F. Brencio (2022), «…this phenomenon, which is none too happily designated as ‘empathy’». Martin Heidegger’s critique of empathy, in “Bollettino Filosofico”, 37, 243-251, ISSN: 1593 – 7178, E-ISSN 2035 - 2670.

This book is a new interpretation of Schelling's path-breaking 1809 treatise on freedom, the last major work published during his lifetime. The treatise is at the heart of the current Schelling renaissance—indeed, Heidegger calls it "one of the most profound works of German, thus of Western, philosophy." It is also one of the most demanding and complex texts in German Idealism. By tracing the problem of ground through Schelling's treatise, this book provides a unified reading of the text, while unlocking (...) the meaning of its most challenging passages through clear, detailed analysis. This analysis shows how Schelling's implicit distinction between senses of ground is the key to his project of constructing a system that can satisfy reason while accommodating objects that seem to defy rational explanation—including evil, the origins of nature, and absolute freedom. This allows Schelling to unite reason and mystery, providing a rich model for philosophizing about freedom and evil today. (shrink)

My central research focus over the past 30 years has been the articulation of what I call a radically temporal approach to philosophy. In the papers below, written between 2001 and 2022, I treat the varying ways in which radically temporal thinking manifests itself in the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin. I also discuss Jacques Derrida's deconstructive project and George Kelly's personal construct theory as examples of radically temporal thinking. With the aim of clarifying and (...) further defining the nature of this family of orientations, I have delineated the important ways in which it differs from a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that includes hermeneutic and radical constructivisms, social constructionism, 4EA (Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective) cognition, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of corporeal intersubjectivity, autopoietic self-organizing systems theory and American pragmatism. Among the authors whose work I have submitted to critique from the radically temporal perspective are: Francisco Varela (autopoietic self-organizing systems), Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Dan Zahavi, Hanne De Jaegher, Michel Bitbol, Thomas Fuchs (enactive, embodied ('4EA') cognition), Gilles Deleuze (Deleuzian biopolitics), Ken Gergen and John Shotter ( social constructionism), Kym Maclaren ( critical phenomenology) and Jan Slaby (critical neuroscience). I argue that these authors' accounts of the relation between affect, motivation and intention, attention , reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness, the basis of mathematical naturalism and sensori-motor models of behavior, and the relation between the body, language and culture remain burdened by traditional presuppositions that the radically temporal philosophies of Heidegger et al put into question. (shrink)

Resumo: A Kehre (viragem) no pensamento de Heidegger foi amplamente discutida e debatida. A introdução da noção de metontologia (Metontologie), em 1927, informou proveitosamente esse debate, uma vez que implica uma preocupação com o domínio ôntico, por parte de Heidegger, que não está presente em trabalhos anteriores. O fato de essa noção desaparecer logo após ser introduzida, porém, desafia sua contribuição para esse debate. Neste artigo, mostra-se que o desaparecimento da metontologia não significa o desaparecimento da preocupação de Heidegger com (...) o ôntico, mas o contrário. Começa-se apresentando a visão de Freeman de uma tensão entre o ôntico e o ontológico, no pensamento de Heidegger, em meados da década de 1920, que resulta na introdução da metontologia, em 1927. Mais tarde, evidencia-se que a explicação de McNeill para o desaparecimento da metontologia, como consequência da visão de Heidegger, de meados dos anos 30, de que a projeção a priori do ser é uma retirada do ser (Entzug des Seins), permite dizer que esse desaparecimento não acarreta uma repentina falta de preocupação de Heidegger com o ôntico. Ao considerar a análise de Heidegger de “o matemático”, em Die Frage nach dem Ding, finalmente, argumenta-se que a metontologia desaparece do pensamento de Heidegger, porque sua dependência da ontologia a impede de explicar sua crescente preocupação com o ôntico, de maneira adequada. (shrink)

Early Heidegger argues that a “homogenous space of nature” can be revealed by stripping away the intelligibility of Dasein's everyday world, a process he calls “deworlding.” Given this, some interpreters have suggested that Heidegger, despite not having worked out the details himself, is also committed to a notion of deworlded time. Such a “natural time” would amount to an endogenous sequentiality in which events are ordered independently of Dasein and the stand it takes on its being. I show that Heidegger (...) was indeed committed to such a temporal realism even though his treatment of these issues is somewhat scattered and pulled in different directions. In the course of my reconstruction, I renew an interpretation of Heidegger that stresses Dasein's thrownness into nature and I answer William Blattner's powerful interpretation of Heidegger as a failed temporal idealist who was unable to derive the sequentiality of ordinary time from Dasein's non-sequential originary temporality. Heidegger did not attempt to derive sequentiality; instead, he understood it as a built-in feature of the natural universe by which Dasein's activities are constrained. World-time turns out to be a co-production of Dasein's non-sequential originary temporality and the endogenous sequentiality of events in nature. (shrink)

In “Melancholia, temporal disruption, and the torment of being both unable to live and unable to die”, I discuss the way in which the temporal desynchronization of melancholia can disrupt the melancholic’s relation to their own death and, on a Heideggerian interpretation, the meaning and significance of their life. In their thoughtful commentaries, Kevin Aho and Gareth Owen draw out some important points for further elaboration and clarification, the most pressing of which invoke Heidegger’s interpretation of time and the radical (...) temporalities of fundamental attunements. As Aho anticipates, this is the conception of time that underpins my interpretation of melancholia and, because this is important... (shrink)

This essay experiments with Kant’s writings on rational religion distilled through the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as canonical confrontations with primal problems of evil. It suggests boundaries between Stevenson’s characters and their occupations comparable to the those conflicted in the Kantian university, namely, law, medicine, theology, and philosophy (which makes a short anticipatory appearance in his earlier text on rational religion). With various faculties it investigates diffuse comprehensions—respectively, legal crime, biogenetic transmission, and original sin—of key ethical (...) modes: will, inheritance, incorporation, freedom, duty, obligation, love, living, and killing to conclude on the possible logic of evil (or evils of logic) collateral and possibly innate to Kant’s comprehension of radical evil. (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)

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)

Animating Luce Irigaray’s oeuvre are two indissociable projects: the disruption of Western metaphysics and the thinking of sexual difference. The intersection of these two projects implies that any attempt to think through the meaning and significance of Irigaray’s notoriously fraught invocation of sexual difference must take seriously the way in which this invocation is itself always already inflected by her disruptive gesture. In this paper, I will attempt to elucidate one moment of this intersection by focusing on her critical engagement (...) with Heidegger. In L’oubli de l’air, Irigaray criticizes Heidegger’s interpretation of the principle of identity as instantiating the same neglect of sexual difference that has been inscribed throughout the history of Western metaphysics. Moreover, Irigaray identifies the vestigial traces of this metaphysical legacy in Heidegger’s commitments to phenomenology. My claim, however, is that if we turn to Derrida’s second Geschlecht essay in order to mediate between Irigaray and Heidegger, the coimplicative nature of their projects comes into focus: on one hand, Derrida identifies within Heidegger’s work an incipient articulation of the very notion of sexuate difference that, on Irigaray’s reading, Heidegger’s work requires but nonetheless elides; on the other hand, Derrida’s rereading of Heidegger’s phenomenological commitments corroborates the philosophical significance of Irigaray’s intervention by recontextualizing the parameters that delimit her invocation of sexuate difference. (shrink)

Philosophy & Architecture special number of philosophy@LISBON (International eJournal) 5 | 2016 edited by Tomás N. Castro with Maribel Mendes Sobreira Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa ISSN 2182-4371.

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger introduces a unique interpretation of death as a kind of world-collapse or breakdown of meaning that strips away our ability to understand and make sense of who we are. This is an ‘ontological death’ in the sense that we cannot be anything because the intelligible world that we draw on to fashion our identities and sustain our sense of self has lost all significance. On this account, death is not only an event that we (...) can physiologically live through; it can happen numerous times throughout the finite span of our lives. This paper draws on Arthur Frank’s (At the will of the body: reflections on illness. Houghton, Boston, 1991) narrative of critical illness to concretize the experience of ‘ontological death’ and illuminate the unique challenges it poses for health care professionals. I turn to Heidegger’s conception of ‘resoluteness’ (Entschlossenheit) to address these challenges, arguing for the need of health care professionals to help establish a discursive context whereby the critically ill can begin to meaningfully express and interpret their experience of self-loss in a way that acknowledges the structural vulnerability of their own identities and is flexible enough to let go of those that have lost their significance or viability. (shrink)

According to Heidegger's Being and Time, social relations are constitutive of the core features of human agency. On this view, which I call a ‘strong conception’ of sociality, the core features of human agency cannot obtain in an individual subject independently of social relations to others. I explain the strong conception of sociality captured by Heidegger's underdeveloped notion of ‘being-with’ by reconstructing Heidegger's critique of the ‘weak conception’ of sociality characteristic of Kant's theory of agency. According to a weak conception, (...) sociality is a mere aggregation of individual subjects and the core features of human agency are built into each individual mind. The weak conception of sociality remains today widely taken for granted. I show that Christine Korsgaard, one of the most creative contemporary appropriators of Kant, operates with a weak conception of sociality and that this produces a problematic explanatory deficiency in her view: she is unable to explain the peculiar motivational efficacy of shared social norms. Heidegger's view is tailor made to explain this phenomenon. I end by sketching how Heidegger provides a social explanation of a major systematic concern animating Korsgaard, the concern with the importance of individual autonomy and answerability in human life. (shrink)

This paper explores the meaning of dreamless sleep. First, I consider four reasons why we commonly pass over sleep's ontological significance. Second, I compare and contrast death and sleep to show how each is oriented to questions regarding the possibilities of "being-a-whole." In the third and final part, I explore the meaning and implications of "being-toward-sleep," arguing that human existence emerges atop naturally anonymous corporeality (i.e. living being). In sum, I try to show that we can recover an authentic — (...) if somewhat ambiguous — sense of "being-a-whole" only by recognizing the ontological significance of dreamless sleep. (shrink)

Resumo: Este artigo mostra a abordagem hermenêutica realizada por Martin Heidegger dos conceitos de natureza e vida a partir da ontologia fundamental. Em Ser e Tempo, Heidegger elabora as condições hermenêuticas para que se possa apreender ontologicamente a vida através do que ele chama de interpretação privativa da vida. O desenvolvimento sistemático do sentido de ser da vida é apresentado por Heidegger na preleção Os conceitos fundamentais da metafísica : mundo, finitude, solidão, de 1929/1930. Nela, para apresentar o fenômeno da (...) vida, Heidegger parte da tese central de que todo vivente é organismo, de modo a desenvolver uma investigação ontológica em conjunto com pesquisas biológicas e zoológicas. Por conseguinte, após a explicitação dos modos de encontro com a natureza, será evidenciado como a natureza em sentido originário mostra-se a partir de um retraimento na abertura de mundo do ser-aí em sua relação com os organismos vivos. Palavras-chave: Heidegger; ontologia; hermenêutica da natureza; vida; mundo.: This article shows the hermeneutical approach performed by Martin Heidegger to the concepts of nature and life from the fundamental ontology. In Being and Time, Heidegger elaborates the hermeneutical conditions so that we can apprehend ontologically life through what he calls the private interpretation of life. The systematic development of the sense of being of life is presented by Heidegger in the lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, of 1929/1930. In this lecture, to present the phenomenon of life Heidegger uses the central thesis that every living being is organism in order to develop an ontological investigation in conjunction with biological and zoological research. Therefore, after the explanation of the ways of meeting with nature, will be shown as nature in the original sense shows itself from a withdrawal in the world opening of the being-there in its relationship with living organisms. Keywords: Heidegger; ontology; hermeneutic of nature; life; world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This study bears upon the ‘Heidegger case,’ that is, the relation of Heidegger’s philosophizing to his political involvements as Rector of the University of Freiburg 1933-4, and his subsequent silences on the subject of the Holocaust. I use the phrase ‘bears upon’ for Heidegger’s political involvement will serve as the ‘horizon’ for the study, my concern being the genesis of Heidegger’s position. Grounded in a musical ‘intuition’ and attunement, I take up the Nietzschean cipher for understanding proposed by Heidegger (...) himself for the self-understanding of the German people: the Apollonian-Dionysian duality, which I apply to the ‘being’ of Heidegger’s own philosophizing. Through this approach I hope to make an original contribution to Heidegger scholarship by showing that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is overdetermined, evolving out of both the phenomenological demand for a rigorous method in establishing fundamental structures of existence and - at the same time – out of an Apollonian attempt to ‘tame’ Dionysian existence, including Heidegger’s own. Inextricably interlinked will be the argument that Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung, his ‘confrontation,’ with Nietzsche precedes the overt engagement of his ‘Nietzsche’ lectures of the 1930s, and, further, that this more pervasive concern with Nietzsche figures in the Apollonian-Dionysian strife within Heidegger’s thinking and within his ‘being.’ Heidegger’s silences in the face of the Dionysian - as well as the Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche - will be seen to precede his ‘silence’ in the face of the actuality and history of the Third Reich. What I am proposing one might characterize as Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung - through Nietzsche - with v Heidegger, in a disclosure of the ontic roots of Heidegger’s ontology, an exercise in his own hermeneutics of facticity. I will pursue the trace of the Apollonian-Dionysian duality: in the Western philosophical tradition which Heidegger confronts, using Husserl and Nietzsche as exemplars; in Heidegger interpretation; in the relation between his texts and his letters; and in the suppressions and intensifications within Being and Time. And I will propose that the fugue and the mutually generative duality of suppression and intensification within Heidegger’s academic thinking were conditions of the possibility of Heidegger’s ‘way’ towards political involvement. (shrink)

The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic life- and worldview philosophy are considered excessively aesthetic, culturally liberal, relativistic, and (...) subjective. This essay involves two tasks in response to this negative evaluation of Dilthey that has shaped our current understanding of his philosophical project; first, an interpretation of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s reception of and struggles with Dilthey. These issues touch upon language, historicity, and the nature of hermeneutics. Second, by pursuing this task in light of Guignon’s interpretation of Dilthey and Heidegger, I hope to question and challenge the “overcoming” of Dilthey’s epistemic and life-philosophical hermeneutics in the “ontological” or “philosophical” hermeneutics of Heidegger. (shrink)

Over the past decades there has been increasing interest in the idea that Heidegger was a “transcendental philosopher” during the late 1920s. Furthermore, a consensus has started to emerge around the idea that Heidegger must be thought of as a transcendental thinker during this time. For the most part this means to first experience how Heidegger's work inherits this term from Kant or Husserl so that one can then experience how Heidegger creatively adapts this inheritance. The aim of this paper (...) is to show that such an approach is unhelpful. The aim of this paper is instead to show that transcendental philosophy bears a wholly renewed meaning in Heidegger's fundamental ontology and that this meaning must be understood in an intrinsic connection with the fundamental-ontological problem of transcendence. Articulating this connection will show how Heidegger makes transcendental philosophy properly phenomenological. Over the past decades there has been increasing interest in the idea that Heidegger was a “transcendental philosopher” during the late 1920s. Furthermore, a consensus has started to emerge around the idea that Heidegger must be thought of as a transcendental thinker during this time. For the most part this means to first experience how Heidegger's work inherits this term from Kant or Husserl so that one can then experience how Heidegger creatively adapts this inheritance. The aim of this paper is to show that such an approach is unhelpful. The aim of this paper is instead to show that transcendental philosophy bears a wholly renewed meaning in Heidegger's fundamental ontology and that this meaning must be understood in an intrinsic connection with the fundamental-ontological problem of transcendence. Articulating this connection will show how Heidegger makes transcendental philosophy properly phenomenological. For a brief time during the late 1920s Heidegger speaks of his philosophical vision in “transcendental” terms; indeed, the title for the whole first part of Being and Time even speaks of winning a specifically “transcendental horizon” for the question of being. Conversely, the past few decades have seen an increasing interest in transcendental philosophy. Indeed, one might even say that there has been a renewed desire for the transcendental – for its rationality, for its metaphysical power and loftiness, for its epistemological armour or for its power to unify traditions – and this desire has lead to all sorts of “transcendental interpretations of … ” Accordingly, while under other circumstances Heidegger's talk of the transcendental might have been brushed under the rug as a “metaphysical” embarrassment it has instead become increasingly commonplace for scholars to thematically engage with this aspect of Heidegger's work. Properly speaking, there is no getting around the way that Heidegger positions his work in transcendental terms during the late 1920s. But language is a mercurial thing; so if there is no getting around the idea that there is something “transcendental” about Heidegger's work from the late 1920s, there is equally no getting around the question concerning the meaning of this ascription. What does it mean to be transcendental? What does it mean for Heidegger to be transcendental? These are questions which remain for us, and how we respond to these questions will have a significant effect on our reading of Heidegger. In fact, as this paper will demonstrate by example, how we respond to these questions has a significant effect on our understanding of the meaning and demands of the “task of thinking” as presented to us by Heidegger's work from the late 1920s. The question about the meaning of the term “transcendental” in Heidegger's late 20s philosophy is both modest and immodest. On the one hand it is a very small topic – perhaps, one might even suspect, a merely pedantic one – but on the other hand it aims at the highest question, namely, the Seinsfrage. In order to investigate these questions I will begin by presenting the most common contemporary interpretations of Heidegger's transcendental philosophising in connection with some reflections on the history of the concept of the transcendental. Secondly, I will demonstrate the formal meaning of the word “transcendental” in Heidegger. Thirdly, working from this foundation I will more fully clarify the meaning of a Heideggerian transcendental philosophy through an investigation of the concepts, problems and phenomena arising from the preceding analysis. Here, in §3, the significance of Heidegger's concept of the “transcendental” is explicitly grappled with. (shrink)

: This paper argues that the slogans "A Woman's Right to Choose" and "The Personal is the Political" typify different traditions within feminist thinking; one emphasizing rights and equality, the other the unconscious and the personal. The author responds to both traditions by bringing together mind and body, and reason and emotion, via the figure of the copula. The copula expresses an alternative model of identity which indicates that value can be produced only in relation.

The Heidegger–Deleuze relationship has attracted significant attention of late. This paper contributes to this line of research by examining Deleuze’s claim, recently reiterated and developed by Philip Tonner, that Heidegger offers a univocal conception of Being where there is one sense of Being that is said throughout all entities. Although these authors maintain that this claim holds across Heidegger’s oeuvre, I purposefully adopt a conservative hermeneutical strategy that focuses on two writings from the 1927–1928 period—Being and Time and the following (...) year’s lecture course translated as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic—and emphasize the lesson of the ontological difference that Being is always the Being of an entity, to argue that with regards to these texts, at least, an alternative equivocal interpretation is possible in which Being is always said differently. The conclusion draws out the implications of this for the relationship between Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and Deleuze’s differential ontology. (shrink)

In this reply I further defend my claim that the transcendental should always remain a primary concern for philosophy of technology as a philosophical enterprise, contra the empirical turn’s rejection of it. Yet, instead of emphasizing the non-technological conditions of technology, as ‘classic’ thinkers of technology such as Heidegger did, it should recognize technology itself as the transcendental operator par excellence. Starting from Heidegger’s ontological understanding of transcendence I show that while technical artifacts may indeed always conform to a certain (...) horizon of understanding, they also constitute this horizon in specific ways. Following Stiegler I show that concrete technologies (technology with a small ‘t’) are not just empirical effects of an overarching movement of transcendence (Technology with a capital ‘T’) but are originally constitutive of it. In response to Romele’s critique that the social, language, images, imaginaries, symbols, etc. are also transcendentals, I argue that all these phenomena are always already conditioned by technical milieus. As for Besmer’s contention that I offer a reductive interpretation of postphenomenology’s notion of multistability, I argue that there are decisive systemic and organological limits to multistability offered by technical artefacts and that all variation in use and implementation is always constrained by inherent technical tendencies and processes of concretization. Agreeing with Besmer that the transcendental and the empirical should be understood not oppositional but compositional I argue that technology may be that which constantly ‘mediates’ between the two. (shrink)

This paper argues for a fundamental re-reading of Heideggerian philosophy, especially regarding the logical structures presented by Heidegger in the thirties and onward. The field, which this logic organizes, shows an explorative formal element of language in and of itself, and is therefore different from an analytic concept of logic. An analytic conceptualization of logic is understood here as a reflection on the inner structures of already existing notions. An explorative logic, on the other hand, explores the relations between already (...) existing notions and the possible, but yet unknown, development of new notions. The logic of Heidegger is explorative, as it describes the relational, formal structures between the already established semantic field and its virtual excess. This virtual excess, while formal, must be nonetheless considered the primary access to whatever we call external to language in the transcendental sense in Heidegger's philosophy. Therefore, the central question of this logical re-reading of Heidegger is the formal relation to the unknown real. (shrink)

While Freud and Heidegger were antipathetic towards one another’s ideas, a number of commentators have argued that the Freud–Heidegger relation is actually quite complementary. This paper contributes to this position by engaging with the relationship through the mediation of their respective views on the ‘origins’ of sexuality; a topic that is implicit to Freudian psychoanalytic theory and which is often taken to be absent from Heidegger’s, with the consequence that it has been ignored when bringing them into conversation. Having shown (...) that in the 1928 lecture course The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Heidegger does in fact address the question of sexuality in relation to the neutrality of Dasein outlined in the previous year’s Being and Time, I bring Freud and Heidegger into conversation on the question of the ‘origins’ of sexuality to suggest that there is a strong affinity between the two on this issue, insofar as both argue against any form of sexual essentialism by depending upon a processual ontology and affirming an originary sexual indeterminateness, which in the case of Freud takes the form of an initial bisexuality and in the case of Heidegger an ontological sexual neutrality, before concluding that, while Freud’s initial bisexuality forecloses sexuality within a binary framework, Heidegger’s notion of an ontological sexual neutrality does not, and so goes furthest in laying the ground for a rethinking of sexuality in non-essentialist, non-binary terms. (shrink)

In recent work, William Blattner claims that Heidegger is an empirical realist, but not a transcendental idealist. Blattner argues that, unlike Kant, Heidegger holds that thinking beyond human life warrants no judgment about nature's existence. This poses two problems. One is interpretive: Blattner misreads Kant's conception of the beyond-life as yielding the judgment that nature does not exist, for Kant shares Heidegger's view that such a judgment must lack sense. Another is programmatic: Blattner overstates the gap between Kant's and Heidegger's (...) positions, for both are ontological, not ontic. I solve these problems by showing that Heidegger's analysis of Dasein contains the core of Kant's argument for transcendental idealism: the apriority of space and time. I conclude that Heidegger exemplifies Kant's view that empirical realism just is transcendental idealism. (shrink)

Yael Lin's The Intersubjectivity of Time: Levinas and Infinite Responsibility is the first sustained inquiry into Emmanuel Levinas's theory of temporality, a concept which permeates his work and can in many ways serve as a lens through which his entire system can be examined and understood. As the first book length monograph on the subject, Lin's work promises to be of significant value to scholars of Levinas. The book proceeds by tracing what the author sees as the Western roots of (...) Levinas's theory of temporality, namely the works of Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson, then goes on to explore the various limitations and problems of that philosophical lineage, before showing how Levinas's own theory responds to those limitations and problems by drawing from the Jewish philosophical tradition. (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)

Heidegger also famously says that Being depends on Dasein, even though beings in general do not. This is perplexing. “Heidegger and the “There Is” of Being” offers an interpretation of what’s going on in the passages in which this sort of assertion is made.

The paper argues that metaphysical thought, or thought in whose context our general framework of sense is under scrutiny, involves, legitimates, and requires a variety of informal analogues of the ‘true contradictions’ supported in some paraconsistent formal logics. These are what we can call informal ‘legitimate logical inadequacies’. These paradoxical logical structures also occur in deeply pluralist contexts, where more than one, conflicting general framework for sense is relevant. The paper argues further that these legitimate logical inadequacies are real or (...) inherent in sense itself rather than conventional, shows how they can feature in argumentative practice in these metaphysical and pluralist contexts, and discusses some of their implications for metaphysical truth and for philosophical inquiry and disagreement. (shrink)

Self, others and nature (environment) have been suggested over numerous decades and in various places as a way of understanding experience in outdoor education. These three elements and the relations between them appear to cover it all. But is this really the final word on understanding experience? In this paper I explore two emphases within experience expressed by Peirce that offer differing ways of understanding experience: in one emphasis self, others and nature are submerged and not discerned; in the other (...) they appear as the three familiar and related elements. The first emphasis is phenomenological and focused on a simple whole; the other is pragmatic and concerned with a total whole (elements in a totality). The key distinction here is that between something simple (one-fold) and something total (manifold). For Heidegger the difference between these is the ontological difference, where the two differing emphases are be-ing (verb) and beings (noun); or, expressed in another way, phenomenological thinking and calculative thinking. For Dewey these two emphases are revealed as aesthetic and reflective experience, both connected via inquiry. Awareness of this difference and connection suggests that issues involving self, others and nature as elements emerge from and return to the aesthetic ways of being (or occupations) that we build through our programme design and conduct. Relations between self, others and nature are submerged within these ways of being, highlighting how our programme design and conduct does not merely concern activities (including reflective activities), but involves building ways of being. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the Cartesian paradigms of clarity and univocity and how these inform contemporary educational theory and practice. Phenomenology is discussed as a way of disrupting Descartes' visions of clarity and distinctness as paradigms of knowledge and as a return of inquiry to life as it is actually lived. Analogical discourse is examined as a way of giving a voice to this sort of inquiry. Heidegger's notions of inquiry as obedience and thanksgiving are discussed.

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)

Animating Luce Irigaray’s oeuvre are two indissociable projects: the disruption of Western metaphysics and the thinking of sexual difference. The intersection of these two projects implies that any attempt to think through the meaning and significance of Irigaray’s notoriously fraught invocation of sexual difference must take seriously the way in which this invocation is itself always already inflected by her disruptive gesture. In this paper, I will attempt to elucidate one moment of this intersection by focusing on her critical engagement (...) with Heidegger. In L’oubli de l’air , Irigaray criticizes Heidegger’s interpretation of the principle of identity as instantiating the same neglect of sexual difference that has been inscribed throughout the history of Western metaphysics. Moreover, Irigaray identifies the vestigial traces of this metaphysical legacy in Heidegger’s commitments to phenomenology. My claim, however, is that if we turn to Derrida’s second Geschlecht essay in order to mediate between Irigaray and Heidegger, the coimplicative nature of their projects comes into focus: on one hand, Derrida identifies within Heidegger’s work an incipient articulation of the very notion of sexuate difference that, on Irigaray’s reading, Heidegger’s work requires but nonetheless elides; on the other hand, Derrida’s rereading of Heidegger’s phenomenological commitments corroborates the philosophical significance of Irigaray’s intervention by recontextualizing the parameters that delimit her invocation of sexuate difference. (shrink)

In my paper, by drawing on the writings Heidegger developed in the late 1920s, I wish to display what we may refer to as the thorough educational nature of Heideggerian reflection. It is my argument that the analysis of Dasein we find in the early Heidegger displays an extraordinary deep and dense reflection on selfhood and subjectivity, a reflection that is rooted in subject’s freedom and transcending. By paying attention to the interplay between these two features, I argue that in (...) the late 1920s, while challenging the notion of an all-encompassing consciousness as the place where everything should be understood and managed, Heidegger built a conception of selfhood and subjectivity in terms of freedom, responsibility, and ongoing transformation. Such a conception, I argue, is in and of itself educational. (shrink)

This paper argues that the slogans “A Woman's Right to Choose” and “The Personal is the Political” typify different traditions within feminist thinking; one emphasizing rights and equality, the other the unconscious and the personal. The author responds to both traditions by bringing together mind and body, and reason and emotion, via the figure of the copula. The copula expresses an alternative model of identity which indicates that value can be produced only in relation.Let us say that the problem is (...) violence. At its most naive: how can the sexual relation, which is supposedly full of love, be violent?I mean the sexual relation in its resonances and ambiguity—to indicate the relation between the sexes, and the relation between lovers. In no way can the relation be confined to love, either heterosexual or homosexual, since it is often a contest. It cannot be reduced solely to a social relation, because in one of its aspects it addresses the most intimate subjectivity.In a certain feminist lifestyle advocacy, those women who are in same sex relations avoid sexual violence by avoiding men, and those who are in heterosexual relationships strive to find the “right kind”—that is, relationships of respectful and supportive love—rejecting all signs of aggression, from sexist disparagement and emotional cruelty to sexual humiliation and physical assault, as “abuse.”Strangely, this dichotomy does not explain the proximity of passion and aggression, whether in love between men and women or in same-sex relationships between feminist women. As rational counsel, it resists the important sense in which the erotic is, and is even valued as, the excess of the rational. And as an analysis of the oppression of women it defeats itself, for to insist on masculinity as violence itself, and/or on the sexual relation as properly governed by reason, seems to miss the point of both love and feminism.Stranger still, feminisms, which set out to address and redress the oppression of women, have become rivalrous themselves. Are these aggressions a legacy of the intellectual world they must take place in. Have we overlooked an aspect of the relation between sisters? Feminism has not addressed the question of aggression in feminism as anything more than contamination.Perhaps, after all, the thing that feminism has not yet successfully addressed is love. The “battle between the sexes” has not rendered the ambivalence of the heterosexual relation. As a species of theory, feminism has relished the rigor of distinction and has not found it easy to tolerate the proximity of opposites.And yet, in evoking the body, some feminisms approach closer to this difficulty. It remains to take up the relation between the body and the concept more thoroughly, in order to find out whether sexual difference could ever be philosophical. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall examine the evolution of Heidegger’s concept of ‘transcendence’ as it appears in Being and Time (1927), ‘On the Essence of Ground’ (1928) and related texts from the late 1920s in relation to his rethinking of subjectivity and intentionality. Heidegger defines Being as ‘transcendence’ in Being and Time and reinterprets intentionality in terms of the transcendence of Dasein. In the critical epistemological tradition of philosophy stemming from Kant, as in Husserl, transcendence and immanence are key notions (...) (see Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 1907, and Ideas I, 1913). Indeed, ‘transcendence in immanence’ is a leitmotif of Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl discusses transcendence in some detail in Cartesian Meditations §11 in a manner that is not dissimilar to Heidegger. Heidegger is critical of Husserl’s understanding of consciousness and intentionality and Heidegger deliberately chooses to discuss transcendence as an exceptional domain for the discussion of beings in his ‘On the Essence of Ground’, his submission to Husserl’s seventieth-birthday Festschrift. Despite his championing of a new concept of transcendence in the late 1920s, Heidegger effectively abandons the term during the early 1930s. In this paper, I shall explore Heidegger’s articulation of his new ontological conception of finite transcendence and compare it with Husserl’s conception of the transcendence of the ego in order to get clearer what is at stake in Heidegger’s conceptions of subjectivity, Dasein and transcendence. (shrink)

In the literature related to the study of sport, the idea of phenomenology appears with various meanings. The aim of this paper is to sketch the nature, methods and central concepts of phenomenology, and thereby to distinguish philosophical phenomenology from its empirical applications. We shall begin by providing an overview of what we think phenomenology is and is not, by introducing the following points: we distinguish phenomenology from phenomenalism; the ontological from the ontic; transcendental subjectivity from subjectivity; phenomenology from phenomenography; (...) and phenomenology from other kinds of empirical qualitative methodology. Next, we examine the two most important British studies to include overviews of phenomenological work in relation to sociology of sport. We then take a critical view of the work of one research paper that gives a particularly clear description of the method of ?empirical phenomenology?. Throughout, we insist on the simple basics: that phenomenology is not simply the study of empirical phenomena, is not a form of subjectivism, is not about someone's personal experience or personal perspective, and that it is not to be confused with ?qualitative research methods?. We further insist that, if a researcher wishes to use the name ?phenomenology? for his or her research, he or she should explain just what it is (about the method or the concepts, or the outcomes) that informs or results from the research programme, in order to justify the name. (shrink)

Taking the problem of perception and illusion as a leading clue, this article presents a new phenomenological approach to perception and the world: holism of experience. It challenges not only Husserl’s transcendentalism, but also what remains of it in Heidegger’s early thought, on the grounds that it is committed to the skeptical inference: Since we can always doubt any perception, we can always doubt perception as a whole. The rejection of such an implicit inference leads to a relational paradigm of (...) Being-in-the-World that differs from Heidegger’s on many points. (shrink)

Interpretations of Heidegger's Being and Time have tended to founder on the question of whether he is in the end a realist or an idealist, in part because of Heidegger's own rather enigmatic remarks on the subject. Many have thus depicted him as being in some way ambivalent, and so as holding on to an unstable combination of the two opposing positions. Recently, William Blattner has explained the apparent ambivalence by appealing to Kant's transcendental/empirical distinction. Although an ingenious reading of (...) Being and Time, there are a number of difficulties involved in cashing out its central claims. I argue that it fails, moreover, to capture Heidegger's avowed animus toward both realism and idealism. After criticizing Blattner's reading, I recount several features of Heidegger's ?existential analytic? of Dasein in Division I of Being and Time and connect them with his (slightly later) notion of world?entry. This latter notion provides a way of explaining how Heidegger retains a realistic conception of natural entities, while offering an overall view that cannot be identified with either realism or idealism. (shrink)

The confusion surrounding Heidegger's account of death in Being and Time has led to severe criticisms, some of which dismiss his analysis as incoherent and obtuse. I argue that Heidegger's critics err by equating Heidegger's concept of death with our ordinary concept. As I show, Heidegger's concept of death is not the same as the ordinary meaning of the term, namely, the event that ends life. But nor does this concept merely denote the finitude of Dasein's possibilities or the groundlessness (...) of existence, as William Blattner and Hubert Dreyfus have suggested. Rather, I argue, the concept of death has to be understood both as temporal finitude and as finitude of possibility. I show how this reading addresses the criticisms directed at Heidegger's death analysis as well as solving textual problems generated by more limited interpretations of the concept. (shrink)

The present article deals with Heidegger’s research into boredom. The phenomenon cannot be simply described as an emotion but as a fundamental attunement, which represented a pathway to being qua being for Heidegger. Many scholars have argued that the philosopher’s treatment of the phenomenon led to sublimation or transgression in describing it beyond its phenomenological limits. While I agree with the general assessment, I also believe that there is a need to expand the argument further. I will argue that the (...) cause of such transgression lies mainly in Heidegger’s inability to separate the truth from the notion of meaning or sense. (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)

In his very last, now famous, interview, Michel Foucault states that his philosophical thought was shaped by his reading of Heidegger, even though he does not specify what aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy inspired him in the first place. However, his last interview is not the only place where Foucault refers to Heidegger as his intellectual guide. In his 1981/1982 lecture course, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault confesses that the way Heidegger conceptualized the relationship between subject and truth was a (...) starting point for him for thinking about the relationship between truth, subject, subjective-transformation, and freedom. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to reconstruct the Foucault-Heidegger encounter from the perspective of subject-truth relation. I will ask how Heidegger and Foucault conceptualized the relationship between truth, self-transformation, and freedom. And I will claim that for both Foucault and Heidegger, freedom lies in constantly and creatively repeating the traditional possibilities of existence in order to question the reified patterns of interpretation, and in order to reveal the anxiety–engendering–truth that what is regarded as natural and inevitable in human life is historically contingent and transformable. (shrink)

Though the claims they make about temporality are markedly different, Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger agree that time is a philosophically foundational phenomenon; indeed, they agree that time is, in certain respects, the basis for all discursively representable beings. This paper focuses not so much on their theories of temporality (i.e., their respective answers to the question what is time? and their justifications for these answers) but rather on the challenges involved in talking about this phenomenon at all. Both thinkers (...) are highly sensitive to these challenges and to the problems involved in any attempt to represent time in a discursively straightforward manner. I will show that: (1) Bergson’s and Heidegger’s respective claims about time can be fully understood only if we keep this sensitivity in view and carefully note what they are—and aren’t—doing in talking about time ; and (2) what is ultimately at stake in their analyses is not just the phenomenon of time but what it means to engage in rigorous philosophical praxis. (shrink)

Este artigo apresenta a abordagem realizada por Heidegger dos conceitos de mundo, natureza e finitude a partir da prelação de 1929/30, intitulada Os Conceitos Fundamentais da Metafísica: Mundo, Finitude e Solidão. Ao concentrar e manter grande parte da problemática da ontologia fundamental elaborada em Ser e Tempo, a preleção de 1929/30 constitui-se por ser um vértice no pensamento de Heidegger, equilibrando-se entre a ontologia fundamental e os livros e preleções que vieram depois dos anos de 1930. Deste modo, ao apresentar (...) a transformação do conceito de abertura na preleção de 1929/30, torna-se possível argumentar que Heidegger elabora um conceito de finitude oriundo da relação do ser humano com a natureza, distinto do conceito de finitude existencial pensado a partir da relação do ser humano com a possibilidade da morte. Esse conceito de finitude assinala, por sua vez, a inserção não apenas da finitude existencial, mas também da finitude de ser. (shrink)

It is widely held that reflexivity is the defining feature of selfhood: the ability of the self to stand in a certain relation to itself. The question of how exactly to theorize this self-relation, however, has been the source of ongoing debate. In recent years, Kantian and post-Kantian approaches such as Christine Korsgaard’s constitutivism and Richard Moran’s commitment view, have attempted to establish the priority of the agential over the epistemic self-relation, thereby re-orientating the debate away from metaphysics and epistemology (...) towards ethics and moral psychology. Despite the important progress they make towards a de-alienated and reified understanding of the self-relation, however, I argue that the Kantian paradigm is ultimately inadequate because its methodological individualism makes it incapable of accounting for the irreducibly social dimension of the self-relation and, therefore, of successfully making the transition from ethics to social and political philosophy. In other words, an adequate ontology of the self-relation is possible only as a social ontology. In order to motivate this thesis, I appeal to two examples that expose the “social deficit” of the Kantian approach: Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of race/racism in “The Lived Experience of the Black” and the phenomenon of cultural collapse in Jonathan Lear’sRadical Hope. I then go on to provide a sketch of an alternative approach based on the notion of “self-appropriation”, distinguishing it from Rahel Jaeggi’s use of the term in her recent critique of alienation, in the process. (shrink)

Being and Time's fundamental ontoogy and existentialism both rest on the A Potiori Claim, which states that originary temporality is, although non-sequential, a genuine and basic concept of time from which we derive our more ordinary, sequential concept of time. In this paper, I develop a new reading and defense of this claim against the readings of William Blattner, which ties originary temporality too tightly to the particular roles and identities we live out and must therefore find Heidegger's project a (...) failure, and Tony Fisher, who implies that our various roles and identities hang together in time in a merely accidental and non-rational way. On my reading, originary temporality is the structure of Dasein's characteristic activity of existential commitment. Through this activity, we each work out, in our own case, what it takes to embody the capacity for sense-making, at all. Here, the non-sequentiality of originary temporality reflects the way in which commitments are revised and sustained through time, while the sequence of nows derives from our need to embody our commitment in a single life that negotiates among the practical demands that our various identities make of us. (shrink)

In his 2012 article Philosophy of Education for the Public Good: Five Challenges and an Agenda, Gert Biesta identifies five substantial issues about the future of education and the work required to address these issues. This article employs a Heideggerian reading of education to evaluate ‘Biesta’s truth’. I argue that Biesta’s point of view underestimates knowledge’s predominance and relativism; frames intentionality in pre-Heideggerian terms, which—although not a problem in itself because an individual is free to choose a particular perspective on (...) the concept—raises the issue of consistency in Biesta’s theoretical framework; and a final criticism concerns Biesta’s choice of tools for engaging with the identified challenges: The primary tools Biesta uses are intrinsic to the perspective he challenges. The use of a ‘first person perspective’ to frame pedagogy that focuses on the subject and ‘subjectification’ reaffirms the fundamental Western gesture that makes human beings subjects who ‘stand-over-and-against’ the world. I argue that it is possible to penetrate Plato’s ‘theoretical gaze’ and find a ‘weak’ alternative to an all-encompassing point of view of education through a Heideggerian approach that regards intentionality and thinking as ‘hearing’. (shrink)

Phenomenology has been with us for many years, and yet grasping phenomenology remains a difficult task. Heidegger, too, experienced this difficulty and devoted much of his teaching to the challenge of working phenomenologically. This article draws on aspects of Heidegger’s commentary in progressing the teaching and learning of phenomenology, especially as this pertains to research in fields such as education. Central to this task is elucidation of what I believe to be the most important feature of phenomenology—what Heidegger referred to (...) as the ‘starting point’ of phenomenology. I have written this article in the manner of a phenomenological workshop with the intention of inviting the reader to engage experientially with this starting point. (shrink)