One unresolved dispute within Heidegger scholarship concerns the question of whether Dasein should be conceived in terms of narrative self-constitution. A survey of the current literature suggests two standard responses. The first correlates Heidegger’s talk of authentic historicality with that of self-authorship. To the alternative perspective, however, Heidegger’s talk of Dasein’s existentiality, with its emphasis on nullity and unattainability, is taken as evidence that Dasein is structurally and ontologically incapable of being completed via any life-project. Narrativity imports into Being and (...) Time commitments concerning temporality, selfhood, and ethics, which Heidegger rejects. Although both positions find good exegetic support for their conclusions, they can’t both be right. In this article, I navigate a path between these two irreconcilable positions by applying insights derived from recent debates within Anglo-American literature on personal identity. I develop an alternative thesis to Narrativism, without rejecting it outright, by arguing that Dasein can be analysed in terms of what I call narratability conditions. These allow us to make sense of the prima facie paradoxical notion of historicality without narrativity. Indeed, rather than reconciling the two standard positions, I hold that the tension between them says something important about Dasein’s kind of existence. Thus I conclude that while the narrativist question Who ought I to be? is perfectly legitimate within limits, what the existential analysis of the limits on narratability reveals is that no answer to this question can ever be definitive. (shrink)

This paper explores two models using which we might understand Heidegger's notion of ‘Eigentlichkeit’. Although typically translated as ‘authenticity’, a more literal construal of this term would be ‘ownness’ or ‘ownedness’; and in addition to the paper's exegetical value, it also develops two interestingly different understandings of what it is to have a judgment of one's own. The first model understands Heideggerian authenticity as the owning of what I call a ‘standpoint’. Although this model provides an understanding of a number (...) of key features of authenticity, it also invites an important objection—which I call ‘the closure objection’—that can be found in, for example, the work of Steven Galt Crowell and Tony Fisher. Although I argue that this objection can be met, the response for which it calls reveals that the feat of authenticity as understood through the standpoint model rests upon a further feat, and one which may itself have a stronger claim to be identified with Heideggerian authenticity. I develop this thought, introducing what I call the ‘all-things-considered judgment model’ of authenticity, the basis of which lies in, among other sources, Heidegger's appropriation of themes from Aristotle's discussion of phronesis. I explain the exegetical benefits of adopting this model and consider some objections that it invites, before closing with a discussion of how the two models understand the notion of ‘a judgment of one's own’. (shrink)

Though the names “Judith Butler” and “Martin Heidegger” rarely come together in Butler and Heidegger scholarship, the critical encounter between these philosophers might help us conceptualize the relationship between freedom and marginalization. In this paper, I will read Butler from the perspective of the Heidegger of Being and Time and claim that what Butler's philosophy suggests is the radical dependency of one's freedom on the cultural resuscitation of socially murdered racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and sectarian/confessional minorities. More specifically, I will (...) claim that the socially sanctioned subject's freedom is dependent on the marginalized Other's freedom, and, conversely, the marginalized Other's freedom is dependent on the socially sanctioned subject's freedom. (shrink)

The guiding premise of this thesis is that the concept of historical time constitutes a distinct philosophical problem for Karl Marx’s work. Marx does not examine the relationship between time and history in his work, rendering the historicist framework of linear, progressive time the overriding framework through which he understands this relationship. However, the larger problem is that, despite this lack, the philosophical originality and critical function of Marx’s work is in no small measure defined by the contribution it makes (...) towards our understanding of this relationship. Therefore, this thesis argues that it is necessary to construct a concept of historical time out of Marx’s work. Methodologically, this begins with an outline of the broad contours of the materialist concept of history in 'The German Ideology', and a temporal reading of the historical act – the creation of the means of human life – on which this concept is based. This reading is then ontologically grounded, first by Martin Heidegger’s 'Being and Time', in order to establish how the act as such temporalises, and then by Jean-Paul Sartre’s 'Critique of Dialectical Reason', in order to grasp how this temporalisation can be thought in relation to the movement of historical totalisation, which is to say the ongoing totalisation of the time of all human lives. In short, Heidegger and Sartre enable us to secure labour and need – the two concepts upon which the materialist concept of history depends – as the two basic forces upon which historical temporalisation depends. Yet if, as Marx’s 'Capital' reveals, the specifically capitalist category of ‘abstract labour’ is the condition of thinking the transhistorical category of ‘labour in general’, and if abstract labour exists to satisfy capital’s need to self-expand, not the human’s need to live, then capital – not the human – is the condition of thinking history. Capital and its times give history its intelligibility, such that capitalism is the only standpoint from which ‘history as such’, ‘history itself’, can be conceived. However, the concept of historical time cannot simply register that capital makes the category of history possible. It must also account for the historically changing character of the relationship between time and history, and hence the possibility of social and historical time after capitalism. (shrink)

The New Fuzziness: Richard Rorty and Education is an examination of the works of Richard Rorty, focusing on his impact on education. Richard Rorty is "one of the most provocative and influential of contemporary thinkers writing in English." This unpublished manuscript is written by Dr. Philip E. Devine, Professor of Philosophy at Providence College.

Heidegger denied that his enquiries were concerned with ethics. Heidegger and Ethics questions this self-understanding and reveals a form of ethics in Heidegger’s thinking that is central to his understanding of metaphysics and philosophy. In our technological age, metaphysics has, according to Heidegger, become real- ity; philosophy has come to an end. Joanna Hodge argues that there has been a concomitant transformation of ethics that Heidegger has failed to identify. Today, technological relationships form the ethical relations in which humans find (...) them- selves. As a result, ethics is cut loose from abstract universal moral standards, and the end of philosophy announced by Heidegger turns out to be an interminable interruption of the metaphysical will to completion. In order to realise the produc- tive potential of this interruption, the repressed ethical element in Heidegger’s think- ing must be retrieved. (shrink)

Contemporary studies of the phenomenon of attention uncritically suppose that the only way to go about observing attention is as a modification of consciousness. Consciousness is taken to be always intentional, i.e., distinguished by reference to an object-whether physical or not-toward which it is directed. Observers of attention therefore assume that attention is an intentional modification of consciousness. Such practices of observation, in virtue of the kinds of practices that they are, take for granted that the fundamental constituents of reality (...) are subjects and objects. Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger discovered that belief in the world as divided into subjects and objects is merely a convenience designed for the purpose of making a certain kind of sense of experience intelligible-a belief that operates as a controlling assumption which forces the world, if it is to be intelligible, to show up under the oppressively confined ontology that was originally introduced merely as an observational convenience. My work contributes to the prevalent literature an examination of these presuppositions by reconsidering what the landscape of attention studies would look like without the importation of the confinement of a world reduced to subjects in interaction with objects. I do this first by returning to the fundamental and yet strangely forgotten insights into the question that Husserl and Heidegger provided. Then I explore through some of the autobiographical work of Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, and Pascal a pathway by which we might think differently about what it is to pay attention. I conclude that attention might also be understood as a kind of waiting that does not specify an object, but rather a posture, a way of being that necessarily manifests itself prior to any sort of prejudged or anticipated object. The contribution of my work will serve the community of observers of attention by forcing them to explain what it is to pay attention without reliance on the subject-object distinction. (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)