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)

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)

Since the seminal 1955 habilitation by Heidegger's pupil, Walter Schulz, it has become an open secret that Schelling's philosophy, more than that of any of the other German Idealists, is an immediate antecedent to Heidegger's thought. For this reason, it is all the more fascinating that to this day research is still lopsidedly concerned with the interpretation of Heidegger's reading of Schelling's Freedom Essay and that a thorough and overarching investigation into the idealistic inheritance of Martin Heidegger's thought remains wanting. (...) The same applies to the debates that Heidegger's students began in the twentieth century. The traditions of modern nature ethics and the criticism of technology, which derive from Schelling, were interpreted and mediated through Heidegger to his students Hans Jonas, Hannah Arendt, and Günther Anders. This essay attempts to delineate some of the basic features of a more bilateral or dialogical relationship between these two philosophers and to more fully appreciate Heidegger's relationship to German Idealism in general and Schelling in particular. (shrink)

(1992). Immanuel Kant, Jean Piaget and the Rage for Order: Ecological Hints of the Colonial Spirit in Pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 28-43.

Continental philosophies of science tend to exemplify holistic themes connecting order and contingency, questions and answers, writers and readers, speakers and hearers. Such philosophies of science also tend to feature a fundamental emphasis on the historical and cultural situatedness of discourse as significant; relevance of mutual attunement of speaker and hearer; necessity of pre-linguistic cognition based in human engagement with a common socio-cultural historical world; role of narrative and metaphor as explanatory; sustained emphasis on understanding questioning; truth seen as horizonal, (...) aletheic, or perspectival; and a tolerance for paradoxical and complex forms of expression. Continental philosophy of science is thus more comprehensive than philosophy of science in the analytic tradition, including (and as analytic philosophy of science does not tend to include) perspectives on the history of science as well as the social and practical dimensions of scientific discovery. Where analytic philosophy is about reducing or, indeed, eliminating the perennial problems of philosophy, Continental philosophy is all about thinking and that will mean, as both Heidegger and Nietzsche emphasize, making such problems more not less problematic. (shrink)

This paper uses an extended discussion of Nietzsche’s essay “The Greek State” to uncover the political aspects of his early thinking. The paper builds on a similar discussion of another essay from the same period, “Homer on Competition,” in arguing that Nietzsche’s thinking is based on a confrontation with the work of Plato. It is argued that the key to understanding “The Greek State” is seeing it, in its entirety, as an enigmatic interpretation and re-writing of Plato’s Republic. Nietzsche interprets (...) the Republic as Plato’s accomplishment of the task of the genuine philosopher: the legislation of values and the moulding of human character. (shrink)

The Heideggerian account of the ontotheological constitution of Western metaphysics has been extremely influential for contemporary philosophy of religion and for philosophical perspectives on theology and the divine. This paper introduces and contrasts two central strategies for approaching the question of the divine in a non- or post-ontotheological manner. The first and more established approach is that of post-Heideggerian hermeneutics and deconstruction, inspired by Heidegger’s suggestion of a “theology without the word ‘being’” and by his later notions of an “ultimate (...) god” and of “divinities” as one of the four axes of the fourfold (Geviert). Here, the divine is no longer articulated in terms of the supreme or absolute being, but as one of the interdependent dimensions of finite and contextual meaningful presence. The more recent approach introduced by Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux dissociates itself from the Heideggerian hermeneutics of finitude and adopts mathematics as its basic ontological model. Rather than focusing on meaning and sense, Badiou and Meillassoux replace ontotheological metaphysics with materialist frameworks. With regard to the divine, this approach leads either to a contemporary version of atheism (Badiou) or to the reintroduction of a divine entity, but now a merely possible and contingent one (Meillassoux). (shrink)

ABSTRACTDuring his philosophical life, Husserl sought to develop his phenomenology as a “science of true beginnings, or origins” that is metaphysically neutral. Nevertheless, according to Heidegger and Derrida, Husserl’s phenomenology remains a kind of metaphysics of presence in that it presupposes a metaphysical notion of “origin”. This paper attempts both to correct Heidegger and Derrida’s misunderstandings of Husserl’s notion of “origin” and to clarify the reason why Husserl’s phenomenology and its pursuit of “origin” is still a metaphysical project.

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)

Two recent works will be considered that discuss Heidegger and Nietzsche in the context of the problem of overcoming metaphysics and the onto-theological tradition. A common criticism will be that these works in their attempt to retrieve a conception of religion, politics or faith beyond onto-theology and metaphysics tend to justify or idealize particular historically and culturally conditioned perspectives, which are not immune from further philosophical critique. Simon Oliai’s approach to countering the burgeoning fundamentalisms in our global age is ultimately (...) not very convincing, representing as it does, a Western, liberal, Eurocentric worldview. The author’s use of Nietzsche or Heidegger for this purpose is also not very compelling. The remainder of this review essay appraises the volume edited by Cimino and van der Heiden, which attempts to rethink faith beyond onto-theology in several interesting ways. Although meant to be a comparative study, several contributions subscribe to a general Heideggerian (or Heidegger-inspired phenomenological-hermeneutical) theoretical framework, which itself is not rigorously scrutinized. A problematic implication is that Nietzsche’s own critical and constructive views of philosophy, his critique of religion and history, and his positive appraisal of faith and divinity are not seriously considered on their own terms: they are either mostly ignored, or they are selectively interpreted through a Heideggerian lens, with the result that this volume puts forward a mostly unfavorable view of Nietzsche. Some of the conceptual moves credited to Heidegger in the volume have their equivalents in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which a comparative and evaluative study such as this one must seriously take into account by resisting the uncritical acceptance of Heidegger’s own view of Nietzsche. (shrink)

By elaborating upon pivotal twentieth-century studies in language, representation, and subjectivity, Being Made Strange reorients the study of rhetoric according to the discursive formation of subjectivity. The author develops a theory of how rhetorical practices establish social, political, and ethical relations between self and other, individual and collectivity, good and evil, and past and present. He produces a novel methodology that analyzes not only what an individual says, but also the social, political, and ethical conditions that enable him or her (...) to do so. This book also offers valuable ethical and political insights for the study of subjectivity in philosophy, cultural studies, and critical theory. (shrink)

We do indeed “live and work in a time when the issues facing education, many of which have been with us for a considerable period, are being approached primarilythrough measurement – classroom assessment, research methods, standardized testing, international comparisons”. It is also true that “we do not often stop to consider what counts – and alternatively, what doesn’t count – in a climate where measuring up to a standard is the name of the game. At a deeper level, we rarely (...) raise questions about measurement itself.” Heidegger argued that what is “most thought provoking [in this ‘thought provoking age’] is that we are still not thinking,” in What is called thinking? . This somewhat startling assertion deserves careful attention especially in relation to the quote above . Heidegger’s assertion is pertinent for a number of reasons: he associated this “not thinking” with a “critical moment in history”, with a “call”, and with a “miscalculation”. I will argue that it is important to reflect on a number of questions: what is thinking, especially in relation to measurement? Was Heidegger correct in arguing that we have “miscalculated” in so far as we have sought “the safety of the mere drive for calculation” ? And how does the desire for a higher form of “representational thinking” in these contexts serve and promote a number of aims in higher education, such as learning and even “flourishing”? I will attempt to provide answers to a number of these questions by reflecting on the broad but fundamentally important question of measurement and its limits. (shrink)

Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton—born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a (...) broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton, “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367, 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton, “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–25, 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18(1): 67–72, 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity. His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. (shrink)

In the recent critique of ‘Western metaphysics’ by post‐structuralist and postmodern theorists, there has emerged a distinctive line of thought which seeks to apply such critique to the domain of political theory. This paper approaches Hannah Arendt's conceptualisation of the political as a proto‐type of such a theorisation, deploying as it does key elements of the Heideggerian position so as to rethink the nature of the political. By delineating the specifically ‘post‐metaphysical’ moments of Arendt's theory and its corresponding critique of (...) political modernity, I endeavour to illuminate both the advantages and pitfalls of contemporary efforts at developing a philosophical conception of the political on the basis of a neo‐Heideggerian position. (shrink)