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 discusses the notion of a thing in Heidegger. Its aim is to explain the systematic place of that notion in Heidegger’s thought in relation to his ontological discourse: as what is explained through different understandings of being, things allow for a simultaneous differentiation and discussion of the different epochs in the so-called history of being. Thus a henomenology of things and thingness serves as frame of reference for all explications of ‘what there is.’ If Heidegger is a realist, (...) it is not because he attributes reality to all that is, but rather because all explanations of being refer back to how things are discovered as meaningful. (shrink)