deutscher asks what institutional means are available to understand this work as innovative philosophy, and to what extent these projects can (...) usefully be analyzed as the gestures of women in philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophy, which does not begin again, always unfolds against the background of the ongoing philosophical tradition, which it needs to interpret. I argue that Heidegger’s theories, like all philosophical theories, can neither be reduced to, nor separated from, the historical context. In that sense they are like all other philosophical views, perhaps in theory ahistorical but in practice historical, hence always bound up with and inseparable from their historical moment. If, as I believe, Heidegger’s theories led him in part toward (...) National Socialism, there is no alternative, if philosophy is to survive in a meaningful sense, to rejecting those aspects of his position, which must now be considered as simply and wholly dead, in favor of other aspects of Heidegger’s thinking that, if they are still living, can possibly be saved. (shrink)

This article compares translation and commentary practices surrounding the texts associated with French feminism with those of contemporary French women philosophers more generally. Many of the latter, discussing the history of philosophy, ask questions such as “How do texts play against the means they supply themselves?” and “How are philosophical forces, and the institutions of commentary, countered, destabilized, deregulated?” Deutscher asks what institutional means are available to understand this work as innovative philosophy, and to what extent these projects can usefully (...) be analyzed as the gestures of women in philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This study bears upon the ‘Heidegger case,’ that is, the relation of Heidegger’s philosophizing to his political involvements as Rector of the University of Freiburg 1933-4, and his subsequent silences on the subject of the Holocaust. I use the phrase ‘bears upon’ for Heidegger’s political involvement will serve as the ‘horizon’ for the study, my concern being the genesis of Heidegger’s position. Grounded in a musical ‘intuition’ and attunement, I take up the Nietzschean cipher for understanding proposed by Heidegger (...) himself for the self-understanding of the German people: the Apollonian-Dionysian duality, which I apply to the ‘being’ of Heidegger’s own philosophizing. Through this approach I hope to make an original contribution to Heidegger scholarship by showing that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is overdetermined, evolving out of both the phenomenological demand for a rigorous method in establishing fundamental structures of existence and - at the same time – out of an Apollonian attempt to ‘tame’ Dionysian existence, including Heidegger’s own. Inextricably interlinked will be the argument that Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung, his ‘confrontation,’ with Nietzsche precedes the overt engagement of his ‘Nietzsche’ lectures of the 1930s, and, further, that this more pervasive concern with Nietzsche figures in the Apollonian-Dionysian strife within Heidegger’s thinking and within his ‘being.’ Heidegger’s silences in the face of the Dionysian - as well as the Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche - will be seen to precede his ‘silence’ in the face of the actuality and history of the Third Reich. What I am proposing one might characterize as Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung - through Nietzsche - with v Heidegger, in a disclosure of the ontic roots of Heidegger’s ontology, an exercise in his own hermeneutics of facticity. I will pursue the trace of the Apollonian-Dionysian duality: in the Western philosophical tradition which Heidegger confronts, using Husserl and Nietzsche as exemplars; in Heidegger interpretation; in the relation between his texts and his letters; and in the suppressions and intensifications within Being and Time. And I will propose that the fugue and the mutually generative duality of suppression and intensification within Heidegger’s academic thinking were conditions of the possibility of Heidegger’s ‘way’ towards political involvement. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger was not only one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century but also a supporter of and a contributor to one of the most discriminatory ideologies of the recent past. Thus, "the Heidegger's case" gives us philosophers an opportunity to work on discrimination from a philosophical perspective. My aim in this essay is to question the relationship between freedom and discrimination via Heidegger's philosophy. I will show that what bridges the gap between Heidegger's philosophy and a discriminatory (...) ideology such as the National Socialist ideology is Heidegger's conceptualization of freedom with the aid of a monolithic understanding of history--one that refuses to acknowledge the plurality and heterogeneity in the socio-historical existence of human beings. Accordingly, I will claim that the Heideggerian freedom depends on the social, if not literal, murder of the marginalized segments of a given society. However, I will refuse to conclude that Heidegger's philosophy is a Nazi philosophy and that it should never be appropriated as long as we want to purify our thoughts from discriminatory ideas. Rather, I will re-appropriate Heidegger, against Heidegger, to read and interpret Michel Foucault's and Judith Butler's philosophies. My aim here is to construct a social ontology that may justify anti-discriminatory policies. More specifically, through my Heideggerian readings of Foucault and Butler, I will argue that one's freedom is dependent on the cultural resuscitation of socially, and sometimes literally, murdered racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and sectarian/confessional minorities. (shrink)

Draws from Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory to explore the concept of selfhood. This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, exiles, (...) and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega’s project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega’s work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits. Mariana Ortega is Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University and coeditor (with Linda Martín Alcoff) of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

A comprehensive anthology of Heidegger's early essays.

Derrida's reading of Heidegger in Of Spirit provides an excellent opportunity to assess the ethical and political value of each of their works. Derrida uncovers a slippage in Heidegger during the 1930s in which Heidegger ?forgot to forget? the dangers of the ?spirit? he had disavowed in Being and Time. This reveals a substantial early investment in the National Socialist project from which Heidegger never adequately recovered. Even in his attempts to distance himself from his Nazi past, Heidegger was still (...) caught up in a metaphysical, though not a racial?biological, gesture and while Heidegger may have written at the end of philosophy, it was an end never come. One cannot stop reading Heidegger on this account. Rather, one is all the more compelled to read him, and after him Derrida. In Derrida's reading of Heidegger, we see the ways in which Heidegger opened up for Derrida an alternative space for the ethical ? in ?The call of Being? before any decision ? in the obligation to the other. However, this ethical possibility of deconstruction is only a space of undecideabiliry and questioning, never a space for political comportment; that is, it is ontological?existential, not ontical?existentiell. In this, while deconstruction opens up a space for ethics, it is never to guide, only to expose. (shrink)

This article compares translation and commentary practices surrounding the texts associated with French feminism with those of contemporary French women philosophers more generally. Many of the latter, discussing the history of philosophy, ask questions such as “How do texts play against the means they supply themselves?” and “How are philosophical forces, and the institutions of commentary, countered, destabilized, deregulated?” Deutscher asks what institutional means are available to understand this work as innovative philosophy, and to what extent these projects can usefully (...) be analyzed as the gestures of women in philosophy. (shrink)

Volume 18, Issue 2, April 2019, Page 216-220.

_A comprehensive anthology of Heidegger's early essays._.

There is more to be said about two of the topics Chris Peers addresses in his article Freud, Plato and Irigaray: A morpho-logic of teaching and learning (2012, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44, 760–774), namely the Socratic method of teaching and Plato’s stance with regard to women and feminism. My purpose in this article is to continue Peers’s discussion of these two topics.