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. ...

Prior to having its authenticity and transparency examined the openness of human existence may be said to need preservation as is, regardless of its receptivity and responsiveness to the truth of Being. Paradoxically, in self-sacrifice the fulfilment of Dasein’s ownmost potentiality-for-being is dependent upon a most radical disowning of itself. This investigation approaches self-sacrifice on the basis of its analogy with the creation of the work of art – as the peculiar fixation of the existing, already disclosed world of everydayness (...) within Dasein’s final absence. Finally, the suggestion is made that the incommensurable greatness of the heroic self-sacrifice needs to be itself preserved from the degradation brought about by massive and compulsive reproduction. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 8, Edition 1 May 2008. (shrink)

This paper deals with Meillassoux’s conception of a speculative realism, especially as he develops it in his book After Finitude. The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the argument that leads Meillassoux to deduce a,principle of factuality‘. This only absolute, the necessity of contingency, constitutes the basis of a radical realism, which does not revert to philosophy before Kant’s Critique, but overcomes the correlationism of modernity. In the second part of the paper I propose to examine the relations between (...) Meillassoux and Heidegger on the one hand and Meillassoux and Schelling on the other. It seems that Heidegger stands up to Meillassoux’s criticism of correlationism, when he says correlationism always remains within the correlation. I try to show that Heidegger recognizes a dimension that eludes correlative thought, but he claims that the highest task of thought is precisely to try to think this un-thinkable: that is why thought must take other forms than the correlative one. Finally, I compare the,principle of factuality‘ with Schelling’s, unprethinkable Being‘, emphasizing that such a necessity of contingency constitutes precisely non-freedom for Schelling and therefore it cannot be considered as the absolute. Schelling distinguishes this necessity of contingency from the only absolute, namely God’s freedom as,freedom to be or not to be‘. This means a freedom from the necessity of contingency, a freedom above factuality and above Being. (shrink)

If the opposition between “action and contemplation” seems characteristic of the history of philosophy, it also sums up Hannah Arendt’s personal history and philosophy – the diagnosis of the theoretician of the political practice on her contemporaries being eloquent. But the author of the Human condition invites us to reverse the conjunction. Arendt breaks up deliberately with philosophical tradition and particularly with Thomas Aquinas by making these terms exclusive and choosing to think either action or contemplation. We would like thus (...) to reflect on the relationship between these two thinkers by examining potential echoes of Summa Theologiae within Arendt’s 1958 essay. (shrink)