In “Cogito and the History of Madness,” Derrida maintains that crisis is endemic to philosophy rather than being, as Husserl forcefully argued, a temporary condition that can and must be overcome through the resources of reason. A reflection on the place of madness in Descartes's Meditations serves as the point of departure for demonstrating that Derrida has done an injustice to philosophy; and a comparison of Derrida's views with the thought of Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche reveals that Derrida's position in (...) “Cogito and the History of Madness” entails a sacrifice of the notion of responsibility that lies at the center of meaningful historical action. (shrink)

The aim of the thesis is to consider the position of phenomenology in contemporary thought in order to argue that only on its terms can a political ontology of difference be thought. To inaugurate this project I being by questioning Heidegger's relation to phenomenology. I take issue with the way that Heidegger privileges time over space in "Being and Time". In this way, the task of the thesis is clarified as the need to elaborate a spatio-temporal phenomenology. After re-situating Heidegger's (...) failure in this respect within a Kantian background, I suggest that the phenomenological grounding of difference must work through the body. I contend that the body is the ontological site of both the subject and the object. I use Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty to explore the ramifications of this thesis. I suggest first of all that architecture should be grounded ontologically in the body, and as such avoids being a 'master discourse'. Secondly, by theorising the body and world as reciprocally transformative, my reading of Merleau-Ponty emphasises the ways in which his thinking opens up a phenomenology of embodied difference. It is on the basis of these themes that I develop this thinking in the direction of race, exploring the dialectics of visibility and invisibility in the work of Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin. I argue that embodied difference attests to variations in the agent's freedom to act in the world. If freedom is understood through Merleau-Ponty as being the embodied ground of historicity, we must ask after unfreedom. I suggest that the "flesh" ontology of a pre-thetic community should be rethought as a regulative ideal, the ideal of a justice that can never be given. In this light, phenomenology becomes as much as poetics. Beyond being though of as conservative, phenomenology henceforth unleashes the possibility of thinking a transformative embodied agency. (shrink)

What is the relation between philosophical analysis and sociological method? Sociology has traditionally looked to Philosophy to provide either an indubitable epistemic foundation for its practices or alternatively to legislate invariant criteria of scientificity which might guide the social sciences in questions of methodology. But has Philosophy itself such an autonomy from the developing knowledge domains of the different sciences,natural and social? A structural analysis of philosophic discourse in the twentieth century reveals as a key element of recent philosophic'al thought (...) a central anthropologism. This study traces the rupture in philosophic thought which has occurred with the dissolution and collapse of classical epistemology and the emergence in turn of a radically new mode of philosophizing based on a recognition of the centrality of social reality to ontological judgement and epistemological critique. Just as the analytic epistemOlogy of the seventeenth century can be seen as an accommodation by Philosophy to the emergence and development of the empirical natural sc~ences, so the appearance of 'conversational' epistemology can be viewed as Philosophy's attempt to think'the implications for the nature of knowledge-in-general of the emergence and subsequent development of the social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century. The key theoretical instance which demarcates classical epistemology fram the anthropologistic philosophy since the 1920's is its inability to accommodate the category of intersubjectiv:itJY successfully within its egological structure. Contemporary philosophy, phenomenological, analytical, pragmatist and marxist, is forced to grapple with the new awareness of man's essential sociality. This has profound implications for epistemology. The question of the relationship of philosophical analysis to sociological method must be re-addressed in the light of the revealed epistemic proximity of the two disciplines. What sort of philosophical critique, we ask, is possible and appropriate in an age of sociological reason and historical method? (shrink)

An original reading of Nietzsche and Heidegger that paved the way for Vattimo’s conception of weak thought. In Beyond the Subject Gianni Vattimo offers a reading of Nietzsche and Heidegger that shows how the premises to overcome the metaphysical Subject were already embedded in their thought. Vattimo makes a case for a Nietzsche who is not concerned with the structure and glorification of the Overman, but rather with its opposite, by showing how it is the single individual who must see (...) and accept his/her potential and then excel and develop an inner strength and ethic. He reads Heidegger as concerned with the inevitable distortion present in every interpretation, which, when confronted and accepted, humbles us to deal with a less overarching telos or Grund, and makes us more attuned to contingency and interpersonal communication—what Vattimo calls a “weakened” notion of being. These original readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger pave the way for Vattimo’s concept of weak thought and open up to a future social ethic that is less agonistic and more community oriented. This edition includes two supplementary essays from 1986 and 1988 that expand on the same themes, providing a deeper look at an important decade in the development of Vattimo’s thought. (shrink)

Drawing on a range of sources in philosophy and literature, but with particular reference to the work of Heidegger, makes a compelling case for the importance of place in philosophical discourse.

This dissertation addresses the question of marginalization in cross-cultural communication from the perspectives of hermeneutic philosophy and postcolonial theory. Specifically, it focuses on European colonialism‘s effect on language and communicative practices in Latin America. I argue colonialism creates a deeply sedimented but unacknowledged background of inherited cultural prejudices against which social and political problems of oppression, violence and marginalization, especially towards women, emerge—but whose roots in colonial and imperial frameworks have lost transparency. This makes it especially difficult for postcolonial subjects (...) to meaningfully express their own experiences of psychic dislocation and fragmentation because the discursive background used to communicate these experiences is made up of multiple, sometimes conflicting traditions. To address this problem, I turn to a strategic use of Nietzsche‘s conceptions of subjectivity and language as metaphor to engage the unique difficulties that arise in giving voice to the subaltern experience. Thus, I argue that while colonialism introduces an added layer of complexity to philosophical discussions of language, the concrete particularities and political emergencies of Latin American history necessitate an account of language that can speak to these concrete particularities. To this end, I develop a conception of, what I call, ―hydric life,‖ a postcolonial feminist hermeneutics that better accommodates these cultural specificities. (shrink)

The relevance of Martin Heidegger’s thinking to Paul Celan’s poetry is well known. Between Celan and Heidegger proposes that, while the relation between them is undeniable, it is also marked by irreducible discord. Pablo Oyarzun begins with a deconstruction of Celan’s Todtnauberg, written after the poet visited Heidegger in his Schwarzwald cabin. The poem stands as a milestone, not only in the complex relationship between the two men but also in the state of poetry and philosophy in late modernity, in (...) the aftermath of the Holocaust. Discussion then turns to The Meridian, Celan’s acceptance speech for the prestigious Büchner Prize for German language literature. Other issues are insistently addressed—place, art, language, pain, existence, and the Heideggerian notion of dialogue—as Oyarzun revisits several essential poems from Celan’s oeuvre. A rare translation of Oyarzun’s work into English, Between Celan and Heidegger affirms the uniqueness of Celan’s poetry in confrontation both with Heidegger’s discourse on Dichtung (a poetic saying centered in the idea of gathering) and with Western philosophical notions of art, technē, mimesis, poiesis, language, and thinking more broadly. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This study bears upon the ‘Heidegger case,’ that is, the relation of Heidegger’s philosophizing to his political involvements as Rector of the University of Freiburg 1933-4, and his subsequent silences on the subject of the Holocaust. I use the phrase ‘bears upon’ for Heidegger’s political involvement will serve as the ‘horizon’ for the study, my concern being the genesis of Heidegger’s position. Grounded in a musical ‘intuition’ and attunement, I take up the Nietzschean cipher for understanding proposed by Heidegger (...) himself for the self-understanding of the German people: the Apollonian-Dionysian duality, which I apply to the ‘being’ of Heidegger’s own philosophizing. Through this approach I hope to make an original contribution to Heidegger scholarship by showing that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is overdetermined, evolving out of both the phenomenological demand for a rigorous method in establishing fundamental structures of existence and - at the same time – out of an Apollonian attempt to ‘tame’ Dionysian existence, including Heidegger’s own. Inextricably interlinked will be the argument that Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung, his ‘confrontation,’ with Nietzsche precedes the overt engagement of his ‘Nietzsche’ lectures of the 1930s, and, further, that this more pervasive concern with Nietzsche figures in the Apollonian-Dionysian strife within Heidegger’s thinking and within his ‘being.’ Heidegger’s silences in the face of the Dionysian - as well as the Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche - will be seen to precede his ‘silence’ in the face of the actuality and history of the Third Reich. What I am proposing one might characterize as Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung - through Nietzsche - with v Heidegger, in a disclosure of the ontic roots of Heidegger’s ontology, an exercise in his own hermeneutics of facticity. I will pursue the trace of the Apollonian-Dionysian duality: in the Western philosophical tradition which Heidegger confronts, using Husserl and Nietzsche as exemplars; in Heidegger interpretation; in the relation between his texts and his letters; and in the suppressions and intensifications within Being and Time. And I will propose that the fugue and the mutually generative duality of suppression and intensification within Heidegger’s academic thinking were conditions of the possibility of Heidegger’s ‘way’ towards political involvement. (shrink)

Hermeneutics is widely celebrated as a call for “conversation”—that is, a manner of inquiry characterized by humility and openness to the other that eschews the pretenses of calculative rationality and resists all finality of conclusions. In this, conversation takes shape in efforts to understand and interpret that always unfold in the transmission of meaning historically in language. Yet, the celebration of hermeneutics for humility and openness appears, at least, to risk embarrassment in light of claims found in Heidegger and Gadamer (...) that conversation is always contingent on “prior accord.” Critics of hermeneutics have, for some decades, interpreted this claim of prior accord to refer to a common tradition, so that the understanding achieved in conversation is restricted to those who belong to the same heritage. In this essay, the author argues that although Heidegger and Gadamer often suggest this prior accord is a matter of common tradition, crucial threads of Gadamer’s thought, in particular, recommend a different view. Gadamer, in these threads, offers that “prior accord” concerns not a common tradition, but, on the contrary, the call to participate in hermeneutic transmission as such, even—and no doubt especially—when those in conversation are not familiar with the tradition or language of the other. With this, we are called to converse not first by _what_ the other says, but by the fact _that_ we do not yet understand, that we have already misunderstood, and that we perhaps cannot understand. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 48, Issue 2, pp 244 - 264 Cassirer is important in 20th Century philosophy for the attention he gives to the fundamental relationship between myth and language. For Cassirer, myth is a non-subjective form of discourse wherein the origin of language coincides with both the human-divine encounter and the event of being itself. In this article, I trace the disagreement between Cassirer and Heidegger on the nature of the magical sign, which is at the heart of mythical (...) discourse. While Heidegger initially argues that this form of sign is structurally impossible on the basis of his accounts of signs and language in _Being and Time_, he later comes to recognize that he had not properly accounted for its possibility within his phenomenological deduction. I conclude by describing how Heidegger’s notion of poetry eventually comes into alignment with the way Cassirer describes the function of myth and the magical sign. (shrink)

Assesses Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to ethics as calling for a poetic interplay between perception and imagination, and between silence and solidarity, that reveals our place in the world, and our obligations to ourselves and others. Before his death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty worried about what he saw as humanity’s increasingly self-enclosed and manipulative way of experiencing self, others, and the world—the consequences of which remain apparent in our destructive inability to connect with others within and across cultures. In Merleau-Ponty and the Face (...) of the World, Glen A. Mazis provides an overall consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that brings out what he sees as a corrective prescription for ethical reorientation that is fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Mazis begins by analyzing the key role that silence plays for Merleau-Ponty as a positive, powerful presence rather than a lack or emptiness, and then builds on this to explore the ethical significance of the face-to-face encounter in his thought as one of solidarity rather than obligation. In the last part of the book, Mazis traces the development of what he calls “physiognomic imagination” in Merleau-Ponty’s work. This understanding of imagination is not fancy or make-believe, but rather brings out the depths of perceptual meaning and leads to an appreciation of poetic language as the key to revitalizing both ethics and ontology. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s published works, lecture notes, unpublished writings, and the work of many phenomenologists and Merleau-Ponty scholars, Mazis also offers incisive readings of Merleau-Ponty’s work as it relates to that of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Gaston Bachelard, and Emmanuel Levinas. (shrink)

This essay explores the ontological movement of poetry, its language and words, by establishing a dialogue with the thought of three Japanese thinkers, Ki no Tsurayuki, Motoori Norinaga and Fujitani Mitsue, and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. The overall purpose, as we progress from one to the other, is to present, explore and disclose a horizon where poetry gradually becomes the locus of a philosophy of language that places it at the genesis of mutual understanding, ethics and, thus, of community.

The past several generations of scholarship on Rembrandt's “Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp” have suffered from the anxiety of influence exercised by the influential interpretations of William Heckscher and William Schupbach. Schupbach's interpretation in particular has guided interpretation of the painting in the past generation and has given rise to a fundamental misunderstanding of the painting and its cultural significance. Schupbach and those whom he has influenced have failed to recognize that, from the standpoint of Baroque consciousness, there is (...) an inner compatibility rather than a paradox or tension between the optimistic endorsement of earthly science and the putatively pessimistic resignation to the inevitability of death. Where the figure of Tulp represents the optimism of science and technology, that of the topmost surgeon Van Loenen represents the recognition that the technological project functions within the larger context of a Christian worldview. A reflection on the original form of “Tulp,” in which Van Loenen was depicted wearing a hat, shows how Rembrandt's painting can still speak to us from a distance of almost four hundred years and pose a challenge to our own secular ambitions. (shrink)

The teacher-student relationship has long been of primary concern to educators and the focus of much educational research. While various theoretical understandings of this relationship exist, ontological understandings of the lived experiences of this relationship are not so prevalent, and there is thus a call for phenomenological studies aimed at uncovering the essential and ontological meanings of this taken for granted phenomenon. This paper reports on such a project and, in particular, some of the challenges encountered in the process of (...) phenomenologically researching the relationship which arises in the context of teacher education between the lecturer and the student teacher. The challenges of phenomenological research are both numerous and complex. These challenges relate to the intensity of the lived experience of the research itself, the meditative attunement of the researcher to the focal phenomenon, and the process of walking in a research process that is mindful of one's own historicity (Gadamer, 1960/1995). While the primary focus of this paper is on the challenges of researching the lecturer-student teacher relationship in a phenomenological way, it nevertheless reflects the unique capacity of a phenomenological approach to respect the centrality and humanity of relationship and to open understanding that affirms this. (shrink)