Debates about the legitimacy of embryonic stem-cell research have largely focused on the type of ethical value that should be accorded to the human embryo in␣vitro. In this paper, I try to show that, to broaden the scope of these debates, one needs to articulate an ontology that does not limit itself to biological accounts, but that instead focuses on the embryo’s place in a totality of relevance surrounding and guiding a human practice. Instead of attempting to substantiate the ethical (...) value of the embryo exclusively by pointing out that it has potentiality for personhood, one should examine the types of practices in which the embryo occurs and focus on the ends inherent to these practices. With this emphasis on context, it becomes apparent that the embryo’s ethical significance can only be understood by elucidating the attitudes that are established towards it in the course of specific activities. The distinction between fertilized embryos and cloned embryos proves to be important in this contextual analysis, since, from the point of view of practice, the two types of embryos appear to belong to different human practices: (assisted) procreation and medical research, respectively. In my arguments, I highlight the concepts of practice, technology, and nature, as they have been analyzed in the phenomenological tradition, particularly by Martin Heidegger. I come to the conclusion that therapeutic cloning should be allowed, provided that it turns out to be a project that benefits medical science in its aim to battle diseases. Important precautions have to be taken, however, in order to safeguard the practice of procreation from becoming perverted by the aims and attitudes of medical science when the two practices intersect. The threat in question needs to be taken seriously, since it concerns the structure and goal of practices which are central to our very self understanding as human beings. (shrink)

Early Heidegger argues that a “homogenous space of nature” can be revealed by stripping away the intelligibility of Dasein's everyday world, a process he calls “deworlding.” Given this, some interpreters have suggested that Heidegger, despite not having worked out the details himself, is also committed to a notion of deworlded time. Such a “natural time” would amount to an endogenous sequentiality in which events are ordered independently of Dasein and the stand it takes on its being. I show that Heidegger (...) was indeed committed to such a temporal realism even though his treatment of these issues is somewhat scattered and pulled in different directions. In the course of my reconstruction, I renew an interpretation of Heidegger that stresses Dasein's thrownness into nature and I answer William Blattner's powerful interpretation of Heidegger as a failed temporal idealist who was unable to derive the sequentiality of ordinary time from Dasein's non-sequential originary temporality. Heidegger did not attempt to derive sequentiality; instead, he understood it as a built-in feature of the natural universe by which Dasein's activities are constrained. World-time turns out to be a co-production of Dasein's non-sequential originary temporality and the endogenous sequentiality of events in nature. (shrink)

I outline the early Heidegger's views on mood and emotion, and then relate his central claims to some recent finding in neuropsychology. These findings complement Heidegger in a number of important ways. More specifically, I suggest that, in order to make sense of certain neurological conditions that traditional assumptions concerning the mind are constitutionally incapable of accommodating, something very like Heidegger's account of mood and emotion needs to be adopted as an interpretive framework. I conclude by supporting Heidegger's insistence that (...) the sciences constitute a derivative means of disclosing the world and our place within it, as opposed to an ontologically and epistemologically privileged domain of inquiry. (shrink)

Joseph Rouse has drawn from Heidegger’s early philosophy to develop what he calls a “practical hermeneutics of science.” With this, he has not only become an important player in the recent trend towards practice-based conceptualisations of science, he has also emerged as the predominant expositor of Heidegger’s philosophy of science. Yet, there are serious shortcomings in both Rouse’s theory of science and his interpretation of Heidegger. In the first instance, Rouse’s practical hermeneutics appears confused on the topic of realism. In (...) the second instance, Rouse suppresses Heidegger’s distinction between existence and essence, and hence fails to grasp the latter’s corollary distinction between scientic research and everyday practice. I argue that, by accepting a correction in his interpretation of Heidegger, Rouse would find the means to resolve the debilitating tensions in his stance towards realism. (shrink)

The general topic of my philosophical dissertation is phenomenological ontology of breathing. I do not investigate the phenomenon of breathing as a natural scientific problem, but as a philosophical question. Within our tradition, breathing has been normally understood as a mechanistic-materialistic physiological life-sustaining process of gas exchange and cellular respiration which does not really seem to have any essential connection to human being’s spiritual, mental or philosophical capacities. On the contrary to this natural scientific view, I argue that breathing can (...) be understood as a philosophical question that has phenomenological, experiential, ontological, spiritual, bodily, mental, poetic, elemental, ethical, voluntary and mystical dimensions. My investigation conceptualizes breathing in the first place as a question of phenomenological ontology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologico-ontological method of interrogation of the lived body’s experiential openness to the world and Being provides the most fundamental point of departure in this dissertation. Merleau-Ponty emphasized in his investigations the lived body’s perceptual openness to the world and Being. He argued famously for the primacy of perception. His thesis of the primacy of perception means that perception as the perceptual openness to the world and Being is the foundation which is always presupposed by all the other levels of our existence and being-in-the-world. In this dissertation, I challenge this idea of the primacy of perception with Merleau-Ponty’s own remarks about breathing. I argue that in his own remarks about breathing, he implicitly points toward a level which is even more fundamental than the primacy of perception. In this dissertation, this level of our being-in-the-world I call the primacy of breathing. Breathing as the lived body’s respiratory openness to the world and Being is now understood as the foundation which is always presupposed by all the other dimensions of our being-in-the-world. These dimensions are, for example, our theoretical, practical, social and perceptual ways of relating with the world. If the idea of the primacy of breathing is taken seriously, it means that all the questions of philosophy could be rethought, reexamined and re-experienced within the fundamental atmosphere of respiratory openness to the world and Being. In this dissertation, I initially try to rethink philosophy as a new philosophy of breathing. This new philosophy of breathing would be phenomenological ontology of breathing. The bases of this new phenomenological ontology of breathing are Merleau-Ponty’s remarks about breathing. My task is to explicate and interpret them with the help of Merleau- Ponty’s own phenomenological ontology. In my task of beginning philosophy anew as philosophy of breathing or as respiratory philosophy, I will also use the ideas of Martin Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard, Paul Claudel, Luce Irigaray, Edmund Husserl and David Kleinberg-Levin. My dissertation is divided into two main sections. In Section One, I construct within the framework of phenomenological ontology a new notion of breathing as the primacy of breathing. In Section Two, I develop a phenomenological method that I call the method of ontologico-respiratory reduction. This method will lead us back to the primacy of breathing. (shrink)

Though commentators have paid little thematic attention to Heidegger’s 1928 treatise “On the Essence of Ground” (OEG), recently available subsequent writings suggest that Heidegger himself saw OEG as a pivotal step on the way to “overcoming” his analysis of fundamental ontological transcendence. Among these writings is a set of rarely discussed lettered notes originally scribbled into his personal copy of OEG in which Heidegger offers a point-for-point deconstruction of the treatise’s fundamental ontological interpretation of transcendence. I argue that examining the (...) interplay between these two tiers of analysis may illuminate the murky trail that cuts between the beaten track of Being and Time and the increasingly well-trodden paths of Contributions to Philosophy and other later writings. Part one motivates the reading I propose by situating OEG in the broader contexts of its reception in the secondary literature, its engagement by Heidegger himself in subsequent writings, and my own interpretation—in view of Heidegger’s remarks—of its utility for illuminating the catalyst’s role played by the transcendence problem in the development of his overall project. Against this backdrop, part two advances a selective reading of the most important developments in OEG’s main text and lettered notes, elucidating in the process their hermeneutic significance for returning to and “turning” from the progressive elaboration of transcendence that both initiates and eventually exhausts Heidegger’s fundamental ontological inquiries. The picture that emerges, I conclude, is that OEG is hermeneutically a significantly more important work (for Heidegger certainly, but potentially also for his interpreters) than its marginal status in the secondary literature might lead one to believe. (shrink)