This article re-orients Heidegger’s analyses of things to cast light on two distinct ways of relating to things, one at the root of technological use and the other crucial to artistic creation. The first way, which we may call instrumental practice, denotes the activity of using something to accomplish some goal or objective. This practice underlies the analysis of use-things [Zeuge] that Heidegger presents in Being and Time. Heidegger’s contribution there is twofold: to show how understanding things as zuhanden, there (...) for us, is prior to taking things as objects in “nature,” and to clarify how the “phenomenon of the world” can show itself when a useful thing becomes dysfunctional. But Heidegger’s focus on the thing as zuhanden leaves in the dark a second kind of practice that we engage in when we relate to things, the practice of attending to an activity for its own sake, as I illustrate by the using or making of four things: the hammer, the Daoist cook’s cleaver, the Daoist-inspired empty jug or Krug, and the Japanese calligrapher’s brush. Heidegger’s dialogue on Gelassenheit anticipates but also cuts short this practice of attention: gelassenes Denken—the thinking that lets go of representations and expectations and simply lets things be—promises to open a way to experience our essential nature [Wesen], but the dialogue’s focus on things as already there or already made distracts from the practice of attention that goes into the art of making things like jugs. By re-orienting Heidegger’s thinking we are able to recast the question of technology: can the practice of attention performed for its own sake—caring for things simply to care for them, caring for the surrounding world simply to care for it—help salvage not only the environment but the very essence of being human? (shrink)

Modernity is not only the culmination of the “oblivion of being,” for it also provides, in the form of transcendental thinking, a way to recover the original relation of thought to being. Heidegger develops this account through several lecture courses from 1935–1937, especially the 1935–1936 lecture course on Kant, and the account receives a kind of completion in the 1936–1938 manuscript, Contributions to Philosophy. Kant limits the dominance of rationalistic prejudices by reconnecting thought to the givenness of being. He thereby (...) shows the way to overcome the West’s rationalistic oblivion of being. By returning to Kant and repeating him more fundamentally we prepare ourselves for Heidegger’s non-rationalistic thinking of being. This paper, then, reconsiders Heidegger’s relation to modern philosophy, demonstrating on the basis of his own texts that he appropriates modern philosophy but in a non-rationalistic way. Transcendental philosophy plays an essential though ambiguous transitional role in his thinking. (shrink)

What does it take to see how autistic people participate in social interactions? And what does it take to support and invite more participation? Western medicine and cognitive science tend to think of autism mainly in terms of social and communicative deficits. But research shows that autistic people can interact with a skill and sophistication that are hard to see when starting from a deficit idea. Research also shows that not only autistic people, but also their non-autistic interaction partners can (...) have difficulties interacting with each other. To do justice to these findings, we need a different approach to autistic interactions—one that helps everyone see, invite, and support better participation. I introduce such an approach, based on the enactive theory of participatory sense-making and supported by insights from indigenous epistemologies. This approach helps counteract the homogenising tendencies of the “global mental health” movement, which attempts to erase rather than recognise difference, and often precludes respectful engagements. Based in the lived experiences of people in their socio-cultural-material and interactive contexts, I put forward an engaged—even engaging—epistemology for understanding how we interact across difference. From this perspective, we see participatory sense-making at work across the scientific, diagnostic, therapeutic, and everyday interactions of autistic and non-autistic people, and how everyone can invite and support more of it. (shrink)

Phenomenology and Quantum theory have defined themselves against the subject-object tradition of thought and against the modern objectivistic attempt to unify explanation of reality or being. Scientific technology and calculative way of thinking have prevailed over meditative and qualitative thinking in modern times. Despite scientific efforts to eliminate any inconsistency caused by metaphysical speculations and systems, in everyday life and science we encounter such phenomena which cannot be explained unambiguously and fully on the basis of purely conventional criteria. This paper (...) focuses on Bohr's framework of complementarity. The idea enables us exploring and describing a given phenomenon in such manner that we get adequate knowledge of the same phenomenon or subject of interest only by completing incompatible descriptions. (shrink)

The article explores the topic of Gelassenheit (releasement) in Heidegger, through the lense of the ambiguous role of Christian mysticism in general and Eckhart in particular in and for his thinking. In an analysis of how mysticism appears in his early lectures on religion, it explains why he is critical of this concept and of how it is commonly understood. It also gives reasons for why we too should be cautious in using it to describe his position in his later (...) writings where he explicitly reconnects to themes and concepts from Eckhart. The text provides a critical rehearsal of Eckhart's understanding of both “Abgeschiedenheit” (detachment) and "Gelassenheit" and how Heidegger relates to it both in his early lectures and in his later essays. Ultimately it outlines a phenomenological understanding of what is commonly referred to as a “mystical” comportment more along the lines of a heightened openness and awareness, in Heidegger’s words as a “releasement toward things and an openness to the secret”. Thus, instead of seeing Heidegger’s later writings as a sort of crypto-mysticism, the text seeks to show how his critical appropriation of Eckhart explicitly points beyond a standard dichotomy between the rational and the mystical, in an effort to develop a comportment of thinking than can respond to the demand of modern technological predicament. (shrink)

Philosophy has rendered a close attention to audiovisual communication in recent times, but this interest has not always had a parallel in the attention that television has paid to philosophical themes. Nevertheless, some examples of television approaches to philosophy have reached a quite remarkable level of quality. This paper will focus on one of such instances (the DVD Gadamer. Memoria de un siglo, produced by the Spanish Open National University). By means of an analysis of its main virtues and its (...) flaws (from a communicational outlook), we will try to obtain some general conclusions about how philosophical didactics and television can move ahead in their just begun cooperation. (shrink)

Distinguishes the concepts of place and locality in Heidegger's late work and argues that there is an emergent distinction which the essay goes on to clarify further.

In diesem Aufsatz wird das Verhältnis zwischen den Begriffen Gelassenheit und πόλεμοσ, von Heidegger als „Auseinanderset- zung“ übersetzt und aufgefasst, untersucht. Der Betrachtung liegt dabei die Frage zu Grunde, ob der späte Heidegger sich mit den Begriffen Gestell und Gelassenheit überhaupt noch im Sinne grundlegender Gestalten der mensch- lichen Lebensweise auseinandersetzt, so wie er es in den 30er Jahren tat und behauptete. Weitergehend wird die Beziehung des Begriffs der Gleichförmig- keit, verstanden als eine Folge der technischen Herrschaft über die Erde, (...) zu C. Schmitts Begriff der Neutralisierung als eine der Konsequenzen der zu- nehmenden Technisierung hergestellt und diskutiert. (shrink)

Tussen zijn veertigste en zijn zestigste levensjaar was Jan Hendrik van den Berg (1914) een uitermate succesvol en populair auteur. Boeken van zijn hand, zoals Metabletica (1956) en Medische macht en medische ethiek (1969), waren ongekende bestsellers. Hij was de Nederlandse vertegenwoordiger van een belangrijke Europese stroming in de filosofie: de historische fenomenologie. In de jaren zeventig raakte hij echter in conflict met zijn tijd. Terwijl de Nederlandse publieke opinie een wending naar links doormaakte, bond Van den Berg de strijd (...) aan tegen verloedering, hooliganisme en anarchisme. Dit ging ten koste van zijn populariteit, maar niet van zijn productiviteit, noch van zijn innovativiteit. Tot op de dag van vandaag werkt hij aan een indrukwekkend , panoramisch oeuvre. Hij is de belangrijkste Nederlandse filosoof sinds Bolland. -/- Deze studie wil het werk van Van den Berg reconstrueren, situeren en beoordelen. Reconstrueren door de methodische en thematische coherentie ervan zichtbaar te maken. Situeren door het te confronteren met dat van andere, verwante auteurs zoals Husserl, Freud, Bachelard en Foucault. Beoordelen door na te gaan in hoeverre Van den Berg de inzet van zijn project, zowel inhoudelijk als methodologisch, waarmaakte. -/- Het werk van Van den Berg is geen curiosum, maar opvallend actueel. Hij onderzoekt het begin, de aanvang van wetenschappelijke en maatschappelijke ontwikkelingen waarvan het belang in de huidige situatie met nadruk zichtbaar wordt. Zijn beeldende stijl wekt de geschiedenis van de wetenschap tot leven, maar werd vaak als ‘anekdotisch’ afgedaan; zijn talent voor polemiek lokte soms felle reacties uit en zijn methodologische flexibiliteit maakte hem een gemakkelijk doelwit van academische kritiek. Aan de positieve kant van de balans staan echter zijn intellectuele enthousiasme en zijn internationale faam. Zijn werk verdient een rehabilitatie. (shrink)

If Z hu Xi had been a western philosopher, we would say he synthesized the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus: that he took from Plato the theory of forms, from Aristotle the connection between form and empirical investigation, and from Plotinus self-differentiating holism. But because a synthesis abstracts from the incompatible elements of its members, it involves rejection as well as inclusion. Thus, Z hu Xi does not accept the dualism by which Plato opposed to the rational forms an (...) irrational material principle, and does not share Aristotle’s irreducible dualism between form and prime matter, or his teleology. Neither does he share Plotinus’ indifference to the empirical world. Understanding how these similarities and differences play out against one another will help us discover what is at stake in their various commitments. (shrink)

En el pensar heideggeriano, tanto en su época temprana como tardía, ha habitado la idea una "máscara" respecto a una "figura originaria", ya sea como propiedad e impropiedad, o como el abandono del ser en el inicio del pensar occidental respecto a un despliegue originario del ser como Ereignis; la principal labor filosófica de Heidegger se ha abocado a remover las capas y así deconstruir el camino trazado por la metafísica; un pensamiento vivo que "piensa para atrás". Sin embargo este (...) no es el único modo en que Heidegger "ejerce" pensamiento, pues junto al "paso atrás", Heidegger nos indica a veces y de un modo siempre sugerente, la posibilidad del salto. Ambos movimientos del pensar están configurados desde experiencias afectivas concretas, las que no son subjetivas sino el trazo mismo de cada figura epocal del pensamiento-ser, del Ereignis. Atenderé en este escrito únicamente al temple fundamental sugerido por Heidegger para el segundo inicio en los Beiträge zur Philosophie: la reserva , para luego indicar desde ella hacia lo que en sus escritos últimos llamará desasimiento . In Heidegger's thinking, both in its earlier as in its later stages, the idea lives under a "mask" which stands to an "original figure" either as the improper in relation to what is proper, or as the defection from being at the beginning of Western thought in relation to the original desplay of being as Ereignis. Heidegger's main philosophical job was to remove the masking layers and thereby to deconstruct the route travelled by metaphysics: his is a living thought that "thinks backwards". However, this is not the only way in which Heidegger "practices" thinking: together with "stepping back", Heidegger often suggests the possibility of "jumping". Both motions of thought start from concretely experienced moods, which are not subjective but constitute the very trail of each epochal figure of thought-being, of Ereignis. In this essay I only pay attention to the fundamental mood proposed by Heidegger for the second beginning in Beiträge zur Philosophie: namely, reticence ; but I point thence to what in his last writings he called detachment. (shrink)

"Raymond Geuss is a major voice in contemporary philosophy, and this book will enhance his stature even further. Containing some of his best pieces so far, "Outside Ethics" reveals his impressive range as well as the depth of his thought.

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)

Offers the first focused study of the shifei debates of the Warring States period in ancient China and challenges the imposition of Western conceptual categories onto these debates. In recent decades, a growing concern in studies in Chinese intellectual history is that Chinese classics have been forced into systems of classification prevalent in Western philosophy and thus imperceptibly transformed into examples that echo Western philosophy. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel offer a methodology to counter this approach, and illustrate their (...) method by carrying out a transcultural inquiry into the complexities involved in understanding shi and fei and their cognate phrases in the Warring States texts, the Zhuangzi in particular. The authors discuss important features of Zhuangzi’s stance with regard to language-meaning, knowledge-doubt, questioning, equalizing, and his well-known deconstruction of the discourse in ancient China on shifei. Ma and van Brakel suggest that shi and fei apply to both descriptive and prescriptive languages and do not presuppose any fact/value dichotomy, and thus cannot be translated as either true/false or right/wrong. Instead, shi and feican be grasped in terms of a pre-philosophical notion of fitting. Ma and van Brakel also highlight Zhuangzi’s idea of “walking-two-roads” as the most significant component of his stance. In addition, they argue that all of Zhuangzi’s positive recommendations are presented in a language whose meaning is not fixed and that every stance he is committed to remains subject to fundamental questioning as a way of life. (shrink)

Are the robots coming? Is the singularity near? Will we be dominated by technology? The usual response to ethical issues raised by pervasive and ubiquitous technologies assumes a philosophical anthropology centered on existential autonomy and agency, a dualistic ontology separating humans from technology and the natural from the artificial, and a post-monotheistic dualist and creational spirituality. This paper explores an alternative, less modern vision of the “technological” future based on different assumptions: a “deep relational” view of human being and self, (...) an ecological view of human–technology relations, and “ubiquitous” spirituality. Moving beyond an ethics of fear and control, it is argued that technology is part of a lived and active whole that is at the same time human, technological, social, and spiritual. Influenced by ecological and Eastern thinking, it is concluded that an ethics of technology understood as a relational ethics of life asks us to adapt and grow within this multi-faced ecology, which is currently—but not necessarily—pervaded by hyper-individualist modernity and its ego-boosting technologies of the self. This growth is only possible by relating to, and learning from, other cultures and from their specific way of pervading and being pervaded. (shrink)

The essay recapitulates the decisive steps in Heidegger’s development of the problem of human freedom. The interpretation is set in the context of a general matrix for how freedom is treated in the tradition, as both a theoretical ontological problem, and as practical appeal. According to some readers, Heidegger’s thinking is a philosophy of freedom throughout; according to others his “turning” implies abandoning the idea of human freedom as a metaphysical remnant. The essay seeks an intermediate path, by following his (...) explicit attempts to develop an ontology based on the concept of freedom in the earlier writings, showing how this is the central theme in his confrontation and also his final break with German idealism, with Kant and with Schelling in particular, and with the prospects for a system of freedom. However, this break does not terminate his preoccupation with the problem of freedom, which is then transformed into the idea of thinking as a practice of freedom, as a way of reaching into “the free”. (shrink)

Outside Ethics brings together some of the most important and provocative works by one of the most creative philosophers writing today. Seeking to expand the scope of contemporary moral and political philosophy, Raymond Geuss here presents essays bound by a shared skepticism about a particular way of thinking about what is important in human life--a way of thinking that, in his view, is characteristic of contemporary Western societies and isolates three broad categories of things as important: subjective individual preferences, knowledge, (...) and restrictions on actions that affect other people. He sets these categories in a wider context and explores various human phenomena--including poetry, art, religion, and certain kinds of history and social criticism--that do not fit easily into these categories. As its title suggests, this book seeks a place outside conventional ethics.Following a brief introduction, Geuss sets out his main concerns with a focus on ethics and politics. He then expands these themes by discussing freedom, virtue, the good life, and happiness. Next he examines Theodor Adorno's views on the relation between suffering and knowledge, the nature of religion, and the role of history in giving us critical distances from existing identities. From here he moves to aesthetic concerns. The volume closes by looking at what it is for a human life to have "gaps"--to be incomplete, radically unsatisfactory, or a failure. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a critical reading of some aspects of Heidegger’s late philosophy and evaluate how these relate to his nationalist claim that we need to stay rooted in the soil of our homeland. In response to this claim, Žižek suggests thet being-rootless is the primordial state of being-human and that what we represent as our roots are secondary attempts to obfuscate this dimension. First, I will present Heidegger’s philosophy of technology to elucidate his thesis that the essence (...) of modern technology determinates the way we come to experience the totality of beings in our times as “standing reserve”. In the second section, I expound his aesthetics where art is seen as a mode of approaching entities that follows a different logic to that of the Gestell. However, this analysis of Heidegger’s philosophy of art will reveal a political dimension to the concept of earth which I take to be a reactionary attempt to neutralize the eventual dimension of the Gestell. In the third section, I offer a critical re-interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy following Žižek’s clue. I argue that modern art is characterized by its self-reflexive character which can be deemed transcendental once we accept the ontological dimension of art following Heidegger. These works offer a rooting in our own rootless condition analogous to the grounding in the Abgrund of Hegel’s absolute knowledge. Finally, I offer an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorius Basterds from the perspective of the conceptual framework developed in the previous pages. (shrink)

This paper aims to review the meaning and scope of the Heideggerian notion of _serenity_. In accordance with this purpose, the research is articulated according to four thematic units that allow reconstructing and synoptically exposing the most significant aspects that Heidegger elucidates throughout his conference, given in 1955 with the title of _Gelassenheit_. These points read as follows: (1) the meaning and semantic scope of the word _serenity_; (2) the condition of autochthony and the threatening nature of calculating thought; (3) (...) technique, violence and alienation; (4) the Heideggerian sense of serenity according to the meaning of _equanimity_. For the interpretation of the documents, the methodology commonly used in studies concerning the history of philosophy is adopted, which consists of a hermeneutical and critical reading of the texts selected for analysis, together with the unavoidable support favored by the specialized bibliography. (shrink)

In this article I will consider John D. Caputo’s ‘radical hermeneutics’, with ‘undecidability’ as its major theme, in conversation with Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘anticipatory resoluteness’. Through an examination of the positions of Caputo and Heidegger I argue that Heidegger’s notion of ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ reaches far beyond the claims of ‘radical hermeneutics’, and that it assumes a reconstructive process which carries within its scope the overtones of deconstruction, the experience of repetition and authenticity and also the implications of Gelassenheit. Further, (...) I am arguing that Caputo’s ‘radical hermeneutics’ is problematic and even erroneous when it comes to criticize Heidegger’s thought portraying it as being founded on ‘the myth of the early Greeks’. (shrink)

Reiteradamente, ao longo de sua obra, Heidegger referiu-se ao opúsculo Sobre a essência da verdade, cuja primeira elaboração data de 1930. Chega a dizer, em entrevista ao L’Express , ser esse trabalho a "dobradiça" entre Heidegger I e Heidegger II, inseparáveis um do outro. A questão da história é nele abordada na sua relação com a verdade do ser, mais exatamente, com a idéia de que a continuidade dos eventos que concerne a essa verdade está ontologicamente ligada a uma recusa (...) original do ser a uma inteligibilidade plena ou definitiva. Dessa recusa original decorre a liberdade e, simultaneamente, a possibilidade do erro, a errância; decorre, igualmente, a possibilidade de completo desnorteamento. Tomando essas teses como ponto de partida, é possível afastar da concepção heideggeriana de história quaisquer traços de processualismo ou teleologia, e, sobretudo, reconciliá-la com uma idéia simultaneamente geral e "concreta" de alteridade. É o que aqui se pretende.Over and over along his works Heidegger has mentioned the opuscule On the Essence of Truth, whose first elaboration dates from 1930. In an interview to L'Express he even comes to say about this work that it is a "hinge" between Heidegger I and Heidegger II, inseparable from each other. The text deals with the question of history in its reference to the truth of being, more precisely, to the idea that the continuity of events related to this truth is ontologically tied to an original refusal of being to a full or conclusive intelligibility. What is brought out of this original refusal is freedom but, at the same time, the possibility of error, errancy; it also follows the possibility of complete disorientation. Taking these thesis as a starting point, it is possible to move away from the heideggerian conception of history any traces of processualism or teleology and, above all, to reconcile it with an idea both broad and "concrete" of alterity. That's what we intended to do here. (shrink)

One prominent interpretation of Heidegger's thought on issues that are traditionally called “ethical” is that it gives us a formal description of how to reach authenticity (the early Heidegger) or how to gain a free relationship to technology (the late Heidegger) without stating any positive prescriptions. However, as Hubert L. Dreyfus (1995), (2000) has argued, there is more than pure formalism to Heidegger's thought: he points again and again to how important rootedness, Boden and Heimat, are in trying to overcome (...) the technological understanding of being. Notoriously, Heidegger sees a special role to the Greek-German linguistic axis in internally challenging the tradition of Western metaphysics. This putative special status is in an unsettling way connected to Heidegger's antidemocratic ideas and to the “closedness” of the tradition that according to him is able to challenge the technological world. We will claim here that there is a way of opening up and thus, in a sense, democratizing the role of tradition and rootedness. However, this democatization has to be done without losing sight of the importance of positive content (as opposed to formal description) in overcoming technology. This opening up is connected to the idea of local gods in later Heidegger as interpreted by Dreyfus; however, the democratization comes at the price of making ethics local as opposed to universal. (shrink)

This study is a philosophical work on Martin Heidegger's thinking. Its primary purpose is to study Heideggerian concepts. Secondly, it brings into focus two other thinkers who play with Heidegger 's thought, and thirdly, it applies Heideggerian thinking to truth and art. The study is compilation of eight articles, which are divided under three titles: I Heidegger and the Truth. II Heidegger and Truth in the Horizon of Nietzsche and Foucault, III Art in the Heideggerian Light. The main themes in (...) this study are truth and art. The first part of the study is comprised of research work on Heid egger's theory and the concept of truth, which he present in his main work Sein und Zeit. Another important theme is the Heideggerian concept of world, which is the foundation of Heidegger's Alethetical truth. Heidegger uses the concept in the phrase "being in the world." This "being in the world" is a situation in which Dasein always exists, and Heidegger claims that there is no truth without Dasein. Art, especially the work of art and poetry, are connected with the truth in Heidegger's philosophy. Art has played a central role throughout the entire tradition of western philosophy, and the same is true in Heidegger's philosophy. But Heidegger does not follow the traditional aesthetic theory of art. He formulates the question of the essence of art as an ontological question. Art is the place where the truth occurs. This kind of understanding of truth and art needs to overcome metaphysics. Heidegger regards Friedrich Nietzsche as the last representative of metaphysics, which is why Nietzsche's philosophy as nihilism must be overcome. I deal with these questions in the second part of my study. In the third part of the study I examine what is left of the truth and art in the postmodern era. In his later writings, Heidegger leaves out Dasein and changes his style of writing. The concept of the world is still essential, but it now lives its own life along with earth, gods and mortals. The main aim of this study is to bring Heidegger's theory of the truth into focus and into the Finnish philosophical discourse. Secondly, it shows what happens to the work of art in the postmodern era. (shrink)

One prominent interpretation of Heidegger’s thought on issues that are traditionally called “ethical” is that it gives us a formal description of how to reach authenticity (the early Heidegger) or how to gain a free relationship to technology (the late Heidegger) without stating any positive prescriptions. However, as Hubert L. Dreyfus (1995, 2000) has argued, there is more than pure formalism to Heidegger’s thought: he points again and again to how important rootedness, Boden and Heimat, are in trying to overcome (...) the technological understanding of being. Notoriously, Heidegger sees a special role to the Greek–German linguistic axis in internally challenging the tradition of Western metaphysics. This putative special status is in an unsettling way connected to Heidegger’s antidemocratic ideas and to the “closedness” of the tradition that according to him is able to challenge the technological world. We will claim here that there is a way of opening up and thus, in a sense, democratizing the role of tradition and rootedness. However, this democatization has to be done without losing sight of the importance of positive content (as opposed to formal description) in overcoming technology. This opening up is connected to the idea of local gods in later Heidegger as interpreted by Dreyfus; however, the democratization comes at the price of making ethics local as opposed to universal. (shrink)

This article re-orients Heidegger's analyses of things to cast light on two distinct ways of relating to things, one at the root of technological use and the other crucial to artistic creation. The first way, which we may call instrumental practice, denotes the activity of using something to accomplish some goal or objective. This practice underlies the analysis of use-things [Zeuge] that Heidegger presents in Being and Time. Heidegger's contribution there is twofold: to show how understanding things as zuhanden, there (...) for us, is prior to taking things as objects in "nature," and to clarify how the "phenomenon of the world" can show itself when a useful thing becomes dysfunctional. But Heidegger's focus on the thing as zuhanden leaves in the dark a second kind of practice that we engage in when we relate to things, the practice of attending to an activity for its own sake, as I illustrate by the using or making of four things: the hammer, the Daoist cook's cleaver, the Daoist-inspired empty jug or Krug, and the Japanese calligrapher's brush. Heidegger's dialogue on Gelassenheit anticipates but also cuts short this practice of attention: gelassenes Denken—the thinking that lets go of representations and expectations and simply lets things be—promises to open a way to experience our essential nature [Wesen], but the dialogue's focus on things as already there or already made distracts from the practice of attention that goes into the art of making things like jugs. By re-orienting Heidegger's thinking we are able to recast the question of technology: can the practice of attention performed for its own sake—caring for things simply to care for them, caring for the surrounding world simply to care for it—help salvage not only the environment but the very essence of being human? (shrink)

Introduction Martin Heidegger died on May 26,. Although he will write no more, newly published works of his will continue to appear for some years yet. ...

Traditionally, metaphysical notions of self and other presuppose a dualism that underlies much of Western philosophy. This dualism is opposed by accounts of self and other in recent continental philosophy and classical Chinese philosophy, which I compare. I argue that the self is seen in continental and Chinese thought as embedded in relations and language, and not as transcendent or prior in the metaphysical sense to them. I argue for this by focussing on three themes: self and language, self as (...) relational and embedded in the world or contextual environment, and self and the particular other. These three themes show that the complexity and dynamic of the self-other relation is much more realistically conveyed by continental and classical Chinese thought than by the traditional metaphysical account. (shrink)

The subject is the bearer of the sovereign decision, according to C. Schmitt. This decision grounds on certain situational pragmatics, yet mainly is born out of a ‘null’; as the decision forms the political normalcy that follows after, it displays its nature as an ‘event’. This subject is simultaneously a legal and a political one; it is the founder of the Nomos. This founding subject has been eclipsed in alignment with its post-modernly acclaimed ‘death’. The subject is deemed to have (...) been inherently divided, as long as its identity steadily postpones itself, is incessantly ‘differing’, according to the deconstructionist approach; or it is considered as fundamentally ‘passive’, meaning not so much ‘weak’, but rather dethroning the Western preoccupation with the active autonomous individual; or, it is maintained but intrinsically reversed, now held either as part of a fundamental ontological order and indirectly of the nature, or, opposite to Kantian assumptions, as primarily captured in a radical heteronomy, which constitutes it as a proper ethical subject. Crucial is how to develop a concept taking into account the eventfulness of the constitution of the subject, without effacing the political character of such constitution by reducing it to non-political discourses, i.e., to metaphysics, morals or economics; how to conceive of Derrida’s ‘democracy to-come’ as political event, namely both as secular act and in the same time as referring to extramundane fundaments ; how to go beyond the linearity of the liberalist ideology by equating the political event with a messianic miracle ‘without messianism’; how to ‘salute’ democracy? (shrink)

RESUMO O propósito deste artigo é aproximar o significado do pensar calculador de Heidegger e a teoria sobre a sociedade do risco de Beck, considerando suas interpelações com o significado da técnica na modernidade. Porém, mais que tratar das aproximações entre ambos os pensadores, este estudo pretende também demonstrar a importância da filosofia da técnica de Heidegger para pensar o sentido do cálculo do risco e do risco do cálculo na sociedade do risco. Assim, argumenta-se que a teoria do risco (...) de Beck confirma e atualiza o pensamento de Heidegger sobre a técnica moderna, quando se observa que o pensar calculador, que dirige e controla o modo de ser na era do técnico, manifesta-se hoje com toda claridade na sociedade do risco global. ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to bring the meaning of Heidegger’s calculative thinking and Beck’s risk society theory closer, as well as their interpellations with the meaning of technique in modernity. Nevertheless, more than dealing with the convergences between both thinkers, this study also intends to demonstrate the importance of Heidegger’s technique philosophy in order to investigate the meaning of risk calculation and of calculation risk in risk society. Therefore, it argues that Beck’s risk theory confirms and updates Heidegger’s thinking on modern technique, as one observes that calculative thinking, which directs and controls the way of being in the age of technicality, clearly manifests itself nowadays, in the global risk society. (shrink)

This paper is motivated by Heidegger’s invitation to think the essence of technics through a dialogue between technics and art. This dialogue is approached with the help of several artworks belonging to what can be called the “technological turn” in art. First, I draw a schematic picture of notions of instrumentality, rationality, totality, and teleology inherited from classical philosophy of art and technology and challenged by contemporary art. I underline the Romantic claim that art overcomes these features thanks to its (...) freedom and ask, referring to the work of Gilbert Simondon, whether technology could also be liberated from its subordination to utilitarian ends. Second, I look at how certain contemporary works of art attempt to solve some of these problems. Artists who seize technical objects generally seek to make their functioning visible and problematic by distorting, interrupting, or otherwise modifying the technical dispositif—this is when a machine becomes a work of art. I show how this happens in certain works of Rebecca Horn, Jean Tinguely, Anaïs Tondeur, Eduardo Kac, and Tomas Saraceno. In conclusion, I show how art can liberate technology by liberating it from utility and instrumentality and by exposing it as such in its functioning. On the other hand, I argue that technology can liberate art, both through artistic techniques and nonartistic technological processes. (shrink)

In this article I will consider John D. Caputo’s hermeneutics of deconstruction or what he calls ‘radical hermeneutics’, with ‘undecidability’ as its major theme, in conversation with Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘resolute existence’. Through an examination of the different positions of Caputo, Heidegger, and also Kierkegaard, Derrida and Meister Eckhart on the possibility of repetition, the hermeneutical circle and the mystical way of prayer and faith, I am arguing that deconstruction is not the end of hermeneutics, it is not the (...) final destination of an interpretative task, and thus deconstructive hermeneutics has to concede a reconstructive process. Further, I am arguing that Caputo’s ‘radical hermeneutics’ is too reductionist to keep any meaning for the hermeneutic enterprise to aspire to. I am contending, rather, that it is resolute existence that theology aspires to as it is a move beyond ‘undecidability’. (shrink)