How can we understand the phenomena of loss and mourning in the Heideggerian framework? There is no established interpretation of Heidegger that gives an elaborate account of the phenomena of loss and mourning, let alone gauges its importance for our understanding and assessment of authentic existence in Heidegger. This paper attempts to do both. First, I give a detailed exposition of Heidegger’s analysis of the phenomena of mourning and loss and show that Heidegger’s analysis of mourning in his early and (...) late work is strikingly in line with his collectivist understanding of Being-with. This demonstrates, contrary to what some of his proponents argue, that Heidegger does not follow the kind of dynamic understanding of Being-with that places the other within fine-grained spaces of possibility. Second, with reference to Heidegger’s existential philosophy, I construct a phenomenology of mourning and grief. Though Heidegger himself fails to explain the relationships in which one mourns after a close other, we can develop a unique phenomenology of mourning with reference to Heidegger, which shows that each loss is singular and can be equiprimordial with one’s own death in opening one to the possibility of an authentic existence. In this new understanding of authenticity, loss is regarded as a powerful force, akin to death, in leading one toward their self-owned existence. (shrink)

This article uses recent work in philosophy of science and social epistemology to argue for a shift in analytic philosophy of religion from a knowledge-centric epistemology to an epistemology centered on understanding. Not only can an understanding-centered approach open up new avenues for the exploration of largely neglected aspects of the religious life, it can also shed light on how religious participation might be epistemically valuable in ways that knowledge-centered approaches fail to capture. Further, it can create new opportunities for (...) interaction with neighboring disciplines and can help us revitalize and transform stagnant debates in philosophy of religion, while simultaneously allowing for the introduction and recovery of marginalized voices and traditions. (shrink)

The essay explores the possibilities afforded by Heidegger’s thought for addressing the question of the reality of the phenomenon within the framework of the theory of quantum mechanics. Heidegger’s conception of the task of phenomenology is seen to provide a crucial axis along which the phenomenon of quantum physics can be connected both to its appearance in language and to the historical unfolding of the horizon that grounds the possibility of an encounter with the phenomenon itself. The determinations of this (...) horizon, i.e. of the order of “phenomenality” that makes the appearance of the phenomenon possible, are analyzed in the instance of quantum mechanics, and compared to the ones presented by Heidegger in his considerations concerning the appearing of the phenomenon in Aristotelian and classical physics. The three main directives that structure the analysis of this order of phenomenality are the determinations of the conditions of experience of the phenomenon, of the function of language that makes this appearance possible, and of the subject function that constitutes, and is in turn constituted by, this experience. (shrink)

De-anthropocentrism is the leitmotif of philosophy in the twenty-first century, encouraging diverse and competing thoughts as to how this goal may be achieved. This article argues that the method by which we may achieve de-anthropocentrism is ethical rather than metaphysical – it must involve a creation of the self, rather than an interpretation of the given human conditions. Through engagements with the thought of Nietzsche, Levinas, and Foucault, and a close reading of Baudelaire’s poem “La Beauté,” I will illustrate three (...) ethical commitments essential to de-anthropocentrism: to abandon the claim to knowledge associated with human reason, to remain in perpetual quest of an object, and to transgress the given perceptual structure through aesthetic experience. In contrast to Kantian philosophy built upon universal human reason, art is the ethical arena where each artist creates their own way to relate to the object, while de-anthropocentrism occurs – this article argues – when the artist includes the self as the field of creation. Object-Oriented Ontology in my assessment is the only branch of philosophy that truly achieves de-anthropocentrism. (shrink)

This article compares the use of Romantic metaphor with the Chinese literary device xiang 象 (which I translate as “thing-metaphor”) in regard to how they embody different metaphysical relations between humans and things. Whereas Romantic metaphor transports a physical thing to the immaterial realm of imagination, xiang is a literary device in which the material qualities of the thing, while creatively interpreted to generate human meaning, retain ontologically a strong physical presence. Xiang therefore epitomizes a theory of creation that challenges (...) the Western dualistic paradigm: that the poet creates not virtual copies of the thing, but meanings of the thing, and therefore our relationships with things. The article concludes with Heidegger’s discourses on metaphor to suggest that my discussion of thing-metaphor has universal applicability. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the character of the literary and contends that if, instead of accepting the legitimacy of the question “what is literature?” and trying to answer it, one were to subject the question itself to a critical scrutiny—i.e. in order to lay bare what the question presupposes about the literary—it becomes obvious that any attempt to answer the question by uncritically accepting the legitimacy of the puzzle it puts forward can only give rise to contradictions. For the question (...) requires and presupposes for an answer an ontologically independent foundation, and the latter, given its immutability, requires the positing of a reality/representation disjunction—where the latter of the pair permits of and accommodates the experience of change—thereby ensuring that representation, too, requires a foundation, which, due to the impossibility of a foundation being the foundation of its other, that is, mutability, ends up undermining the very possibility of a disjunction, and, hence, the coherence of the foundationalist enterprise. Given that the problem of incoherence is bound to recur in all attempts to explain the literary in a foundationalist framework and given that the logic of foundationalism is one with the logic of nihilism—for the incoherence necessitates the denial of the possibility of literature—a release from the contradictions and a reinstatement of the reality of literature can come about only if one is awakened to the incoherence of the foundationalist undertaking. The resulting turn away from foundationalist thinking to differential thinking—where the incoherence of the demand for coherence is grasped and the reality of time reinstated—sheds light on the twining of the destinies of the literary and the philosophical: if philosophy as differential thinking awakens us to the displacement of being in the flow of time, literature sets into work the displacement of meaning in the functioning of language. This confirms that not only are the attempts to unearth a ground for the literary a mistake, but denying the reality of the literary event—i.e. upon failing to find a ground—is equally a mistake. (shrink)

This book investigates what change is, according to Aristotle, and how it affects his conception of being. Mark Sentesy argues that change leads Aristotle to develop first-order metaphysical concepts such as matter, potency, actuality, sources of being, and the teleology of emerging things. He shows that Aristotle’s distinctive ontological claim—that being is inescapably diverse in kind—is anchored in his argument for the existence of change. -/- Aristotle may be the only thinker to have given a noncircular definition of change. When (...) he gave this definition, arguing that change is real was a losing proposition. To show that it exists, he had to rework the way philosophers understood reality. His groundbreaking analysis of change has long been interpreted through a Platonist lens, however, in which being is conceived as unchanging. Offering a comprehensive reexamination of the relationship between change and being in Aristotle, Sentesy makes an important contribution to scholarship on Aristotle, ancient philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, and metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper outlines the fundamental aspects of a Heideggerian-ecofeminist philosophy. It aims to be suggestive rather than definitive regarding the form and function of such a philosophy and will, consequently, be somewhat partial and incomplete. It is intended to highlight the enormous potential of such a hybrid philosophy. To this end it will provide a brief account of the philosophy of the later Heidegger, with particular emphasis on his analysis of technology and his account of the Greek concept of truth (...) as aletheia, or unconcealment. It will also focus on Heidegger’s account of the connection between the Greek concept of nature as physis and his own ontology of Being, “letting-be” as the appropriate attitudinal stance to existence, and the bearing of all the above on contemporary ecological concerns. (shrink)

Logos, generally regarded as the basic principle of the operating world, seems to be closely tied up with development of human being. With the evolutionary history of human, logos evolves into three different dimensional expressions, namely reason, rationality, and reasonableness. In different historical periods, each expression of logos has their own glory days respectively. In the age of ancient Greek sages, reason referred to the whole range of subjects from geometry argumentation to rhetoric. Later on, there emerged a superiority on (...) theoretical abstraction and logical deduction, which was called the dictatorship of rationality. Yet it was found that the bureaucratization of learning had created as many problems as it solved. In recent decades, the years had seen a revived interest in substantial arguments in medical ethics, ecology, and other practical fields. However, we are not inclined to regard reasonableness as a way that it can cure once and for all the crisis of our times. Based on the imperfection of each variant and indeterminacy of the topic, we attempt to track back to logos in a more comprehensive perspective, corresponding to diversity of human activities and modern social production way of life. (shrink)

The paper analyzes Quentin Meillassoux’s conception of the fideistic approach to religious faith intrinsic to the “strong correlationism” that he considers pervasive in contemporary thought. Backman presents the basic elements of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism and especially the thesis according to which strong correlationism involves a “fideistic” approach to religiosity. In doing so, Backman critically examines Meillassoux’s notions of post-metaphysical faith, religious absolutes, and contemporary fanaticism, especially against the background of Heidegger’s philosophy. According to Backman, Meillassoux’s logical and conceptual critique of (...) strong correlationism is innovative, and it may remain legitimate if its presuppositions are accepted. And yet, Backman argues that Meillassoux’s allegations of fideism seem to rely on the questionable application of Enlightenment conceptions to the contemporary situation. (shrink)

The chapter discusses Quentin Meillassoux's recent interpretation and critique of Heidegger's philosophical position, which he describes as "strong correlationism." It emphasizes the fact that Meillassoux situates Heidegger in the post-Kantian tradition of transcendental idealism that he defines in terms of a focus on the correlation between being and thinking. It is argued that Meillassoux's "speculative" attempt to overcome the Kantian philosophical framework in the name of absolute contingency should be understood as a further development and dialectical overcoming of its ultimate (...) contemporary form, the Heideggerian philosophy of finitude. (shrink)

Kolb discusses postmodern architectural styles and theories within the context of philosophical ideas about modernism and postmodernism. He focuses on what it means to dwell in a world and within a history and to act from or against a tradition.

In this article I explore how a philosophical conception of love may be used to draw debate on the death of God beyond the binary opposition between theology and philosophy through a comparative study of the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy. Although Marion’s reading of love—in both its theological and phenomenological guises—proposes an innovative phrasing of a non-metaphysical notion of divinity, I argue that it is ultimately unable to maintain its coherence in nominal discourse due to Marion’s insistence (...) on keeping love and being separate. In contrast, through his unique thinking on ontology, Nancy’s philosophy allows us to reposition love at the heart of being, from whence it may serve as a means of disrupting the very principle governing the atheist and theist world-views. Far from dismantling Marion’s core proposition, I conclude that the two thinkers may in fact be more closely aligned than previous scholarship has acknowledged, coming together in the need to affirm an experience of the impossible that takes place in the present rather than in any eschatological fulfillment to come. At this intersection between two nominally very different thinkers, love forms an ontological limit-point for thought that poses a challenge to both theology and philosophy alike as they continue to grapple with the question of religion in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the philosophical approach to faith after deconstruction as manifested in the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy. By taking the saturated phenomenon as its focus, the analysis seeks to demonstrate that whilst Marion’s thinking proves to be an innovative re-imagining of the possibilities of phenomenology, its problematic recourse to a supplementary hermeneutic means that saturation can never be adequately applied to faith without simultaneously compromising the excessive intuition upon which it relies. The article then (...) explores whether Nancy’s suggestion that saturation be re-framed as faith can offer a viable alternative approach. Whilst the post-phenomenological modality within which Nancy operates means it may be problematic to retain the term ‘saturation’ in the exact sense Marion gives it, it is argued that Nancy’s version of saturated faith allows us to approach the binary divide between philosophy and theology from a different direction, resulting in a vision of faith that cuts across theism and atheism, destabilising them from within. Although Nancy’s thought in this area certainly does nothing to respond to persistent questions surrounding the place of institutionalized religion within secular modernity, it nevertheless serves as a powerful tool for thinking the possibilities of faith in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Sleep is consciousness naturally folded back to itself in the self-come-home-to-self, to find life nourished, renovated, and vitalized, all beyond objective management. Sleep can never be understood with direct conscious approach, but must be approached indirectly, implicatively, and alive coherently, as tried here. Sleep (A) is Spontaneity, (B) Self-Fullness, and so (C) sleep is life’s Gospel of Self-ing.

Heidegger’s discussion about the rise of the arbitrary power of “machination” in his late 1930s writings does not just echo his well-known later thinking on technology, but also affords a profound insight to the ontological mechanism of oblivion behind the history of Western thinking of being. The paper shows how this rise of the coercive power of ordering signifies an emergence of historically and spatially significant moment of completion: outgrowth of the early Greek notions of tekhne and phusis in terms (...) of globally expanding systems of calculative orderings. The paper thus aims to show how the condition of machination marks a fundamental implementation of the hidden consummation of the mechanism of oblivion now being re-adopted into the operational clarity of calculative rationality. It is argued that the rise of machination became possible through the historical process of replacing the early Greek disposition of existence, the wonder, with calculative rationality of ordering. (shrink)

This paper explains the nature and origin of what I am calling Transgressive Realism, a middle path between realism and anti-realism which tries to combine their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses. Kierkegaard created the position by merging Hegel’s insistence that we must have some kind of contact with anything we can call real (thus rejecting noumena), with Kant’s belief that reality fundamentally exceeds our understanding; human reason should not be the criterion of the real. The result is the idea that (...) our most vivid encounters with reality come in experiences that shatter our categories, the way God’s commandment to kill Isaac irreconcilably clashes with the best understanding of ethics we are capable of. I explain the genesis of this idea, and then show it at work in Heidegger and Levinas’ thought. Understanding this position illuminates important aspects of the history of continental philosophy and offers a new perspective on realism. (shrink)

Although sexual difference is widely regarded as the concept that lies at the center of Luce Irigaray's thought, its meaning and significance is highly contested. This dissensus, however, attests to more than merely the existence of a recalcitrant conceptual ambiguity. That is, Irigaray's discussion of sexual difference remains fraught not because she leaves this concept undefined but because the centrality of sexual difference in fact marks a complex and unstable nexus of phenomena that shift throughout her work. Consequently, if Irigaray (...) is indeed the preeminent thinker of sexual difference, this is not in virtue of her recurrent appeal to a monolithic, readily digestible concept but rather somehow despite the absence of precisely this gesture. In this paper, I will attempt to elucidate the peculiar preeminence of sexual difference in Irigaray's work by identifying her persistent, though largely unexamined, commitment to transcendental phenomenology. Indeed, I attempt to show that the complex of phenomena of sexual difference emerges in L'oubli de l'air and The Way of Love as a modulation of Heidegger's own revision of transcendental phenomenology. In this sense, the peculiar preeminence of sexual difference does not mark the centrality of a concept but Irigaray's amplification of this Heideggerian gesture. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question why the issue of reason and evidence as the central concern in the mainstream contemporary philosophy of religion has to be displaced by the issue of suspension according to Lao-Zhuang and the Augustine of Hippo. For both Lao-Zhuang and Augustine, in making room for the Other to appear at the core of the self’s being, it shows that there is an inseparable relationship of the self to the Other. In suspending its own understanding, admitting its (...) own ignorance in humility, the subject is not in sheer darkness, but can follow a new light not generated from itself; in suspending its own will, the subject is not paralyzed, but follows the will of the Other. The selfhood of the subject is constituted in its relation to the Other. (shrink)

This paper carries out an intensive study of Heidegger's famous reflection on the word dao and of his citations from the Daodejing, with the purpose of elucidating his complex relation with Daoist thinking. First I examine whether dao could be said to be a guideword for Heidegger's path of thinking. Then I discuss Heidegger's citations, in six places of his writings, from five chapters of the Daodejing, by situating them in the immediate textual context as well as against the broad (...) background of the fundamental presuppositions and orientations of Heidegger and Laozi's thinking. My examination of Heidegger's citations from the Daodejing has for the first time gathered together all the relevant materials discovered so far. (shrink)

Are all forms of difference contained in what is, or is there some form of difference that escapes, negates, or constitutes what is? Parmenides and Heraclitus may have had the greatest effect on how philosophy has answered this question. This paper shows that Heraclitus is not a partisan of difference: identity and difference are mutually generative and equally fundamental. For his part, Parmenides both makes an argument against opposing being and non-being in the False Road Story, and then uses precisely (...) this opposition to put up signs on the Way of Truth. The paper responds to this impasse by making the case that the poem’s philosophical character is didactic, rhetorical, and mythological, which is why both these signs, and the opposition between non-being and being, are presented as names created by mortals. (shrink)

مارتین هایدگر در آثار متأخر خود تشریح می‌کند که متافیزیک به مثابه هستی‌ـ‌خداشناسی چگونه با توجه صرف به هستندگان آنها را از یک سو به جهت چیستی یا ذات مورد بررسی قرار می‌دهد و از سوی دیگر به جهت بودگی و قرار گرفتن در زنجیرۀ علّی ذیل برترین هستنده یا همان خداوند. وی با نگاه نقادانه به ساختار هستی‌ـ‌خداشناسی متافیزیک، بر آن است تا تبیین کند که رویکرد هستی‌ـ‌خداشناسانه هم سبب از دست رفتن فهم هستی شده و هم در نتیجۀ (...) آن الوهیت را از جایگاه اصلی خود خارج کرده است. در این مقاله بر آنیم تا معنای هستی‌ـ‌خداشناسی را در تفکر هایدگر متأخر بررسی کنیم و بدین منظور در پی آن هستیم که چگونه متافیزیک نزد هایدگر از نگاه همدلانۀ هستی‌شناسی بنیادین به رویکرد انتقادی هستی‌ـ‌خداشناسی تغییر جایگاه پیدا کرد و آثار دورۀ گذار و دورۀ متأخر وی را بدین منظور مورد تأمل قرار می‏دهیم. در این مقاله با تبیین ساختار هستی‌ـ‌خداشناسانۀ متافیزیک از منظر هایدگر نشان خواهیم داد که چگونه هستی مغفول واقع شده سبب تولد الهیات متافیزیکی شده است. (shrink)

In this article, I rethink the key arguments of my co-authored paper Teaching Pleasure and Danger in Sexuality Education (Author and Co, 2013 Author and Co. (2013). Teaching pleasure and danger in sexuality education. Sex Education, 13(2), 121–132.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]) by bringing the postmodern logic of critical sexuality education theory into conversation with the relational ontology of new materialism. I begin by rejecting the key problem presented in Author and Co’s (2013) paper as (...) a false problem. This false problem is the drawing of an ‘unqualified line’ between positive and negative sexual experience in sexuality education. Instead, I argue that the actual problem is the initial act of drawing a line to separate sexual experience into a binary. My modification of the problem is an ontological move that allows me to consider sexuality education outside the binaries of negative and positive experience. Elaborating on the ontology problem presented in my paper Teaching Pleasure and Danger in Sexuality Education, I explain new materialism and its key task of realizing the interdependence of dualist terms. Drawing on Bergson and Braidotti’s philosophies of difference, I argue that pushing for sex-positive sexuality education strengthens the sex-negativity in sexuality education. I further critique the logic of negation that structures sexuality education by interrogating the contemporary push for pleasure-based sexuality education. Through this process of rethinking my previous scholarship through new materialist logic, I begin the task of reconfiguring the phallogocentric sexual subject as a subject-in-the-process. The conclusion of this article offers a beginning consideration of sexuality as an act of becoming where forces brought into relationship are entangled, creating a new thing. (shrink)

The paper works out an account of the piety proper to philosophical thought. The investigation proceeds as a critical interpretation of three enigmatic claims made by Martin Heidegger about ‘the piety of thinking,’ but the paper is not simply exegetical; the interpretive work is constantly in service of an attempt to think through the phenomenon independently. Plato’s Euthyphro and Nietzsche’s critique of scientific piety both hover in the background of Heidegger’s pronouncements, and they are given special attention here. Through the (...) investigation, philosophical piety is shown to be a virtuous capacity to respond with fitting submission to the truth as what is insurmountably prior to us. To respond fittingly is, at least, to deal well with sameness and difference, which in the case of piety means to recognize two features of our situation: that philosophical questioning necessarily arises out of a fundamental listening, or affirmation, and that we always belong to being but only ever across a gap. (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)

Scotus’ theory of univocity is described: his exact definition of univocity and his view of transcendental concepts that are ‘simply simple’. These concepts are said to be univocally applied to God and creatures. Next, we describe Scotus’ views on univocity in ‘being’ and the precise meaning of the infinite and finite ‘mode’ of being. Finally, we apply these results to work of Heidegger and Marion. It appears that they had an insufficient grasp of the intricacies of Scotus’ theory of univocity (...) and that Marion’s religious phenomenology could have benefitted from these scotistic tools. (shrink)

. Enframing geography: subject, curriculum, knowledge, responsibility. Ethics and Education: Vol. 7, Creating spaces, pp. 277-290. doi: 10.1080/17449642.2013.767004.

Irigaray demonstrates that metaphysics depends upon the specific negation and exclusion of the female body. Readings of Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman tend to highlight the status of this excluded materiality: is there an essential female body which precedes negation or is the feminine only an effect of exclusion? I approach Irigaray's work by way of another question: is it possible to move beyond a feminist critique of metaphysics and towards a feminist philosophy?

Relying on the form of the matter, as well as the content, this article is a playful and lyrical re-thinking of Foucault’s radical move to re-claim ‘otherness’ and the ‘other’ as ‘ecstatic’ fetish. Posed as such, ‘otherness’ and the technologies of identity this implies, neither stands as an opposition to Being/being nor as the ‘that’ which does not fit in. In this move, something rather peculiar also comes to light: a politics of the ethical that no longer relies on the (...) mastery of logos. Indeed, it relies, on a radical ‘non-mastery’, a ‘beheaded mastery’; a kind of ‘coming’ without ‘be’. Could it be said that therein lies the beginning threads for a wholly different conception of freedom and democracy, not to mention the ‘I’ of this ‘me’? (shrink)

In this paper, we propose to analyze the phenomenon of Christian prayer by way of combining two different analytical frameworks. We start by applying Schutz’s theories of “intersubjectivity,” “inner time,” “politheticality,” and “multiple realities,” and then proceed by drawing on the ideas and insights of linguistic philosophers, notably, Wittgenstein’s “language-game,” Austin’s “speech act,” and Evans’s “logic of self-involvement”. In conjoining these accounts, we wish to demonstrate how their combination sheds new light on understanding the phenomenon of prayer. Prayer is a (...) complex phenomenon that involves two major dimensions: the private and the social, as Matthew and Acts, respectively, demonstrate. Schutz’s study of the phenomenon of “inner time” and the “polithetical” structure of consciousness, at both the subjective and intersubjective level, provides a useful lens to analyze these two dimensions. In addition, prayer, in following a specific set of rules, can also be considered as a specific, i.e., religious “language-game”. In the last analysis, however, we propose to analyze prayer within the Schutzian framework of “multiple realities,” “enclaves,” and “symbolic appresentation,” which permits accessing the “religious finite province of meaning” in the very midst of the paramount reality of everyday life. In a nutshell, we claim that Christian prayer is a practice of constructing and living within a “religious province of meaning” in the everyday world; it is a practice that revolves around self-involving language-activities such as praising, confessing, thanksgiving, or requesting to God, which enable the praying subject to transfigure the language of everydayness and “see through” the world of everyday life in order to let it appear in a different light, e.g., the light of grace, gift, and salvation. (shrink)

This article underlines and draws attention to critical insights Esposito makes regarding the prospects of rethinking community in a globalized world. Alongside Agamben and Nancy, Esposito challenges the property prejudice found in mainstream models of community. In identity politics, collective identity is converted into a form of communal property. Borders, sovereign territories, and exclusive rights are fiercely defended in the name of communal property. Esposito responds to this problem by developing what I call a “deontological communal contract” where being and (...) ethics are prioritized over having and economics. I examine this new perspective on community in relation to mainstream models found in contemporary and classical social theory. (shrink)

Sylvia Plath wrote in the midst of growing racial tensions in 1950’s and 1960’s America. Her work demonstrates ambivalence towards her role as a middle-class white woman. In this paper, I examine the racial implications in Plath’s color terms. I disagree with Renée Curry’s reading in White Women Writing White that Plath only considers her whiteness insofar as it affects herself. Through a phenomenological study of how whiteness shifts meaning in this poem, I hope to show that Curry’s negative estimation (...) is only partly right. I suggest that embodiment is a problem for Plath in general, and this contributes to her inability to fully examine other bodies. (shrink)

From a theoretical standpoint, the problem of human suffering can be understood as one formulation of the classical problem of evil, which calls into question the compatibility of the existence of a perfect God with the extent to which human beings suffer. Philosophical responses to this problem have traditionally been posed in the form of theodicies, or justifications of the divine. In this article, I argue that the theodical approach in analytic philosophy of religion exhibits both morally and epistemically harmful (...) tendencies and that philosophers would do better to shift their perspective from the hypothetical “God’s-eye view” to the standpoint of those who actually suffer. By focusing less on defending the epistemic rationality of religious belief and more on the therapeutic effectiveness of particular imaginings of God with respect to suffering, we can recover, (re)construct, and/or (re)appropriate more virtuous approaches to the individual and collective struggle with the life of faith in the face of suffering. (shrink)

Heidegger accuses ontotheologies of reducing God to a mere object of intelligibility, and thereby falsifying them, and in doing so distracting attention from or forgetting the ground of Being as unconcealment in the Lichtung. Conventional theistic responses to Heidegger’s ontotheological challenges proceed by offering analogy, speech-act theorising or negative theology as solutions. Yet these conventional solutions, however suitable as responses to Heidegger’s Die ontotheologische Verfassung der Metaphysik version of the ontotheological problem, still fall foul of Heidegger’s more profound characterisation of (...) ontotheology in his treatise Seinsgeschichtliche Bestimmung des Nihilismus. Therein Heidegger characterises ontotheology as a metaphysics that posits a first-causal ground of Being combining together an essentia and an existentia. This article presents an alternative family of metaphysical schemes that instead develop their metaphysical ‘theology’ in a non-naive epistemological context, and indeed maintain that God cannot be cognised by us because we cannot reconcile the whatness and the that-ness of God in one coherent thought. God is thus unintelligible, and though able to be signified, cannot be reduced thereby to an object of cognition, and is not posited at the expense of considering the ground of Being as the encounter in Lichtung with Being. The two examples of such disrupted cognition accounts of a non-ontheological metaphysics are from the medieval Franciscan John Duns Scotus and the British Idealist Francis Herbert Bradley. The paper ends with a discussion of the characteristic ‘disrupted cognition’ as a movement between two concepts that are unreconcilable within thought, without being contradictories or contraries, and explores the differences between theological and philosophical employments of ‘disrupted cognition’. (shrink)

The difficulty to pin down the philosophical content of structuralism depends on the fact that it operates on an implicit metaphysics; such a metaphysics can be best unfolded by examining Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist critique of it. The essay argues that both structuralism and Derrida’s critique rely on holistic premises. From an initial externalist definition of structure, structuralism’s metaphysics emerges as a kind of ‘immanent’ holism, similar to the one pursued, in the contemporary analytic panorama, by Donald Davidson. By contrast, Derrida’s (...) deconstructionist critique appears engaged in a ‘quasi-transcendental’ version of holism, which the author analyzes in connection with Martin Heidegger’s notion of Verwindung, or twisted overcoming. (shrink)

I would like to attack a certain view: The view that the concept of identity can fail to apply to some things although, for some positive integer n, we have n of them. The idea of entities without self-identity is seriously entertained in the philosophy of quantum mechanics. It is so pervasive that it has been labelled the Received View. I introduce the Received View in Section 1. In Section 2 I explain what I mean by entity, and I argue (...) that supporters of the Received View should agree with my characterization of the corresponding notion of entity. I also explain what I mean by identity, and I show that supporters of the Received View agree with my characterization of that notion. In Section 3 I argue that the concept of identity, so characterized, is one with the concept of oneness. Thus, it cannot but apply to what belongs to a collection with n elements, n being a positive integer. In Section 4 I add some considerations on the primitiveness of identity or unity and the status of the Identity of Indiscernibles. In Section 5 I address the problem of how reference to indiscernible objects with identity can be achieved. (shrink)

In this article I discuss Kant's idea of cosmopolitanism both in its prescriptive dimension (its normative content and regulative aspirations) and also its descriptive basis (its crucial philosophical-anthropological assumptions constituting its theoretical justification). My aim is to show that the prescriptive dimension cannot be treated separately from the descriptive one for some difficulties that the latter confronts pervade the former and misinform it. I then proceed to an examination of those difficulties which I locate mainly in Kant's onto-theological commitment to (...) some anthropological tenets of his era. I explore the implications of these tenets and show that they contribute negatively to the task of the promotion of a cosmopolitanism that respects difference and heterogeneity. I conclude with some critical suggestions pro-pounding a renegotiation of the paradigmatic certainties of Kant's cosmopolitanism in order to salvage its normative import and couch it in less onto-theological terms. (shrink)

هدف از پژوهش حاضر مطالعۀ نحوۀ مواجهۀ هایدگر با سنت متافیزیکی است، تا به واسطۀ آن روشن گردد که این مواجهه اولاً در مسیر فکری هایدگر دچار چه دگرگونی‌هایی شد، و ثانیاً مواضع هایدگر در باب متافیزیک تا چه اندازه متأثر از الهیات مسیحی بوده است؟ بر این اساس، این پرسش را مبنا قرار دادیم که پروژۀ «تخریب هستی‌شناسانۀ تاریخ متافیزیک» در هایدگر متقدم و رویکرد «چیرگی بر متافیزیک» در هایدگر متاخر به چه نحو صورت پذیرفت، و دلایل گذار او (...) از رویکرد «تخریب متافیزیک» به رویکرد «چیرگی بر متافیزیک» چه بود؟ یافته‌های تحقیق نشان می‌دهد که از منظر هایدگر، نقد متافیزیک بستر ضروری راهیابی به حقیقت هستی است، چرا که متافیزیک، به واسطۀ ماهیت انتو-تئولوژیک‌اش زمینۀ انحراف تاریخی فلسفه و دور شدنش از تفکر اصیل را ایجاد کرد، که نتیجۀ آن را می‌توان در فروبستگی و به خفا رفتن هستی، بی خانمانی و عسرت بشر امروز و نیهیلیسم تکنولوژیک دوران معاصر مشاهده کرد. در عین حال، تعلق خاطر هایدگر به سنت الهیات ایمانی به او کمک کرد تا صورت‌بندی متمایز فلسفی‌اش در نقد و گذار از متافیزیک را با تکیه بر ادبیاتی همسو با کلام مقدس تقریر کند و از این طریق بکوشد تا با گذر از مرزهای محدودکنندۀ فلسفه‌های مرسوم، در راه یک اندیشۀ تماماً غیرمتافیزیکی گام بردارد. (shrink)

This article has two general aims. It first of all critically reconsiders the empirical turn’s dismissal of transcendentalism in the philosophy of technology, in particular through the work of Ihde and Verbeek, and defends the continuing relevance of the notion of the transcencental in thinking about technology today, illustrating this mainly through a reading of Stiegler’s understanding of the human condition as a technical condition and his view of human (noetic) evolution as proceeding from a process of technical exteriorization. The (...) crucial issue that is missed by postphenomenology and the empirical turn is that technology itself in its empiricity occupies the (periodically changing) place of the transcendental. It thus fails to consider the transcendental operativity of technical artifacts within its own empiricist stance. Secondly, it argues for the continuing importance and usefulness of the idea of Technology with a capital T, equally discarded by the representatives of the empirical turn, in particular against the emerging backdrop of the Anthropocene as the age of decisive anthropogenic forcing of the planet and the growing dominance of what has recently been called the technosphere in Earth system science. With Stiegler I show that a proper, inherent dynamic of technology must be acknowledged historically, anthropologically, techno-evolutionarily as well as (techno)phenomenologically. I conclude by demonstrating that our time of planetary crisis summons us to redirect our attention to technology from the empirical to the transcendental, and from the micro-level to the macro-level again. (shrink)

The paper discusses the possibility of applying Heidegger’s considerations on art to the problematic and multifaceted field of contemporary art. The questions of origin and essence, which we are accustomed to refer to the metaphysical tradition, take on new significance by connecting art not to beauty, but to truth. In this epochal change of position, we can find the identity of contemporary art, which reveals itself not by offering edifying meanings, but by indicating a horizon of comprehensibility in which we (...) are involved. Starting from the innovative status of the Dasein as a projecting being-in-the-world, the horizon of comprehensibility of contemporary art outlines a context in which there is no subjectivity using a work, but in which an encounter happens. In its intrinsic and sometimes complacent contradictoriness, contemporary art, especially installations and performances, always manifests its identity as a struggle between truth and untruth, as an event that has no steady ground, and no unique or ascertained origin or monolithic essence, and which is nevertheless expressive and meaningful. The quality of being an event implies that contemporary art is not something objectifiable, representable, or categorizable, but is something that happens. What happens cannot become a substantial foundation, because it remains perpetually a happening, which affects us with its different languages and perspectives. The poetic matrix of contemporary art indicates the uniqueness and unrepeatability of each work of art, which shows us how the un-originality and un-essentiality of art is the main pathway to arrive at an experience of the world that each time is like the first time. (shrink)

The analysis focuses on the centrality of the mind and the mental, and their relationship with the notion of discourse in International Relations theorizing. While many forms of discourse theory ar...

Contemporary philosophy of religion almost allergically reacts to metaphysics. They do so because of the various critiques of the potential reach of reason, which each in their own way argue that God cannot be appropriately approached via autonomous reason. In this article, I argue, on the one hand, that these critiques are furtively inspired by a certain outlook on transcendence, which I call the ‘Protestant view’ and, on the other hand, that numerous contemporary philosophers of religion are slowly starting to (...) appreciate a more ‘Catholic view’ on transcendence, which allows for a more metaphysically ambitious philosophy of religion. (shrink)