Recent advances in neuroscience lead to a wider realm for philosophy to include the science of the Darwinian-evolved computational brain, our inner world producing organ, a non-recursive super- Turing machine combining 100B synapsing-neuron DNA-computers based on the genetic code. The whole system is a logos machine offering a world map for global context, essential for our intentional grasp of opportunities. We start from the observable contrast between the chaotic universe vs. our orderly inner world, the noumenal cosmos. So far, philosophy (...) has been rehearsing our thoughts, our human-internal world, a grand painting of the outer world, how we comprehend subjectively our experience, worked up by the logos machine, but now we seek a wider horizon, how humans understand the world thanks to Darwinian evolution to adapt in response to the metaphysical gap, the chasm between the human animal and its environment, shaping the organism so it can deal with its variable world. This new horizon embraces global context coded in neural structures that support the noumenal cosmos, our inner mental world, for us as denizens of the outer environment. Kant’s inner and outer senses are fundamental ingredients of scientific philosophy. Several sections devoted to Heidegger, his lizard debunked, but his version of the metaphysical gap & his doctrine of the logos praised. Rorty and others of the behaviorist school discussed also. (shrink)

This special issue of Science and Engineering Ethics is devoted to the ethical, societal and political implications of new and emerging technologies in the area of Human Security. Its aim is to address the wider implications of an altered security landscape. Specifically, and in accordance with SEE’s main area of interest, contributions to this special issue focus on those ethical considerations warranted by scientific and technological advances in the field of human security. This includes, but is not restricted to, issues (...) of privacy and data protection, control, trust, surveillance, authority, and freedom. Papers consider some of the ethical and societal challenges related to new and emerging technologies in the context of the Human Security Doctrine (HSD), as it has been initially formulated by the United Nations Commission on Human Security (UNCHS 2003). The HSD argues for a paradigm shift from understanding security based on tangible assets (e.g., national borders, goo .. (shrink)

On the basis of a close reading of three authors , I try to elucidate what the growing presence of digital technologies in our lives implies for the sphere of schooling and education. Developing a technocentric perspective, I discuss whether what is happening today concerns just the newest form of humankind's fundamental dependency on a technological milieu or that it concerns a fundamental shift. From Flusser, I take the idea that the practice of writing shapes human subjectivity, as well as (...) our very sense of history and progress, and that with the advent of digital technologies the possibility of a posthistorical era is granted. I confront this idea with Stiegler's analysis of technological tools and practices as strongly materialized memories, which amounts to a plea for securing the link with the particular history behind the technologies we use. Here, education should play a conservative role and take responsibility for using technologies in a correct way. I argue that Stiegler is not wholly consistent on this point and, moreover, that his view precludes the possibility to rethink the very meaning of education under present conditions. This possibility is opened if we turn to a philosopher which is ruthlessly criticized by Stiegler for being a technophobe: Agamben. I argue, however, that a more detailed reading of Agamben—n combination with Flusser—might show a completely different and far more positive appreciation for digital technology and that this view offers an opening for rethinking what education is all about. (shrink)

Event of Signature formulates a new philosophical problem which focuses on the handwritten signature as sign of legal identification. Author Michaela Fišerová works with three metaphysical expectations, which are shared in discourses of graphology and forensic analysis. The first expectation tends to reveal the signer's soul: a handwritten signature "naturally" mirrors the unique psychological qualities of the signer. The second expectation tends to guarantee the originality of the signer's trace: a handwritten signature proves physical contact between the signed document and (...) the writing tool "authentically" moved by the signer's hand. The third expectation tends to recognize the signer's legal identity: a handwritten signature is expected to reproduce the signer's personal style, which enables identification by legal authorities. In a methodologically inventive and semiotically-based dialogue with Derrida's deconstruction, Fišerová situates this triple expectation in the interval between life and law. Challenging coverage of this topic finally shows that none of the metaphysical expectations will ever be fulfilled in the event of manual signing. Legal uses of handwritten signature are characterized by the complex aporia of repeating the unrepeatable. (shrink)

This essay poses and responds uniquely to the following crucial questions: Does Rilke’s poetry poetize the event of Being for Dasein? Does Rilke indicate that the human being can yet achieve such a mode of “historical” existence in relation to the Earth or the holy? Heidegger responds to the first query in the affirmative; Rilke does poetize this event, albeit through a “tempered” and somewhat traditional view of Western metaphysics. To the second query, it appears that Heidegger responds in a (...) slightly cryptic and ambiguous manner, and to clarify this response, I turn to Heidegger’s interpretation of Rilke’s “Angel” as a prophetic “metaphysical” figure of futural hope. (shrink)

Amongst the Arendtian scholars, there is almost a consensus on Arendt’s supposedly reluctance to the question of the body. The Arendtian body is said to belong to the unpolitical realm of necessity, in other words, the body is a private matter that should not appear in public. It is antipolitical. However, in this paper, I want to suggest that there is a possibility to outline a phenomenology of embodied political action in what I think to be Arendt’s hidden phenomenology of (...) the body. To make my point, I will first show that what the scholars call the Arendtian body is in fact an Arendtian Body. Secondly, in the German version of The Human Condition, Arendt surprisingly used the Heideggerian term Befindlichkeit that, I will argue, outline the basis of a political phenomenology of the body in Arendt’s work. More precisely, I will try to show that political action is embodied, that there is a hexis, a pathos and an ethos of action. (shrink)

The so-called transhumanist project is anthropotechnic and aims at the enhancement of human physical and cognitive capabilities through the employment of new technologies. Nevertheless, when viewed through the lens of Heidegger’s philosophy, the project appears to confirm his own view on modern technology. According to Heidegger, the essence of modern technology is to serve as an ontological framework in which beings are unconcealed as a totality of resources or stock items. Thus, the first part of this paper examines Heidegger’s approach (...) to technology in order to cast light upon the deep danger of dehumanization entailed by transhumanism. In the second section, however, the ability of Heidegger’s thought to cope with the transhumanist danger is put into question, since it fails to conceive of the essential living character of human being. (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)

REVIEW (1): "Jeff Kochan’s book offers both an original reading of Martin Heidegger’s early writings on science and a powerful defense of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) research program. Science as Social Existence weaves together a compelling argument for the thesis that SSK and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology should be thought of as mutually supporting research programs." (Julian Kiverstein, in Isis) ---- REVIEW (2): "I cannot in the space of this review do justice to the richness and range of Kochan's (...) discussion [...]. There is a great deal in this foundational portion of Kochan's discussion that I find tremendously interesting and engaging [...]." (David R. Cerbone, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science) ---- REVIEW (3): "Science as Social Existence will be of interest not only to Heidegger scholars but to anyone engaged in science and technology studies. [...] This is an informative and original book. Kochan should be praised for his clear, pleasant-to-read prose." (Michael Butler, in CHOICE). (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 1, pp 60 - 84 This article takes up Heidegger’s commentary on Rimbaud’s _Lettres du voyant_ as the starting point for an exploration of the question of rhythm in Heidegger’s thought, and an attempt to situate it within his understanding of technics and Being. Besides pursuing a historical study of the concept of rhythm in Heidegger’s work, this article proposes to understand rhythm through the concept of individuation. It responds to the French philosopher Jacques Garelli’s (...) critique of Heidegger that the latter ignores the question of individuation and always starts with beings that are already individuated. On the contrary, this article attempts to sketch a theory of individuation of rhythm in Heidegger’s proper thinking through a re-interpretation of the _Fug_—a word he used to translate the Greek word δίκη and words derived from it: joint, structure, submission, etc. (shrink)

Resonances between Heidegger's philosophy and Eastern religious traditions have been widely discussed by scholars. The significance of Heidegger's thinking for education has also become increasingly clear over recent years. In this article I argue that an important aspect of Heidegger's work, the relevance of which to education is relatively undeveloped, relates to his desire to overcome Western metaphysics, a project that invites an exploration of his connections with Eastern thought. I argue that Heidegger's desire to deconstruct the West implies the (...) deconstruction of conventional views of learning because both aim to undercut the representational nature of thinking in order to recover thinking as a form of contemplation. Consequently, education should not be conceived as the acquisition of a more or less correct mental picture, but suggests the opposite: the relinquishing of all images in a contemplative aporia. (shrink)

A central question in philosophical and sociological accounts of technology is how the agency of technologies should be conceived, that is, how to understand their constitutive roles in the actions performed by assemblages of humans and artifacts. To address this question, I build on the suggestion that a helpful perspective can be gained by amalgamating “actor-network theory” and “postphenomenological” accounts. The idea is that only a combined account can confront both the nuances of human experiential relationships with technology on which (...) postphenomenology specializes, and also the chains of interactions between numerous technologies and humans that actor-network theory can address. To perform this amalgamation, however, several technical adjustments to these theories are required. The central change I develop here is to the postphenomenological notion of “multistability,” i.e., the claim that a technology can be used for multiple purposes through different contexts. I expand the postphenomenological framework through the development of a method called “variational cross-examination,” which involves critically contrasting the various stabilities of a multistable technology for the purpose of exploring how a particular stability has come to dominate. As a guiding example, I explore the case of the everyday public bench. The agency of this “mundane artifact,” as actor-network theorist Bruno Latour would call it, cannot be accounted for by either postphenomenology or actor-network theory alone. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger was not only one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century but also a supporter of and a contributor to one of the most discriminatory ideologies of the recent past. Thus, "the Heidegger's case" gives us philosophers an opportunity to work on discrimination from a philosophical perspective. My aim in this essay is to question the relationship between freedom and discrimination via Heidegger's philosophy. I will show that what bridges the gap between Heidegger's philosophy and a discriminatory (...) ideology such as the National Socialist ideology is Heidegger's conceptualization of freedom with the aid of a monolithic understanding of history--one that refuses to acknowledge the plurality and heterogeneity in the socio-historical existence of human beings. Accordingly, I will claim that the Heideggerian freedom depends on the social, if not literal, murder of the marginalized segments of a given society. However, I will refuse to conclude that Heidegger's philosophy is a Nazi philosophy and that it should never be appropriated as long as we want to purify our thoughts from discriminatory ideas. Rather, I will re-appropriate Heidegger, against Heidegger, to read and interpret Michel Foucault's and Judith Butler's philosophies. My aim here is to construct a social ontology that may justify anti-discriminatory policies. More specifically, through my Heideggerian readings of Foucault and Butler, I will argue that one's freedom is dependent on the cultural resuscitation of socially, and sometimes literally, murdered racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and sectarian/confessional minorities. (shrink)

Does a Postal Principle, a principle of destinerrance, hold true for computer mediated communication (CMC)? Perhaps. However, the question is not one concerning technology. Is it rather the case that we must ask, after Derrida, after all, whether destinerrance ever held true, as a principle? This paper considers the prospect that the Postal Principle was, in principle, or as a principle, an expression of a truth value from something that can not in fact, be held at all: the ghost in (...) the machine. Drawing on a phenomenology of computer practice, the paper argues that there is greater explanatory value to be found in Derrida's more recent comments on the relative exteriority of the technological apparatus (in Archive Fever and elsewhere), framing an understanding of the human body as partes extra partes. Yet it is demonstrated here that this same framing was already in place from the moment that the principle of destinerrance was first articulated, and that a subsequent technical turn in Derrida's work merely extends a framework already set in place in the earlier work (in The Post Card, for example). It is argued, then, that in articulating a Postal Principle for the purpose of guaranteeing its failure, Derrida had calculated the future trajectory – and had built the logic of the calculation and of the ‘jet’ words, as he calls them, into this trajectory – of what I call the ‘fantasy of the disembodied virtualm’ through which users of CMC project themselves into the archive of archives that the internet was bound to become. (shrink)

This article aims at contributing to the contemporary reception of Heidegger’s thought in eco-philosophical perspective. Its point of departure is Heidegger’s claim, in his Bremen lectures and The Question Concerning Technology, that today the earth is submitted to permanent requisition and planned ordering, and that, having thus lost sight of its auto-poiesis, we are no longer capable of listening, tuning in, and singing back to what he calls in his course on Heraclitus the “song of the earth.” Accordingly, first we (...) examine how the inherently reciprocal dynamics of “earth” and “world,” as thematised by Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art, have become opaque. Second, we analyse whether it is possible to find those same dynamics at play behind Heidegger’s “Fourfold,” which we propose to reread in binary key in dialogue with contemporary anthropology, from Bateson and Lévi-Strauss to Wagner and Viveiros de Castro, and in light of Guattari’s notion of “trans-entitarian generativity.” Third, we stress the need to reposition Heidegger’s thought alongside contemporary concerns on “worlding” and we explore its plausible intersections with today’s object-oriented ethnography. Lastly, we discuss the possibility of rereading Heidegger’s Fourfold afresh against the backdrop of Heidegger’s non-foundational thinking, as a conceptual metaphor for the joint dynamics of Abgrund and Grund. (shrink)

Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty first-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well as (...) on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality. (shrink)

En este texto se estudia la lectura que Heidegger lleva a cabo en torno a la obra de Hölderlin tomando como eje la noción de “aporía”. Por ésta se comprende la imposibilidad de una respuesta o resolución con respecto a la cuestión del ser. Sin embargo, lejos de resultar paralizante, esta aporía leída y expresada a través de Hölderlin conduce a Heidegger a la afirmación de la experiencia de esa aporía, de su necesidad y de su dignidad cuestionante. De este (...) modo, se comprueba cómo Hölderlin aporta el aparato léxico y conceptual que Heidegger desplegará en los años siguientes en su camino del pensar. (shrink)

In Heidegger’s last seminar, which was in Zähringen in 1973, he introduces what he called a “phenomenology of the inconspicuous”. Despite scholars’ occasional references to this “approach” over the last 40 years, this approach of Heidegger’s has gone largely under investigated in secondary literature. This article introduces three different, although not necessarily conflicting ways in which these sparse references to inconspicuousness can be interpreted: The a priori of appearance can never be brought to manifestation, and the unscheinbar is interwoven with (...) the scheinbar as an active characteristic or form of “hiddenness”, therefore making inconspicuousness inherent within all phenomenology. Or, there is now a particular step or reduction within phenomenology that involves one’s being attuned to the various modes of potential hiddenness, of which “inconspicuousness” is a particular character trait. Or there are particular, unique, and specific phenomena that give themselves “inconspicuously,” and there is also thus a corresponding, particular phenomenology in which one must engage in order to gain some kind of access to these specific things’ phenomenal strata. This paper introduces Heidegger’s “phenomenology of the inconspicuous” most especially in his last seminar in Zähringen in 1973, engages related references to unscheinbar in his 1942/1943 Seminar on Parmenides, and then puts forward an interpretation of what these somewhat ambiguous references could mean when contextualized according to Heidegger’s overall interests. This essay brings these references to light, and puts forward a proposal as to what kind of phenomenology Heidegger was–somewhat inconspicuously–referring. (shrink)

Most works about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger either disregard Heidegger’s attachment to National Socialism or assume the ‘minimalist’ view that his attachment was a brief political aberration of no consequence for his philosophy. This paper contends that the minimalist view is not only factually wrong but also that its assumption promotes methodological errors and poor philosophy. To assess this contention we examine two important texts from one of the more fertile fields in current philosophy: Jeff Malpas’s Heidegger’s Topology: Being, (...) Place, World (2006) and Heidegger and the Thinking of Place (2012). Malpas claims that Heidegger’s rejection of National Socialism spurred, or was concomitant with, new directions in his philosophy. These claims are wrong. The paper concludes that any work about Heidegger’s philosophy must first acknowledge and understand his enduring attachment to National Socialism. (shrink)

This thesis develops a hermeneutic philosophy of science to provide insights into physics education. -/- Modernity cloaks the authentic character of modern physics whenever discoveries entertain us or we judge theory by its use. Those who justify physics education through an appeal to its utility, or who reject truth as an aspect of physics, relativists and constructivists, misunderstand the nature of physics. Demonstrations, not experiments, reveal the essence of physics as two characteristic engagements with truth. First, truth in its guise (...) as correspondence enables a human being to prepare for the distinctive event of physics. -/- Second, the event of physics occurs in human perception when someone forces a hidden reality to disclose an aspect of itself. Thus, the ground of physics is our human involvement with reality achieved by way of truth. -/- To support this account of physics, the thesis reports phenomenological investigations into Isaac Newton’s involvement with optics and a secondary school physics laboratory. These involve interpretations of Heidegger’s theory of beings, schema and signification. The project draws upon, and contributes to, the hermeneutic phenomenology of modern physics, a tradition in continental philosophy that begins with Immanuel Kant, and advances particularly from Martin Heidegger to Patrick Heelan. -/- The thesis advocates an ontological pedagogy for modern physics which has as its purpose each individual student’s engagement with reality and truth. Students may achieve this through demonstrations of phenomena that will enable them to dwell with physics, an experience that contrasts with their embroilment in modernity, and which perpetuates nature’s own science. (shrink)

Atheists are rarely associated with holiness, yet they can have deeply spiritual experiences. Once such experience of the author exemplified ‘the holy’ as defined by Otto. However, the subjectivism of Otto’s Kantianism undermines Otto’s otherwise fruitful approach. While the work of Hegel overcomes this, it is too rationalistic to account for mortal life. Seeking to avoid these shortcomings, this paper places ‘holiness’ within a self-differentiating ontological unity, the Heideggerian ‘fourfold’. This unity can only be experienced by confronting groundless finite mortality, (...) and the resulting existential disposition is characterized as ‘reverence’. Reverence is gratitude for mortal existence, and existence itself. Moreover, it is as much political as it is ontological, atheistic as it is theistic. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 3, pp 366 - 387 In this article, I focus on Heidegger’s conception of hospitality in his first and final lectures on Hölderlin’s _Germania_, _Remembrance_, and _The Ister_. I argue that the hospitality of the foreigner for Heidegger is the condition of possibility of dwelling understood as the happening of history.In the first section I analyze the notions of hospitality in Levinas and Derrida. The second section unpacks some of the senses of the earth in (...) Heidegger as the site of man’s historical dwelling, whereas in the third section I focus on holy mourning as the disposition that reveals the earth as the uncanny ground of history. In the final section, I spell out Heidegger’s conception of hospitality, the greeting, and the foreign guest. (shrink)

Against the background of worldwide, intentional or unintentional everyday violations of human dignity and the epochal need to experience oneself as a human being in one’s specific way of being, this article attempts to pursue the question of human dignity and its concealment. On the one hand, it seeks to ask whether human dignity has become obsolete due to social and epochal developments and preconditions and whether it can only appear and be experienced as antiquated in the context of a (...) technological language or an administered world. On the other hand, it asks whether ethical and anthropological thinking have not sufficiently experienced, thought, and conceptualized man. From the context of these perspectives that determine the question of dignity, Heidegger’s article seeks to take up Heidegger’s repeated search for an original ethics based on Heraclitus’ fragment 119, and from this point of view to ask for a perhaps deeper and more adequate understanding of human dignity. At the centre of this is Heidegger’s thesis that human dignity is based on the protection of the unhidden and, ever before, the hiddenness of all beings. Without wanting to ignore the difficulty and complexity of Heidegger’s thinking, the author seeks to find access to this understanding of our dignity based on the experience of personal encounters. (shrink)

The main idea behind this chapter is that a philosophical investigation of basic pedagogical practices, and more exactly the different ways in which children get the hang of elementary literacy at school, can offer a deeper understanding of what school education is all about. I follow here the French philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler (2010), who argues that this basic pedagogical form defines the school. For him, literacy training sets the model for the practices that make up schools, even if (...) schooling as a rule involves far more complicated practices such as teaching youngsters how to play a musical instrument, write an essay, solve a complex mathematical equation or understand the reasons why empires rise and fall. In all these cases, Stiegler would argue, what is at stake is an introduction into dominant cultural technologies (Cf. Siegert 2015) – which are moulded after the more simpler practice of literacy initiation: grasping how to play the flute also requires an understanding of the relation between the notes on the score sheet and the required manipulations one has to perform on the instrument (which is very much alike to what we do when we first learn how to read and write letters and words). Or take as another example, writing an essay involves a profound insight into the architecture of a text and how an argument should be developed in a logically stringent way, and a mastery over rhetoric and stylistic operations one might use (or not). In all these cases students need to learn to adopt a cultural technology, or grammar as Stiegler (2010) wants it, i.e. an operational logic which is specific to each school discipline (music, literature and history respectively). (shrink)

In this article, I deal with the transition from traditional ‘school’ forms of instruction to educational processes that are fully mediated by digital technologies. Against the background of the idea the very institution ‘school’ is closely linked to the invention of the alphabetic writing system and to the need of initiating new generations into a literate culture, I focus on the issue of literacy training. I argue that with the digitization of education, a fundamental transition takes place regarding what it (...) means to be literate, but also what it means to educate and to be educated. I do so by developing a ‘techno-somatic’ approach, which means that I look at the use of concrete instructional technologies, and the bodily disciplines that are involved. I set out a double comparison in which I contrast existing, ‘traditional’ ways of learning how to read/write with the way in which literacy training looked like before the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and with the initiation into literacy in the Chinese/japanese language, on the other hand. I argue that these comparisons shed light on the differences between traditional and digital literacy. More precisely, I show that in each case, a different relation toward what it means to produce script is involved. As such, both forms of literacy go together with different spaces of experience and senses of being-able, and therefore with altogether different ideas of what education is all about. (shrink)

This paper discusses the development of self-consciousness in the history of philosophy of the 20th century compared with the same development in the natural sciences. The author characterizes this stage of philosophical historiography as the “revolution of relativity.” This movement of self-consciousness was apparent in not only the humanities but also the natural sciences at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Awareness of probability is a fundamental achievement of non-classic physics, which has since reversed its paradigm. In contrast (...) to the Newtonian scheme, quantum theory introduces the category of probability and insists that we can talk about certain physical phenomena only in a probabilistic mode and that the method of observation affects the phenomena observed. Consequently, any “object-subject” and “subject-subject” interaction involves the experience of the researcher, which thereby affects the results. The same model of interpretation lies at the basis of the turn toward self-consciousness in the history of philosophy of the 20th century. The classical history of philosophy is built on idealization and gives an objective description of the philosophical process. Following the other sciences, the philosophy of the 20th century understood that historical and philosophical reality largely depends on the historians of philosophy; that such reality is constructed by certain means; that there is a certain kind of historical and philosophical work; and that, with different strategies, methods and approaches, we obtain different results that are complementary to each other. The 20th century was a time of competing interpretations rather than gradually progressing historical and philosophical systems. This stimulated the search for own ideal of objectivity. For philosophical historiography, this is the hermeneutic ideal of the structural analysis of text or architectonic reconstruction. The historicalphilosophical revolution of relativity promotes the development of critical historiography and revises the foundations of its classical tradition. (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)

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

Straipsnyje analizuojamas žmogaus teisių paradoksas, atskleistas Hannah’os Arendt, Jacques’o Rancière’o ir Giorgio Agambeno darbuose. Žmogaus teisių konceptas veikia kaip biopolitinis aparatas, įdiegiantis žmogaus kaip gyvos būtybės ir žmogaus kaip politinio subjekto perskyrą. Ši gyvūniškumo ir žmogiškumo perskyra, atrandama pačiame žmoguje, rezonuoja su žmogiškumo ir gyvūniškumo klausimu filosofijoje. Klasikinė filosofija – nuo Aristotelio iki Heideggerio imtinai – postuluoja žmogaus ir gyvūno skirtingumą, o Agambenas ir Derrida teigia, kad žmogaus gyvūniškumas ir gyvūno humanizavimas yra tik dvi tos pačios problemos pusės. Toks klausimo (...) performulavimas leidžia pereiti prie Roberto Esposito filosofijos, kurioje teigiamas visų gyvų būtybių lygiavertiškumas bei pačios gyvybės imanentiškumas. Priešingai nei negatyvioji biopolitika, kuri siekė pajungti gyvybę normai ir įstatymui, Esposito nori sukurti teigiančiąją biopolitiką, kurioje norma laikoma imanentiška taisykle, leidžiančia gyvybei siekti maksimalios išraiškos. Nors atrodytų, jog tokia teorija turi mažai ką bendra su politiškumo konceptualizavimu, Esposito teigia, jog būtent ribos tarp zoē ir bios, tarp nuogos gyvybės ir politinės egzistencijos, panaikinimas ne tik nesumažina galimybių veikti politinėje plotmėje, bet, atvirkščiai, yra bet kokio bendro buvimo sąlyga. (shrink)

Heidegger’s thoughts on modern technology have received much attention in many disciplines and fields, but, with a few exceptions, the influence has been sparse in biomedical ethics. The reason for this might be that Heidegger’s position has been misinterpreted as being generally hostile towards modern science and technology, and the fact that Heidegger himself never subjected medical technologies to scrutiny but was concerned rather with industrial technology and information technology. In this paper, Heidegger’s philosophy of modern technology is introduced and (...) then brought to bear on medical technology. Its main relevance for biomedical ethics is found to be that the field needs to focus upon epistemological and ontological questions in the philosophy of medicine related to the structure and goal of medical practice. Heidegger’s philosophy can help us to see how the scientific attitude in medicine must always be balanced by and integrated into a phenomenological way of understanding the life-world concerns of patients. The difference between the scientific and the phenomenological method in medicine is articulated by Heidegger as two different ways of studying the human body: as biological organism and as lived body. Medicine needs to acknowledge the priority of the lived body in addressing health as a way of being-in-the-world and not as the absence of disease only. A critical development of Heidegger’s position can provide us with a criterion for distinguishing the uses of medical technologies that are compatible with such an endeavor from the technological projects that are not. (shrink)

Worlds are always in motion; what kind of movement is at stake? In this essay, I will argue that Heidegger moves beyond Hegel by making the concept of world central to phenomenology. But how do wor...

The browser wars case is a useful springboard for considering the principle of positive competition and the proper regulation of platform technologies. There are lessons to be culled about policy, the application of antitrust law, and the parameters of fair competition. We argue that despite Microsofts opportunistic exploitation of its proprietary code, policy makers should resist the temptation to mandate an open source code model. Vigilant anti-trust enforcement is a preferable alternative. But courts must refrain from using antitrust law to (...) favor small innovators or to constrain the economic protections inherent in intellectual property rights, since those rights are still needed to encourage innovation. On the other hand, despite the exigencies of competition, platform leaders should respect the norm of fair competition and refrain from the impulse to tilt the platform in their favor. Preservation of robust intellectual property rights, deft application of antitrust statutes, and principled competition represent the best prescription for social wealth in the New Economy. (shrink)

Support in different modes, expressions and actions is at the core of the public welfare culture. In this paper, support is examined as an everyday interpersonal phenomenon with a variety of expressions in language and ways of relating, and its essential meaning is explored. The fulcrum for reflection is the lived experience shared by a young woman with mental health problems of her respective encounters with two professionals in mental health facilities. A phenomenological analysis of the contrasting accounts suggests that, (...) when the professional relationship includes openness and risk, a certain degree of freedom of action is possible for both parties involved in the inevitably asymmetrical relationship. Support as “given” eludes controllable and measurable objectives, but imposes itself on the lived experiences of both the giver and the receiver as subject to readiness for acceptance. By not making assumptions about what support is, we open ourselves to the possibility of reciprocally experiencing moments revealing the essential meaning of support as lived. (shrink)

This paper argues that learning is inherently violent. It examines the way in which Heidegger uses – and refrains from using – the concept in his account of Dasein. Heidegger explicitly discussed “learning” in 1951 and he used of the word in several contexts. Although he confines his use of “learning” to the ontic side of the ontic-ontological divide, there are aspects of what he says that open the door to an ontological analogue of the ontic learning. In this discussion (...) it emerges that what precludes “learning” behaving as does “willing”, “waiting” and “thanking”, is something that derives from the relatedness of Dasein. The paper finally examines violence within the disclosure of truth. The approach to the investigation is experimental and is to some extent modeled on Heidegger‟s own later enquires. (shrink)

Is it possible to think about “the Greeks” without exposing oneself to what they call their gods? Feeling called upon to respond to this question, precisely within the constellation of Europe’s most gloomy hour, Martin Heidegger employs the instruments that come to him through his own “turn,” but also from further back: the “Fourfold” and the “Holy” may thus be studied in their crucial confrontation with Parmenides. A corollary resides in the link with the famous problem of “Hellenization” in Christianity.

In this article, the differences between Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger’s approaches to ontotheology are discussed. Whereas Marion argues for a historical approach to this question, i.e., testing whether ontotheology can be detected in this or that thinker in this history of philosophy, this article aims, with Levinas and Heidegger, for an ontological approach to the question concerning ontotheology. In this regard, this text expresses wonder about Marion’s claim that Medieval theology would not have succumbed to ontotheology whereas (...) ancient and modern did. It is shown that ontotheology, for Levinas as well as Heidegger, might not be overcome with a simple command but rather belongs to the very structure of thought. The article concludes with offering some corrections to the Levinasian ‘God outside of onto-theology’ by a more phenomenological account of being-in-the world. (shrink)

Starting from the practice of hermeneutic phenomenological writing as it has been advanced by van Manen, this paper addresses the understanding of an ‘experiential givenness’ of the world as basis for our ‘lived writing’; an understanding that is essential to the new phenomenological writer if s/he is to be part of the phenomenological writing process. As the ultimate givenness of the world is the basis of knowledge, we constantly strive to “reach out on life beyond itself” (Gadamer, 1960/1985, p. 62), (...) and thus need the right language to let the phenomenological text speak. The phenomenological writer’s understandings of the chiasm of world and self, the depth of phenomenological awareness, and the interlacement of ethic-aesthetical poetic writing, are qualities discussed as essential for the phenomenological writer to understand in a felt–sensed way in order to write a phenomenological text. A deconstructive approach to (pre)reflective phenomenological writing is put forth by provocatively asking what it means to be involved in, and profoundly enclosed with the “wordliness of the world” (Saevi, 2011a, p. 3). The radical hermeneutic phenomenological openness to what it means to be human and how to encounter the human givenness of phenomenological seeing and writing renders it possible for the writer’s personal voice to evolve. (shrink)

In a future world of ubiquitous computing, in which humans interact with computerized technologies even more frequently and in even more situations than today, interface design will have increased importance. One feature of interface that I argue will be especially relevant is what I call abstract relational strategies. This refers to an approach (in both a bodily and conceptual sense) toward the use of a technology, an approach that is general enough to be applied in many different concrete scenarios. Such (...) an abstract manner of approach is relevant, for example, when an interface design for a device to which users are already accustomed is applied to an entirely different device (such as a device used for a completely different purpose). To articulate this idea, I explore the history of keyboards, and consider how the habits of interface with one kind (e.g., piano keyboards) have historically enabled some users to approach other technologies fitted with similar keyboard interface (e.g., typewriters, electronic instrumentation). I conclude by brainstorming ways that abstract relational strategies, applicable to a variety of different devices, will have increased importance in a future world in which computing is even more ubiquitous than today. (shrink)

Don Ihde is one of the world's foremost thinkers on the place of technologies in our lives. Over the course of a long career, he has built a unique and useful perspective by expanding on phenomenological and American pragmatist philosophy and has developed wide-ranging insights and conceptual tools for describing the details of our experience across the various areas of human activity, including scientific practice, anthropological history, computer interface, design, art history, and the technologies of everyday life. The Critical Ihde (...) brings together many of Ihde's most influential writings, as well as a number of under-recognized gems. Across these works are examples of his influential contributions to the phenomenology of human auditory and visual experience, his foundational work on the phenomenology of technology, and his thoughts on the technologies of scientific practice, including laboratory and medical imaging. Further, these chapters reveal the development of "postphenomenology," Ihde's original philosophical perspective, one that continues to flourish today across the work of a growing interdisciplinary and international collective of scholars. (shrink)

This essay develops an approach to a phenomenology of shame by taking recourse to different notions of shame found in various humanistic disciplines and in the history of phenomenology. The first part of this paper analyzes some of the central ideas on the nature of shame to be found in cultural anthropology, pedagogy, history and psychoanalysis. The second part discusses the phenomenological theories of shame proposed by Sartre and Levinas. Since their approaches are opposite to each other in crucial respects, (...) the third part of this paper returns to the analyses of shame undertaken in the first part in order to resolve this apparent conflict and advance a coherent theory of shame. The essay’s final thesis is that shame is neither fundamentally destructive nor fundamentally constructive but that it can assume both guises. While it can threaten the subject up to the point of destruction triggering it in aggressive defensive mechanisms, it can also contribute to the development of the subject into a fully free individual capable of acknowledging and answering to others. (shrink)

In this paper I approach the hermeneutic of living nature as suggested by Martin Heidegger in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. On the basis of complex hermeneutic procedures, Heidegger held the well-known thesis about the animal’s poverty of world. My hypothesis is that the relevance of this thesis should be minimized for the sake of the acknowledgment of a poverty in the world proper to human beings. Poverty in the world refers to the main result of a comparison between the (...) structure of the intentionality of animals and the transcendental-formative structure of human existence. Such a comparison does not only point out the lack of the “something as something-structure” in the intentionality of animals, but also the necessary fragmentation in the human sharing of life’s intentionality. From here results a very important semantic limitation, for every meaningful speech about animal life should take into account the incompleteness in the sharing of the intentional spheres of living beings and humans. I conclude suggesting a set of questions that should be focused in a constructive hermeneutic of living nature. Key words: Heidegger, hermeneutic of nature, lfe, intentionality. (shrink)

Atypical among Heidegger’s numerous discussions of poets is the condemnation of Rilke in the 1942-43 lecture course Parmenides. At stake is the definition of “the open” (das Offene): Rilke reserves the open for animals as freedom from conceptual determinacy, whereas Heidegger reserves it for human beings as the place of Being in which things first appear as what they are. The open, for Heidegger, names the existential conception of place (as distinct from a geographical point) and features in his life-long (...) attempts to articulate the relations between language, human existence, poetry and the everyday. By denying that human beings have access to the open, Rilke runs athwart this project and by denying it in a poem he confounds the expectations that Heidegger harbours with respect to the work of art as a site of the opening up of aesthetic experience, within the everyday, to ontological questioning. (shrink)

To examine Heidegger's pedagogy is to be invited into a particular era and cultural reality—starting in Weimar Germany and progressing into the rise and fall of the Third Reich. In his attempt to reform the German university in a strictly hierarchical, authoritarian and nationalistic mold, Heidegger addressed one group of students and professors and not another. The petit‐bourgeois student and the future philosophers he invited with his ‘logic of recruitment’ into the corps of instructors, would share his coded language with (...) its built‐in taboos and censorship. The result was a rhetoric of absolute self‐reference and a semiotic of pure propaganda, based on the evocation of the ancient Greeks in which the philosopher meant to project all that was properly Germanic. Heidegger's rhetoric is exclusionary; its politics and its philosophy are interpenetrating. His lecture courses grew increasingly poeticized, and thus mired in ambiguity, evasion, elision, avoidance, grandiloquence. Parallels are drawn in this essay between Heidegger and our time. Is Heidegger's insistence on autocratic controls within the German university comparable to the corporate positions taken today by some educators? How does the shifting relation between disciplines affect the role of the specialist? How might the sciences morales or humanities, along with the much maligned ‘humanism’, be redefined morally and holistically? (shrink)

By convention epinician poetry claims to be both obligatory and truthful, yet in the intersection of obligation and truth lies a seeming paradox: the poet presents his poetry as commissioned by a patron but also claims to be unbiased enough to convey the truth. In Slater's interpretation Pindar reconciles this paradox by casting his relationship to the patron as one of guest-friendship: when he declares himself a guest-friend of the victor, he agrees to the obligation ‘a) not to be envious (...) of hisxenosand b) to speak well of him. The argumentation is:Xeniaexcludes envy, I am axenos, therefore I am not envious and consequently praise honestly’. Slater observes that envy may foster bias against the patron, but the problem of pro-patron bias remains: does the poet's friendship with and obligation to his patron produce praise at the expense of truth? (shrink)

In this study, we wanted to show that plunging into the depths of modern consciousness allows us to discover a new fundamental measurement of consciousness associated with compaction of time. More precisely, we seek to identify the possibility of compaction of time in the consciousness under certain conditions, by analogy with how time is fundamentally transformed in space. We are trying to understand how, through modern existential and phenomenological as well as natural science methods, primarily on the way of interpreting (...) Heidegger’s destruction, one can rethink the essence of the fundamental dimension of consciousness related to institutionalization of time. In other words, the analysis results offer an opportunity to state that the new dimension reveals another fundamental property of consciousness. In this dimension, not only time is split, which had an objective effect on the classic understanding of the world view. The intention of time is also split, which manifests itself in transretention, transcendention and transprotention. (shrink)