The aim of this article is to contribute to a philosophy of technics by proposing an answer to the following question: what is the nature of the human body as an element of technical systems? The argument focuses on an examination of the phenomenon of bodily technics. This examination is guided by the conviction that Pierre Bourdieu's social theory can be read as contributing significantly to an answer to the above question. However, since Bourdieu's project is not directly aimed at (...) enhancing our understanding of the technicity of the human body, a reading of Marcel Mauss's seminal essay on bodily technics is also discussed to set the stage for an examination of the technicity of the body and to justify the manner in which Bourdieu's theory is read here. Through a careful study of the key notions of habitus, field, practice, time and rule, Bourdieu's social theory is systematically presented and explored for its contribution to an understanding of the question raised in this article. In conclusion, a number of remarks are made on how the relation between Mauss and Bourdieu is to be understood and on the argumentative strength of Bourdieu's work. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to contribute to a philosophy of technics by proposing an answer to the following question: what is the nature of the human body as an element of technical systems? The argument focuses on an examination of the phenomenon of bodily technics. This examination is guided by the conviction that Pierre Bourdieu's social theory can be read as contributing significantly to an answer to the above question. However, since Bourdieu's project is not directly aimed at (...) enhancing our understanding of the technicity of the human body, a reading of Marcel Mauss's seminal essay on bodily technics is also discussed to set the stage for an examination of the technicity of the body and to justify the manner in which Bourdieu's theory is read here. Through a careful study of the key notions of habitus, field, practice, time and rule, Bourdieu's social theory is systematically presented and explored for its contribution to an understanding of the question raised in this article. In conclusion, a number of remarks are made on how the relation between Mauss and Bourdieu is to be understood and on the argumentative strength of Bourdieu's work. (shrink)

The paper asks about the difficulty of reading Schelling's work today given the historical biases that dominate contemporary philosophical inquiry. But if we cannot succeed as the readers Schelling himself appears to be looking for, this does not already have to mean that his work cannot speak to our time. Such a possibility, however, presupposes that we consider Schelling's work as it is inseparably connected to a critique of the modern project and as it points thereby to the monstrous discord (...) that defines human philosophical discourse as such. In particular, the paper considers the Kantian opposition between faith and knowledge and claims that this opposition itself appears to establish a kind of limit for philosophical inquiry today. In this context, some reflections are offered on the history of European nihilism and the death of God. The paper concludes by giving several indications of how Schelling's thought promises to subvert this opposition and this limit. (shrink)

The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic life- and worldview philosophy are considered excessively aesthetic, culturally liberal, relativistic, and (...) subjective. This essay involves two tasks in response to this negative evaluation of Dilthey that has shaped our current understanding of his philosophical project; first, an interpretation of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s reception of and struggles with Dilthey. These issues touch upon language, historicity, and the nature of hermeneutics. Second, by pursuing this task in light of Guignon’s interpretation of Dilthey and Heidegger, I hope to question and challenge the “overcoming” of Dilthey’s epistemic and life-philosophical hermeneutics in the “ontological” or “philosophical” hermeneutics of Heidegger. (shrink)

This article studies an aspect of the relation between emotions and ethics that is usually neglected in the recent debate on moral emotions. By focusing on the contributions of common or everyday emotions to the development of moral behaviours and attitudes, the debate loses sight of the emotional side of the ethical attitude and the way it involves different, specifically ethical emotions. In contrast, such emotions play an important role in Aristotle’s and Heidegger’s thought. As will be shown, both authors (...) identify emotions that are intrinsically tied to ethics in a broad sense and are structurally different from everyday emotions. Moreover, both characterize the two kinds of emotion in a similar fashion: whereas everyday emotions involve a limited form of activity and refer to a more immediate objective domain, the properly ethical emotions result from a superior form of activity and open up to a vaster domain or even to the entire reality, thus having a metaphysical character. The study of this distinction and what it involves will allow for a better understanding not only of emotions in general, but also of the emotional dimension of ethical life. (shrink)

This paper investigates the question of what an organ is from a phenomenological perspective. Proceeding from the phenomenology of being-in-the-world developed by Heidegger in Being and Time and subsequent works, it compares the being of the organ with the being of the tool. It attempts to display similarities and differences between the embodied nature of the organs and the way tools of the world are handled. It explicates the way tools belong to the totalities of things of the world that (...) are ready to use and the way organs belong to the totality of a bodily being able to be in this very world. In so doing, the paper argues that while the organ is in some respects similar to a bodily tool, this tool is nonetheless different from the tools of the world in being tied to the organism as a whole, which offers the founding ground of the being of the person. However, from a phenomenological point of view, the line between organs and tools cannot simply be drawn by determining what is inside and outside the physiological borders of the organism. We have, from the beginning of history, integrated technological devices (tools) in our being-in-the-world in ways that make them parts of ourselves rather than parts of the world (more organ- than tool-like), and also, more recently, have started to make our organs more tool-like by visualising, moving, manipulating, and controlling them through medical technology. In this paper, Heidegger’s analysis of organ, tool, and world-making is confronted with this development brought about by contemporary medical technology. It is argued that this development has, to a large extent, changed the phenomenology of the organ in making our bodies more similar to machines with parts that have certain functions and that can be exchanged. This development harbours the threat of instrumentalising our bodily being but also the possibility of curing or alleviating suffering brought about by diseases which disturb and destroy the normal functioning of our organs. (shrink)

Three metaphors appear to guide contemporary thinking about organ transplantation. Although the gift is the sanctioned metaphor for donating organs, the underlying perspective from the side of the state, authorities and the medical establishment often seems to be that the body shall rather be understood as a resource . The acute scarcity of organs, which generates a desperate demand in relation to a group of potential suppliers who are desperate to an equal extent, leads easily to the gift’s becoming, in (...) reality, not only a resource, but also a commodity . In this paper, the claim is made that a successful explication of the gift metaphor in the case of organ transplantation and a complementary defence of the ethical primacy of the giving of organs need to be grounded in a philosophical anthropology which considers the implications of embodiment in a different and more substantial way than is generally the case in contemporary bioethics. I show that Heidegger’s phenomenology offers such an alternative, with the help of which we can understand why body parts could and, indeed, under certain circumstances, should be given to others in need, but yet are neither resources nor properties to be sold. The phenomenological exploration in question is tied to fundamental questions about what kind of relationship we have to our own bodies, as well as about what kind of relationship we have to each other as human beings sharing the same being-in-the-world as embodied creatures. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger has retrospectively characterized his philosophy as “phenomenology of the invisible”. This paradoxical formula suggests that the aim of his thinking was to examine the origin of the phenomena. Furthermore, Heidegger has also stated that his philosophy is ultimately motivated by a theological interest, namely the question of God’s absence. Following the guiding thread of those remarks, this essay analyzes the essential traits of Heidegger’s thought by interpreting them as an attempt to develop a phenomenology of the invisible. Heidegger’s (...) attitude towards physics and metaphysics, his theory of truth, his reading of Aristotle, his concept of Dasein, his understanding of nothingness are all situated within the problematic context of the relation between the invisible and the revealed. Heidegger’s thought is thereby posited at the point of intersection of phenomenology, ontology, and theology. (shrink)

Crucial in Girard's Mimetic Theory is the notion of mimetic desire, viewed as appropriative mimicry, the main source of aggressiveness and violence characterizing our species. The intrinsic value of the objects of our desire is not as relevant as the fact that the very same objects are the targets of others' desire. One could in principle object against such apparently negative and one-sided view of mankind, in general, and of mimesis, in particular. However, such argument would misrepresent Girard's thought. Girard (...) himself acknowledged that mimetic desire is also good in itself, because is at the basis of love, and even more importantly because it's the opening out of oneself. Starting from the notion of desire as openness to others I will discuss from a neuroscientific perspective the implications for social cognition of mimesis against the background of Girard's Mimetic Theory, an ideal starting framework to foster a multidisciplinary approach to the study of human intersubjectivity. It will be posited that a different, not mutually exclusive, account of mimesis leads to social identification henceforth to sociality. Mimesis is neither good or bad, but has the potentials to lead not only to mimetic violence but also to the most creative aspects of human cognition. Results of empirical research in neuroscience and developmental psychology show that such account of mimesis finds solid supporting evidence. It will be concluded that a thorough and biologically plausible account of human intersubjectivity requires the integration of both sides of mimesis. (shrink)

In the emerging field of animal studies, criticism turns to questions of ethics and animal rights by reading representations of nonhuman animals in philosophy and literature. A rhetoric of coming to terms often shapes such readings and points to a lack of satisfactory answers to two questions: why read nonhuman animals, and why now? These questions are crucial to animal studies but can only be answered by understanding this critical approach as an element of the anthropological discourse, fundamental to philosophy. (...) Examining Aristotle’s and Heidegger’s approaches to thinking about the human-animal relation, it seems that the interest in reading how animals are presented in philosophy is not in coming to definitive terms with this relation or in correcting earlier theories. Rather, it appears to lie in reading the concept of the Animal as marking a limit of terminological language, and thus of theory. The Animal marks the point at which philosophy touches on poetry and withdraws. Criticism is concerned with animals now because the concept of “the animals” keeps casting doubt on theoretical conceptions of the Human and of human language. (shrink)

Este artigo pretende realizar uma breve exposição acerca da crítica de Levinas à tradição filosófica até então vigente, cujos espectros, desdobramentos e necessidades giram ao redor e se sustém no alicerce da Razão ou do ser. Tal postura pode ser observada mesmo no início da filosofia ocidental, aponta Levinas, com Sócrates e a maiêutica, ou mais ainda, com os filósofos da physis e sua busca por um arché, o princípio regulador de todas as coisas. Haveria uma espécie de relação com (...) o conhecimento e o intuito “controlar” e ocultar nossas próprias fraquezas perante o desconhecido. Levinas rompe com a tradição, buscando colocar o humano no cerne da questão, bem como a investigação acerca da pulsão anterior à toda tematização, oriunda da alteridade radical. (shrink)

To address the question posed in the title, I focus on Heidegger's conception of linguistic communication developed in the sections on Rede and Gerede of Being and Time. On the basis of a detailed analysis of these sections I argue that Heidegger was a social externalist but semantic internalist. To make this claim, however, I first need to clarify some key points that have led critics to assume Heidegger's commitment to social externalism automatically commits him to semantic externalism regarding concept (...) use. I begin by explaining the independence of those positions, arguing that social externalism answers the question of whose concepts in a linguistic community are properly individuated, whereas semantic externalism makes a claim about what it takes for concepts to be properly individuated. Once these issues are distinguished, it is possible to see that Heidegger's intersubjectivist conception of language commits him to social externalism, while his conception of the ontological difference commits him to semantic internalism. (shrink)

Este artículo explora una vía para pensar en una individualidad de las cosas cotidianas desde aquel modo de ser que Heidegger denominó ser-a-la-mano. Para ello proponemos un diálogo entre sus tesis sobre la significatividad del mundo y las consideraciones de Wilhelm Schapp sobre las cosas-para. A partir de Heidegger, se expondrá la individualidad física objetual como resultado de lamera presencia espacial. Luego, abordaremos al útil según el para-algo que constituye el sentido de la situación. Las consideraciones de Schapp contribuirán a (...) entender que las cosas han de ser abordadas desde su pertenencia situacional, y no desde la actividad corporal y perceptiva de un sujeto. Desde esta perspectiva, y en contraposición con la materia física, la dimensión material de las cosas cotidianas será entendida como “de algo”. Así, desde Heidegger y Schapp proponemos un concepto de materialidad situacional de carácter histórico como la singularización de las cosas cotidianas y que proponemos como una vía para indagar su individualidad inmediata. Palabras clave: Materia, mera presencia espacial, ser-a-la-mano, Heidegger, Schapp. (shrink)

Este artículo se propone exponer el fenómeno del existir humano, denominado por Heidegger “Dasein”, en íntima relación con el problema de la constitución de la realidad. Para ello, se entenderá lo real como aquella multiplicidad de entes con los que la vida se confronta diariamente. En este sentido, se plantea que esta multiplicidad no pertenece a lo percibido, sino que deviene más bien de la estructura de la percepción sensible. Mediante advertencias de Heidegger en torno a la filosofía kantiana y (...) a través del uso de ejemplos propios, se realzarán los momentos trascendentales de la sensibilidad: el espacio y el tiempo, hasta llegar al cuidado como ser del Dasein. Así, comprendiendo al cuidado en su sentido temporal, advertiremos que lo real se origina desde el futuro perteneciente al existir mismo. Con lo anterior, el estudio expondrá cómo es que el “Dasein” puede ser entendido como aperturidad o de-velamiento de nuestra realidad. (shrink)

Based on critical readings of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the paper offers a phenomenological study of the ontology of well-being that transcends the opposition between subjective and objective being. By interpreting the Heideggerian notion of Befindlichkeit as the fundamental way in which humans find themselves in the world, being affected by and faced with their own existence, the paper opens a way to understanding well-being that locates the possibility of elevating one’s own being not inside (...) or outside the I but in the affective bond to others called friendship. Aristotle’s reflections on philia play a crucial role in developing this understanding of well-being, according to which humans find themselves well by sharing joy with each other and making a vital contribution to the realization of their own possibilities. (shrink)

What is a problem? What is problematic about any problem whatsoever, philosophical or otherwise? As the origin of assertion and apodeiction, the problematic suspends the categories of necessity and contingency, possibility and impossibility. And it is this suspension that is the essence of the problem, which is why it is so suspenseful. But then, how is the problem problematic? Only if what is suspended neither comes to presence, nor simply goes out into absence, that is, if the suspension continues, which (...) continues the problem. But what is problematic about suspension? As a consideration of language shows, the problem of suspension is the problem of implication. If being, for example, is merely implied, neither present nor absent, then it is the suspension of both, at least insofar as it is problematic. And this not only says something about language; rather, it has ontological implications as well — it speaks of being, and the being of anything whatsoever. For if being is implied, if that is the problem of being, it is because being is an implication. Then the being of things like problems is implied as well; or being is in things by implication. But what does it mean for being to be neither presence nor absence, but an implication? It means that being is implied in a way that is problematic — before it is necessary, or even possible. For being’s way of being is characterized by suspension — which has implications for thinking and speaking about being, and about things like problems, even about anything whatsoever. And this has implications for what being implies, namely, unity and time and aspect. (shrink)

Any conception in linguistics and linguistic philosophy that prioritizes the world-disclosing function over the world-representing function of language can be regarded as a kind of linguistic hermeneutics. The paper tries to specify this general thesis by picking up and analysing historical trends in the philosophy of language. It spells out the relationship between the situatedness of locutors in the medium of linguistic practices and the way in which they articulate this medium by actualizing possibilities for personal expressivity and interpersonal communication. (...) It is argued that the starting point from the medium that always already transcends the particular speech acts offers an alternative to inferential semantics. From the perspective of linguistic hermeneutics, the world is disclosed and exposed to ongoing articulation in characteristic hermeneutic situations of language use. The concepts of linguistic medium and discursive articulation of the world are treated in terms of hermeneutic trans-subjectivity as enabling all forms of communicative intersubjectivity. If one ignores the fore-structuring role of the former, one would hypostatise the latter. With regard to this claim, the theory of formal pragmatics is critically discussed. (shrink)

Current interpretations of Heidegger's notion of das Man are caught in a dilemma: either they cannot accommodate the ontological status Heidegger accords it or they cannot explain his negative evaluation of it, in which it is treated as ontic. This paper uses Simmel's agonistic account of human sociality to integrate the ontological and the ontic, indeed perjorative aspects of Heidegger's account. Section I introduces the general problem, breaks the exclusive link of Heidegger's account to Kierkegaard and delineates the general form (...) of a solution. Section II then sketches Simmel's conception of sociology and sociality. Section III determines what Heidegger is trying to do in Chapter Four of Division I in Being and Time in order to formulate a strictly ontological account of das Man. Section IV uses Simmel's account of sociality to build into this ontological account an inherent tendency to display the negative features Heidegger ascribes to das Man. In conclusion, section V points to how the proposed account of das Man intimates the character of fundamental ontology as nascently a form of critical theory. It also explains the extent to which Heidegger's perjorative characterisations of das Man and the Man-selbst are legitimate. (shrink)

The nature and value of autonomy has long been debated in diverse philosophical traditions, including moral and political philosophy. Although the notion dates back to ancient Greek philosophy, it was during the Age of Enlightenment that autonomy drew much attention. Thus, as may be known, moral philosophers tended to emphasize self-regulation, particularly one’s own will to abide by universal moral laws, as the term “autonomy” originates from the Greek words “self” (auto) and “rule” (nomos). In parallel, modern epistemologists supposedly espoused (...) the idea of intellectual autonomy as self-reliance. In this classical view, an intellectually autonomous explorer of knowledge must not depend on a belief that is obtained from another’s testimony, until one can justify it to oneself. However, accompanying the growing focus on the importance of social dimensions of acquiring knowledge and understanding, recent epistemologists have doubted the classical view and have since reconsidered intellectual autonomy from distinct approaches such as social and virtue epistemology. This paper propounds an interpersonal-epistemic approach to intellectual autonomy. First, it is argued that thinking through questioning both individually and with other epistemic peers is an interpersonal-epistemic practice. Second, it is demonstrated that with particular cognitive features inherent within us, an intellectually autonomous person must think through questioning in necessary situations. This interpersonal account of intellectual autonomy can conceptually enrich intellectual autonomy by considering its relationship with not only responsibility but also with vulnerability. Specifically, regarding responsibility, an intellectually autonomous person must be responsible for his or her own actions throughout questioning processes. Regarding vulnerability, our intellectual autonomy lies in retaining autonomy with vulnerability in the plastic control of the questioning processes. (shrink)

In § 35 of Sein und Zeit Heidegger’s denunciation of Gerede, idle talk, is confident and scathing. It sounds so sinister and threatening. What could Heidegger be talking about? One could cite numerous fictional characters (e.g., Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp, Skimpole, Podsnap – all in Dickens), characters whose speech is very nearly an idiolect of bad faith. And yet there is something so fascinating and creative in their speech, an exuberance in their dissimulation, that one wouldn’t want to miss them. Could (...) idle talk in Heidegger’s sense contribute to the theoretization of Bakhtin's idea of the dialogic and heteroglossia and to the notion of discours as it has been developed by Benveniste, Barthes, and Genette? In prose fiction language is valorized (often implicitly) in terms of meaning/nonsense, serious/non-serious, full/empty. When in fiction language that is deemed low, formulaic, or “empty”-- gossip, chatter, prattle, idiotismes – comes to the fore the narrative elements falters, “nothing much” is said. But a kind of speech as act and process is foregrounded. It is this kind of inadvertence in language, its “idling” state, that Gerede points to. (shrink)

Translated into Danish by Henrik Jøker Bjerre.

A partir de uma explanação inicial sobre o significado e os limites da ontologia fundamental de Martin Heidegger, este ensaio procura investigar a possibilidade de uma ontologia não-antropogenética por meio do conceito problemático de extramundanidade. Essa investigação toma como fio condutor a ideia do “perspectivismo cosmológico”, elaborada por Eduardo Viveiros de Castro através de uma interpretação filosófico-antropológica do pensamento ameríndio. Lida como correlato positivo da extramundanidade, a noção perspectivística de sobrenatureza é contrastada com o conceito existencial de ser para confirmação (...) e problematização de seu caráter antropogenético. O objetivo principal do ensaio consiste em desvelar, apoiado radicalmente em outro pensamento, o sentido “cosmopolítico” do discurso sobre o ser, aqui representado pela filosofia de Heidegger. (shrink)