One of Heidegger’s enduring concerns was to develop an original meditation on the meaning of the present. Integral to this attempt is his critique of the understanding of the bein...

The narrative of Plato’s cave story is loaded with ‘some of the most suggestive opposites in the repertoire, namely the contrasts between down and up, darkness and light, chains and freedom’ (Hrach...

In his Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Paul Crowther argued that art and aesthetic experiences have the capacity to humanize. In Art and Embodiment he develops this theme in much greater depth, arguing that art can bridge the gap between philosophy's traditional striving for generality and completeness, and the concreteness and contingency of humanity's basic relation to the world. As the key element in his theory, he proposes an ecological definition of art. His strategy involves first mapping out and analyzing the (...) logical boundaries and ontological structures of the aesthetic domain. He then considers key concepts from this analysis in the light of a tradition in Continental philosophy (notably the work of Kant, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Hegel) which--by virtue of the philosophical significance that it assigns to art--significantly anticipates the ecological conception. On this basis, Crowther is able to give a full formulation of his ecological definition. Art, in making sensible or imaginative material into symbolic form, harmonizes and conserves what is unique and what is general in human experience. The aesthetic domain answers basic needs intrinsic to self-consciousness itself, and art is the highest realization of such needs. In the creation and reception of art the embodied subject is fully at home with his or her environment. (shrink)

Many work on flushing out what our consciousness means in cognitive and phenomenological terms, but no one has yet connected the dots on how consciousness and truth intersect, much less how our phenomenal consciousness can form the ground for most of our models of truth. Here, I connect those dots and argue that the basic structure of our phenomenal consciousness grounds the nature of truth as concordance, to harmonize in agreement, and that most extant theories on truth are well explained (...) in that grounding. Said another way, the unifying and bifurcating intentional structure of phenomenal consciousness is the non-epistemic ground of truth, such that most theories of truth can be explained as particular expressions of concordance based upon the differing aspects of that ground. (shrink)

This paper examines medicine’s use of technology in a manner from a standpoint inspired by Heidegger’s thinking on technology. In the first part of the paper, I shall suggest an interpretation of Heidegger’s thinking on the topic, and attempt to show why he associates modern technology with danger. However, I shall also claim that there is little evidence that medicine’s appropriation of modern technology is dangerous in Heidegger’s sense, although there is no prima facie reason why it mightn’t be. The (...) explanation for this, I claim, is ethical. There is an initial attraction to the thought that Heidegger’s thought echoes Kantian moral thinking, but I shall dismiss this. Instead, I shall suggest that the considerations that make modern technology dangerous for Heidegger are simply not in the character — the ethos — of medicine properly understood. This is because there is a distinction to be drawn between chronological and historical modernity, and that even up-to-date medicine, empowered by technology, retains in its ethos crucial aspects of a historically pre-modern understanding of technology. A large part of the latter half of the paper will be concerned with explaining the difference. (shrink)

Antisemitism is fun. This essay explains why and proposes a new approach to combating it.

This article reflects on the received view of the rupture which constitutes the beginning of a critical, ethical, political and legal opening, the understanding of which inhabits the cry of, and response to, injustice. It takes the very critique that feeds into, and is distorted by, practical reasoning, as its point of departure. Grasping this rupture as the complementary relation between deconstruction and radical alterity, would entail unreflectively accepting a certain kind of truthfulness—truthfulness as [in]correctness, manifesting in a relationship that (...) involves rootless and controlling movement of making and unmaking of world. In closely reading Wittgenstein and Heidegger on the level of seeing, showing and saying, truthfulness is shown to contain an essential tension between, on the one hand, the Socratic, metaphysically-bound notion of beingness, correctness and meaning-steering and, on the other hand, the pre-Socratic notion of unconcealment (a-lethia), which, pointing even earlier than pre-Socratics into aboriginality, involves attentive letting of gliding in the inexpressible saying of language. While steering is about generating new possibilities of expressibility, gliding is about poetic dwelling, or enduring inexpressibility as a constitutive part of saying. Although aletheia is taken to be the key influence on rootless post-foundational thinking, it is argued that unconcealment involves letting and enduring the presencing inexpressibility of place and home-coming, that is, worlding-rootedness; thus showing Heidegger’s originary politics as the district of the uncanny to be about worlding that attentively lets the presencing inexpressibility of earth be as place. In reading Heidegger’s views on humanism, beginning and language, the argument links inexpressibility—essentially and historically—to the grasping of the belongingness together of world, earth and place, viewing this belongingness as key to both the saying of art and of mortals dwelling together temporally, spatially, materially in a manner always strange to, and nearer than, the steering/controlling of beingness, time, space and place that the very gesture and emergence of critique is captive of and is not capable of attuning to and capturing. Art always estranges the metaphysical cycle of correctness which preserves pain and suffering—a cycle that inhabits a double bind of responding to violence and injustice generated by the violence of metaphysics with metaphysical violence and justice. In showing essential strife within truthfulness itself, Heidegger points to even greater and earlier problematic than the pre-Socratics—to the painful core of inexpressibility between the ontology of steering time, spaces and material—steering places—and the gliding temporality, spatiality and materiality of ontology of place. (shrink)

This article is an appreciative essay review of Andrew Feenberg's Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (2005).

Ernst Tugendhat’s critique of Martin Heidegger’s conception of truth is an ongoing topic in Heideggerian scholarship. In this paper, I contribute to the ongoing exchange between defenders of Heidegger and those who are in agreement with Tugendhat. Specifically, I contend that Tugendhat’s criticisms fail to situate Heidegger’s account of truth within his broader phenomenological–hermeneutic project. In the end, Tugendhat’s critique is grounded upon philosophical assumptions that Heidegger is bringing under question by rethinking the concept of truth. I suggest that thinking (...) through Tugendhat’s critique and attempting to formulate an adequate Heideggerian response gives us a richer understanding of both Heidegger’s account of truth and his general philosophical project. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to reveal the anthropologization of Dasein-psyche’s being by methods of neurophilosophy. The anthropologization of Dasein-psyche’s being by methods of neurophilosophy allows considering the noogenesis from the perspective of philosophical traditions, which is much richer in comparison with the history of scientific knowledge about the psychology of meanings. The being of Dasein-psyche in the meaning of "philosopher’s soul" was firstly mentioned by Plato in "Phaedo". The anthropologization of Dasein-psyche’s being reveals the ontological orientation and limits (...) of the being of Dasein-psyche within the being of Dasein-the-One, as well as the intellect, knowledge and techne, as the arete existentials. Theoretical basis of the study is built on Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and methods of neurophilosophy. Originality lies in exploring Dasein-psyche through the neurophilosophical approach. In the context, Dasein-psyche is revealed as a part of the whole or the image, created from Dasein-Y-Matter as a paradigm. It is formed by the factors and causes of complication, as well as by the experience of being of the previous states of matter. Conclusions. In conclusion, the anthropologization of Dasein-psyche’s being by methods of neurophilosophy allows considering the noogenesis from the perspective of philosophical traditions. The essence of a person is revealed as the arete existentials, which require further rethinking and clarification. (shrink)

In Différence et répétition, Deleuze's ontology is structured by his theory of dialectical Ideas or problems, which draws features from Plato, Kant, and classical calculus. Deleuze unifies these features through a theory of Ideas/problems developed by the mathematician and philosopher Albert Lautman. Lautman worked to explain the nature of the problems or dialectical Ideas mathematics engages and the solutions or mathematical theories endeavouring to understand them. Lautman drew upon Heidegger to do this. This article clarifies Deleuze's theory of dialectical Ideas/problems (...) by analysing its debts to Lautman and Heidegger and demonstrates a Heideggerian influence on Deleuze via Lautman. (shrink)

The paper will study an unpublished 1930–31 seminar where Heidegger reads Plato’s Parmenides, showing that in spite of his much-criticized habit of dismissing Plato as the progenitor of “idealist” metaphysics, Heidegger was quite aware of the radical potential of his later dialogues. Through a temporal account of the notion of oneness (to hen), the Parmenides attempts to reconcile the plurality of beings with the unity of Being. In Heidegger’s reading, the dialogue culminates in the notion of the “instant” (to exaiphnēs, (...) Augenblick)—a high point in the entire metaphysical tradition—where the temporal plurality of presence and un-presence converges into a unified disclosure. (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)

Leading scholars address the ethical and practical dimensions of Heidegger's thought.

A critical and creative reconstruction of Adorno's conception of truth that shows its relevance for comtemporary philosophy, art, and politics.

The first full exploration of the political thought of Jan Patocka, student of Husserl and Heidegger and mentor to Václav Havel.

_Philosophers consider race and racism from the perspective of lived, bodily experience._.

Exploring the intimate tie between body movement and space and time, Lee begins with the position that body movement generates space and time and explores the ethical implications of this responsibility for the situations one’s body movements generate. Whiteness theory has come to recognize the ethical responsibility for situations not of one’s own making and hence accountability for the results of more than one’s immediate personal conscious decisions. Because of our specific history, whites have developed a particular embodiment and body (...) movement that generates places that can only be characterized as more comfortable and more enabling to whites. (shrink)

The article « La Défenestration » by Belgian philosopher Marc Richir has been translated into Russian for the first time for this issue of the “Horizon. Studies in Phenomenology.” In his early work “The Defenestration” Richir raises the question of relation between the subject and conceivable world. Here, a philosopher is pictured contemplating the world through the window of his tower. In such detachment from the world the thinker finds himself according to all Modern philosophies of consciousness. Husserl’s phenomenology inherits (...) this detachment, since Husserl imposes the structure of transcendental ego as external to the world. Richir abolishes the concept of transcendental ego with the help of heideggerian Dasein, but analyzing Heidegger’s ontology he comes to the conclusion that the latter remains fixated on beings. Believing a person to live in the fundamental openness of Being, Heidegger places such a person in the secondary world of “truth.” In order to overcome the remains of traditional philosophy in Heidegger’s ontology Richir turns to Merleau-Ponty’ “cosmology of the visible.” The author takes the Merleau-Ponty’s thesis that everything visible has something fundamentally invisible in it. This allows him to discover the universe of “nothing”, which includes both the visible and what is “behind” it. As a result Richir overcomes the classical dualism of the sensual and the intelligible. The concept of defenestration places the subject and the world in the same universe. (shrink)

This paper offers a twofold ontological conceptualization of technology in the Anthropocene. On the one hand, we aim to show how the Anthropocene occasions an experience of our inescapable inclusion in the technological structuring of reality that Martin Heidegger associates with cybernetics. On the other hand, by confronting Heidegger’s thought on technology with Georges Bataille’s consideration of technological existence as economic and averted existence, we will criticize Heidegger’s account by arguing that notwithstanding its inescapable inclusion in cybernetics, technology in the (...) Anthropocene itself fosters an experience of what remains excluded. We conclude by indicating how such an experience is relevant for contemporary philosophical investigation of technology. (shrink)

Today it is said that we live in a condition of post-truth. In this essay, I will query this claim. In doing so, I do not intend to argue the contrary position, and neither will I attempt to offer some hope for a “return” to truth. Rather, my query will begin with an exploration of the assumptions behind the claim of post-truth and then consider an alternative notion of truth offered by Martin Heidegger and put into practice by Vaclav Havel. (...) Next, I consider how this Heideggerian/Havelian notion of truth is perhaps better thought in terms of thinking as articulated by Hannah Arendt, and a conception of ethics that runs close to Arendt’s thinking on thinking. Finally, the essay ends with the consideration that in the increasingly complex worlds of global and informational interconnectedness, perhaps what is most needed is not truth but thinking. That is, thinking that gives way to a sense of the world. (shrink)

This article proposes a philosophical reception of writer Cormac McCarthy’s work, a reception oriented specifically toward the subject of “place” as a primary ontological register in two of his novels. More than a mere appraisal of his descriptive prose or the moral weight of his themes, this reading examines the interrogative dimension of his border-country landscapes and the existential horizon distilled therein. Read with reference to the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that McCarthy’s storied concentration on (...) place seeks to retrieve the question of primordial givenness from beneath the determinations of epistemic and objectivist judgments. So doing, his orientation parallels and contributes to an important and unsettled tension in phenomenological ontology and its aftermath: the question as to whether poetic or visual modes of ontological “measure-taking” are more appropriate to the question of the meaning, truth, and history of being. Ultimately McCarthy shows us the necessary and productive interplay of both. (shrink)

The notion of the heart is one of the most basic notions in ordinary language. It is central to Heidegger’s notion of thought that he relates to the primordial word Gedanc as underlying attunement that issues forth in emotional phenomena. He plays with all the etymological cognates of that word to zero in on the phenomena involved. The key experience of Erstaunen that grounds the first beginning of philosophy is paralleled by Erschrecken that grounds Heidegger’s “second beginning” and plays counterpoint (...) with the first. Along with Befindlichkeit as one’s basic attunement, these are key phenomena that belong to the heart, not to ‘intellect’ or ‘will.’ Thinking in terms of the intellect is das rechnende Denken¸ thinking in terms of the heart, besinnliche Nachdenken. It is the latter that provides the “poetic-intellectual” experience for both the arts and philosophy in which such “world space” is created that even the ordinary appears extraordinary. (shrink)

This paper argues for an interpretation of what Heidegger means by 'angst' in Being and Time that begins from the methodological role angst is supposed to play in Division I as that which disrupts falling. It argues that angst is a distinctive kind of ontological insight.

Sophocles' Antigone is the only individual whom Heidegger names as authentic. But the usual interpretations of Heidegger's ‘authenticity’ either do not apply to Antigone or do not capture what Heidegger finds significant about her. By working through these failures, I develop an interpretation of Heideggerian authenticity that is adequate to his Antigone. The crucial step is accurately identifying the finitude to which Antigone authentically relates: what Heidegger calls ‘uncanniness'. I argue that uncanniness names being's presencing through self-withdrawal and that Antigone (...) stands authentically towards this in her responsiveness to the call of being and her reticence at the end of explanation. In conclusion, I consider Sophocles' own creative act, which bequeathed to the West an understanding of being and a vision of how to relate to it authentically. I argue that Sophocles' status as a world-historical creator does not provide a competing picture of authenticity but must itself be understood as responsive and reticent. (shrink)

This paper traces the (de)formative force of Heidegger's thought on Blanchot's writing. In the paper, I attempt to show how the question of nihilism and the question of truth in the work of Heidegger impose on Blanchot what he calls the exigency of the fragment. This exigency arises more specifically from an affinity and attunement in Blanchot's work to Heidegger's sense of Aus-setzen, on the one hand, and a resistance in Blanchot's work to Heidegger's sense of Ent-wurf, on the other. (...) Fragmentation responds to the risk of ex-posure in a way that withdraws the horizon against which something like Entwurf might be "measured." This response can be characterized as a renewed atentiveness to the relation of errancy and withdrawal. (shrink)

In this article, I establish first the critical role of conscience in Heidegger's Being and Time . As the call of care, conscience attests to the authenticity of Da-sein as it discloses and "accomplishes" Da-sein as the being it is delivered over to be. Heidegger's interpretation of conscience also epitomizes the central aporias of Being and Time , which, with a view to revoking the Western metaphysical tradition, ultimately recalls it. At the heart of such aporias is the hermeneutic circle (...) in the attestation of conscience, whose voice only "reaches him who wants to be brought back." While the language of conscience and attestation was put away in Heidegger's later writings, I argue that the question concerning conscience is a leading question that will continue to guide us to build our way back and forth. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger and Immanuel Kant - two important pillars of contemporary philosophy-were proficient critics of traditional metaphysics in their time. They were known to be critical of a sort of metaphysical striving predisposed to grounding or representing an elusive concept of the universal.. Kant had earlier deconstructed a pre-eminent feature of Western metaphysics, namely, the socalled essence of thing, had it consigned to the noumenon evocative of the paradoxical nature of human knowing: it regulates the boundaries according to which any (...) notion of the infinite, the universal or the absolute can be reflexively thematized, or, thus strategically said, problematized. (shrink)

Philosophy of religion, in both its analytic and Continental streams, has been undergoing a renewal for some time now, and I seek to explore this transformation in the fortunes of the discipline by looking at how truth – and religious truth in particular – is conceptualised in both strands of philosophy. I begin with an overview of the way in which truth has been commonly understood across nearly all groups within the analytic tradition, and I will underscore the difficulties and (...) shortcomings of the analytic approach by comparing it with a Continental, and specifically Heideggerian, approach. I then proceed to a conception of truth that is even further removed from the analytic tradition, one that is prominent in the theology of Christianity and which identifies truth with Christ. The point of this detour through divergent understandings of truth is to show how philosophy of religion, whether analytic or Continental, remains entrenched in forms of thinking that will need to be overcome if it is to have a credible future. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a passage from the addendum to “The Origin of the Work of Art” often ignored in the secondary literature, Heidegger expands on how art institutes the unconcealment of the truth of Being with reference to the ontological difference—the difference between Being and beings which cannot rely on the comparison of predicates for clarification. The relationship between art and the ontological difference is not immediately obvious and lacks further explication in Heidegger’s other texts. This paper argues that there are (...) two fundamental elements to the ontological difference that Heidegger focuses on that can be used to elucidate art as a strife of world and earth: “the Nothing” [das Nichts] outlined in “What is Metaphysics?” (1929) and world-projection described in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929–30). Understanding these two elements of the ontological difference (world-projection and the Nothing) as present together in the event of unconcealment (aletheia) thereby clarifies for the notorious concepts of earth, world, strife, and rift (Riß) that characterize the work of art. Recourse to the ontological difference as an explanatory mechanism for conceptualising Heidegger’s philosophy of art is a useful way of avoiding common issues in the prevailing literature that will be laid out below. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper presents detailed methods for constructing a flexible philosophical–analytical model through which to apply the analytic principles of CDA for the interpretation of metaphors across policy texts. Drawing on a theoretical framing from Foucault and the augmentation of Nietzsche’s views on valuation, we sketch a framework for examining ways in which evaluative semantic categories can be linked to sociological theories in order to bring out their relevance for the purpose of critical discourse analysis. This multi-level research framework draws upon (...) a relationship between language analysis, the philosophical study of valuation, and political economy as a composite formulation of values through which neo-liberalism is discursively entwined and progressed through a system of principles of e/valuation. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the academic debate on the general crisis faced by law schools and the legal professions by discussing why juristic practice is a matter of experience rather than knowledge. Through a critical contextualisation of Vilhelm Lundstedt’s thought under processes of globalisation and transnationalism, it is argued that the demise of the jurist’s function is related to law’s scientification as brought about by the metaphysical construction of reality. The suggested roadmap will in turn reveal that the (...) current voiding of juristic practice and its teaching is part of the crisis regarding what makes us human. (shrink)

Science teaching always engages a philosophy of science. This article introduces a modern philosophy of science and indicates its implications for science education. The hermeneutic philosophy of science is the tradition of Kant, Heidegger, and Heelan. Essential to this tradition are two concepts of truth, truth as correspondence and truth as disclosure. It is these concepts that enable access to science in and of itself. Modern science forces aspects of reality to reveal themselves to human beings in events of disclosure. (...) The achievement of each event of disclosure requires the precise manipulation of equipment, which is an activity that depends on truth as correspondence. The implications of the hermeneutic philosophy of science for science education are profound. The article refers to Newton’s early work on optics to explore what the theory implies for teaching. Modern science—as the event of truth—is a relationship between an individual student, equipment, and reality. Science teachers provide for their students’ access to truth and they may show how their discipline holds a special relationship to reality. If the aim of science teaching is to enable students to disclose reality, the science curriculum will challenge some of the current practices of schooling. If teachers base science teaching upon the hermeneutic philosophy of science, science will assert itself as the intellectual discipline that derives from nature, and not from the inclinations of human beings. Science teachers teach nature’s own science. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper looks at the state of the literature surrounding Heidegger and Nazism today. Part 1 focusses on Hassan Givsan’s remarkable work, Une histoire consternante: pourquoi les philosophes se laissent corrompre par le “cas Heidegger”, which looks at the different, mutually inconsistent forms of “apologetics” denying that Heidegger had been a Nazi, or that this commitment could have been shaped by his philosophy. Part 2 looks at five themes that emerge from the 2014 French-language collection Heidegger, le sol, la communauté, (...) la race, edited by Emmanuel Faye: Heidegger’s anti-semitism, before and in the Black Notebooks; Sein und Zeit and “the political”; Heidegger and his estate’s post-war “rewriting” of his Nazi-era texts; Heidegger’s esotericism; and his intellectual proximities to other Nazi thinkers. Closing reflections touch on the state of the debate, calling for increased scholarly awareness of the evidence, and debate of its significance. (shrink)

This paper develops a new interpretation of Heidegger's concept of conscience in order to show to what extent his thought establishes the possibility of civil disobedience. The origin of conscience lies in the self's appropriation of language as inviting a reciprocal response of the other (person). By developing the social dimension of dialogue, it is showsn that conscience reveals the self in its capacity for dissent, free speech, and civil disobedience. By developing the social roots of conscience, a completely new (...) light is cast on the political implications of Heidegger's thought. (shrink)

Distance is central to both Heidegger’s depiction of being-in-the-world and Derrida’s theorization of the culture of friendship. It is equally fundamental to the structure of language and, I argue, to the concept of the foreign. This essay brings together these theories of distance and demonstrates the ways they act on and through each other, the role that linguistic distance plays in constructing both foreigners and friends, and the permeable semantic boundaries that the concept of distance shares with movement, strangeness, instability, (...) and indefiniteness. It further contends that this semantic seepage has proven threatening to certain species of philosophy and politics and prompted disciplinary efforts – to eradicate distance, regulate foreigners, immobilize meaning, and stabilize friendship – that are remarkably structurally similar and sometimes mutually supportive, but that both Heidegger and Derrida, by contrast, undertake a significant revaluation of distance and the foreignness and indeterminacy associated with it. (shrink)

German philosopher Martin Heidegger stirred educators when in 1951 he claimed teaching is more difficult than learning because teachers must ‘learn to let learn’. However in the main he left the aphorism unexplained as part of a brief four-paragraph, less than two-page set of observations concerning the relationship of teaching to learning; and concluded at the end of those observations that to become a teacher is an ‘exalted matter’. This paper investigates both of Heidegger's claims, interpreting letting learn in the (...) context of Heidegger's larger philosophical project, and suggesting why in light of that project to become a teacher is an exalted concern. The methodology guiding the inquiry is largely hermeneutic, the purpose of the essay to interpret teaching from a Heideggerian perspective: its nature and general method. (shrink)

Josef Pieper’s critique of Martin Heidegger’s Wahrheitsbegriff has been virtually ignored in both Pieper and Heidegger scholarship; however, Pieper’s critique of Heidegger is both lethal and affirmative. On the one hand, Pieper makes a strong case against Heidegger’s Wahrheitsbegriff in “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit” and yet on the other he affirms his thesis that “the essence of truth is freedom.” This paper attempts to mend this gap in the literature by first presenting Heidegger’s “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” the essay in (...) which Heidegger explicates his concept of truth. Second, I exegete the critique of Josef Pieper found in his “Heideggers Wahrheitsbegriff.” Third, I conclude the paper by contextualizing Pieper’s critique within Pieper’s Werke, and make a note of the philosophical insights derivative from Pieper’s less than simple relationship to Heidegger. (shrink)

Attempts to resolve the question of Foucault's relationship to Heidegger usually look for points of substantive correlation between them: the coincidence of being and power, the meaning of truth, technology, ethics, and so on. Taking seriously Foucault's claim in his final interview that he uses Heidegger as an 'instrument of thought', this paper looks for a correlation in practice. The argument focuses on a structural isomorphism between Heidegger's concept of the fourfold event (Ereignis) of being and later Foucault's critique of (...) 'problematization' (problématique). This isomorphism, I argue, indicates a covert philosophical confrontation between Foucault and Heidegger, which was determinative for Foucault in the period of the turn to ethics (1976-84). This is a confrontation over the meaning of the 'event of thought'. Such an interpretation not only permits a literal reading of Foucault's comments regarding Heidegger in his final interview, but also casts the developments in Foucault's later work in a fascinating new light. Foucault's critique of problematization, on this view, is founded in an historicized version of Heideggerian 'other' thinking, and pivots on a ontologically tempered enactment of the Heideggerian turn (Kehre). (shrink)

In this article, the importance of the namelessness of language will be firstly explained through an analysis of authenticity in Heideggerian philosophy, and will be further clarified by way of the phenomenon of “profound boredom” from his Freiburg lecture. As the exploration of namelessness in Heideggerian philosophy plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between East and West, a brief comparison concerning the idea of namelessness and its underlying philosophy of language between the Heideggerian and the madhyamaka Buddhist tradition (...) will also be discussed. (shrink)

Paul Celan was undoubtedly the greatest post-World War II German-writing poet, and Anselm Kiefer one of the greatest living German artists. These two giants can be seen to meet through a series of artworks that Kiefer dedicates to the depiction of Celan’s Todesfugue. Bringing together the verbal and the visual, the color of gold symbolizes life, while ashes symbolize exile and death. In a melancholic gesture of thought, Germany claims ownership of the gold and by extension over Origin. In this (...) way, the Jews are reduced to ashes. Behind this traumatic encounter between gold and ashes, that appears in both Celan’s and Kiefer’s work, there looms a no less traumatic encounter between fire and spirit: the German soul is metaphorically identified with the inflaming and illuminating element of fire, while the Jewish soul is aligned with the element of spirit, or ether. The values of gold and ashes on the one hand, and of fire and spirit on the other, are intrinsically connected; and following Heidegger and Derrida, it can be said that the identification of the German soul with fire is precisely what gives it the claim of sovereignty over gold, and ultimately over Origin. This is also the source of Germany’s philosophical justification for expelling the Jews to exile and death. The Judeo-German differend, with all its horrific violence, so this article argues, is locked within this quadrangle chest of gold, ashes, fire and spirit. (shrink)