Philosophers, theologians, physicists, and psychologists join their efforts to reflect on the crucial issues of limit and infinity, time and eternity, empty space and material space. The volume offers an invaluable contribution to some of the most important issues of our times: questions on God and consciousness are discussed in parallel with quantum theory, black holes, the inflationary universe, the Big Bang, and string theory, from different perspectives and angles, ranging from neuroscience to AI.

Nicholas Rescher’s way of understanding process philosophy reflects the ambitions of his own philosophical project and commits him to a conceptually ideal interpretation of process. Process becomes a transcendental idea of reflection that can always be predicated of our knowledge of the world and of the world qua known, but not necessarily of reality an sich. Rescher’s own taxonomy of process thinking implies that it has other variants. While Rescher’s approach to process philosophy makes it intelligible and appealing to mainstream (...) analytic philosophy, it leaves behind the more daring ideas of Bergson, James, and Whitehead, all of whom envisioned the primordial reality of process in a radical ontology of becoming. This variant of process thought can be construed as coherent and self-consistent, but not without relinquishing the correspondence theory of truth and embracing challenging ideas that bring us in close proximity to existentialism, apophatic theology, and Buddhism. (shrink)

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ETHICS. AFTER NIETZSCHE -/- Preface This book tells the story of twentieth-century ethics or, in more detail, it reconstructs the history of a discussion on the foundations of ethics which had a start with Nietzsche and Sidgwick, the leading proponents of late-nineteenth-century moral scepticism. During the first half of the century, the prevailing trends tended to exclude the possibility of normative ethics. On the Continent, the trend was to transform ethics into a philosophy of existence whose self-appointed task was (...) that of describing the human condition as consisting of choices, as unavoidable as arbitrary, without any attempt at providing criteria for making such choices. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the heir of ethics was a philosophy of morality, that is, an analysis of the language of morality that intended to clarify valuations without trying to justify them. 1958 was the year of the normative turn that led to the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy, a turn followed by decades of controversies between distinct kinds of normative ethics: utilitarian, Kantian, virtue ethics. While the controversy was raging, a quiet revolution took place, that of applied ethics which surprisingly dissolved the controversy's very subject matter by providing methods for making convergence possible on intermediate principles even when no agreement was available about first principles. The normative turn and the revolution of applied ethics have led us, at the turn of the century, to a goal that was quite far from the starting point. Instead of scepticism and relativism that was the fashion at the beginning of the century, at the beginning of the third millennium impartial and universal moral arguments seem to hold the spot being supported, if not by a final rational foundation, at least by reasonableness, the most precious legacy of the Enlightenment. -/- ● TABLE OF CONTENTS -/- ● I Anglo-Saxon philosophy: naturalism 1. Dewey beyond evolutionism and utilitarianism 2. Dewey and anti-essentialist moral epistemology 3. Dewey and naturalist moral ontology 4. Dewey and normative ethics of conduct and function 5. Perry and semantic naturalism -/- ● II Anglo-Saxon philosophy: ideal utilitarianism and neo-intuitionism 1. Moore's critique of utilitarian empiricism 2. Moore on the naturalistic fallacy 3. Moore on the nature of intrinsic value 4. Moore on ideal utilitarianism 5. Prichard on the priority of the right over the good 6. Ross's coherentist moral epistemology 7. Ross's moral ontology: realism, pluralism, and non-naturalism 8. Ross's normative ethics of prima facie duties -/- The chapter reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore's early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. It stresses the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. It argues that PE is more a patchwork of somewhat diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. -/- ●III Anglo-Saxon philosophy: non-cognitivism 1. The Scandinavian School, the Vienna circle and proto-emotivism 2. Wittgenstein and the ineffability of ethics 3. Russell's and Ayer's radical emotivism 4. Stevenson and moderate emotivism 5. Stevenson and the pragmatics of moral language 6. Stevenson and the methods for solving ethical disagreement 7. Hare and prescriptivism The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of 'good', its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with 'emotive' meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell's ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson's theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. A section reconstructs the discussion from the Forties about Hume's law, mentioning Karl Popper's argument and Richard Hare's early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- ●IV Anglo-Saxon philosophy: critics of non-cognitivism 1. Neo-naturalism and its objections to the naturalistic fallacy argument 2. Objections to Hume's law 3. Clarence Lewis and the pragmatic contradiction 4. Toulmin and the good reasons approach 5. Baier and moral reasons 5. Baier, social moralities and the absolute morality 6. Baier and the moral point of view 7. Baier and the contents of absolute ethics -/- ● V Continental philosophy: the philosophy of values 1. Max Weber and the polytheism of values 2. Phenomenology against psychologism and rationalism 3. Reinach and the theory of social acts 4. Scheler and the material ethics of values 5. Hartmann and the ontology of values 6. Plessner, Gehlen and the Philosophische Anthropologie -/- The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl's project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the apriori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy conducted in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach's theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that sketches the ideas 'discovered' later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section discusses Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of 'values' – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler, who claimed to be Husserl's legitimate heirs. -/- ● VI Continental philosophy: the critics of the philosophy of values 1. Freud, the Superego and Civilization 2. Heidegger on original ethos against ethics 3. Sartre and de Beauvoir on authenticity and ambiguity 4. Adorno and Horkheimer on emancipation and immoralism -/- ●VII Post-liberal theologians and religious thinkers 1. Barth on the autonomy of faith from ethics 2. Developments of Reformed moral theology after Barth 3. Bonhoeffer on the concrete divine command and ethics of penultimate realities 4. Developments of Reformed and Catholic moral theology after world war II 5. Baeck and the transformation of liberal Judaism 6. Rosenzweig against liberal Judaism 7. Buber and religion as the vital lymph of morality 8. Heschel and Judaism as a science of actions -/- The chapter examines the main protagonists of Christian theology and Jewish religious thinking in the twentieth century. It stresses how the main dilemmas of contemporary philosophical ethics lie at the root of the various path of inquiry taken by these thinkers. -/- ● VIII Normative ethics: neo-Utilitarianism 1. The discussion on act and rule utilitarianism 2. Hare on two-tiered preference utilitarianism 3. Harsanyi, Gauthier and rational choice ethics 4. Parfit, utilitarianism and the idea of a person 5. Brandt and indirect conscience utilitarianism -/- The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick's and Moore's fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine refuted. Two examples give the reader a glimpse at this uproarious process. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This transformation results in preference utilitarianism combined with a 'Kantian' version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare's two-level preference utilitarianism, where act utilitarianism plays the function of the eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of an action-guiding practical device. -/- ● IX Normative ethics: neo-Aristotelianism and virtue ethics 1. Hannah Arendt, action and judgement 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer and phronesis 3. Alasdair MacIntyre on practices, virtues, and traditions 5. Stuart Hampshire on deliberation 6. Bernard Williams and moral complexity 7. Feminist ethics -/- Sect 1 reconstructs the post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named 'Rehabilitation of practical philosophy' is described. Heidegger's most brilliant disciples were the promoters of this Rehabilitation. Hans-Georg Gadamer is a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle's lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger's lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the significant role of the notion of phronesis. Sect 3 discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. It argues that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. The chapter gives a short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot's and Peter Geach's critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre's grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- ● X Normative ethics: Kantian and rights-based ethics 1. Dialogical constructivism 2. Apel, Habermas and discourse ethics 3. Gewirth and rights-based ethics 4. Nagel on agent-relative reasons 5. Donagan and persons as ends in themselves Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This current started with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. The chapter offers an examination of his argument in some detail, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas's elaboration on Apel's theory. -/- ● XI The applied ethics renaissance 1. Elisabeth Anscombe on the atom bomb 2. From medical ethics to bioethics 3. Rawls and public ethics 3. Nozick, Dworkin and further developments of public ethics 5. Sen and the revival of economic ethics -/- The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin's new casuistry. The chapter argues that Rawls's distinction between a "political" and a "metaphysical" approach to the theory of justice, one central part of ethical theory, is a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and the new casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter. The idea is that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls' view never will be close – on the essential criteria for judgment. -/- ● XII Fin-de-siècle metaethics 1. Deontic logics 2. Anti-realism 3. External realism 4. Internal realism 5. Kantian constructivism -/- The chapter illustrates the fresh start of meta-ethical discussion in the Eighties and Nineties and the resulting new alignments: metaphysical naturalism, internal realism, anti-realism, and constructivism. (shrink)

In this essay, I first analyze the extension of hermeneutical interpretation in the Heideggerian sense to products of contemporary technology which are components of our “lifeworld”. Products of technology, such as airplanes, laptops, cellular phones, washing machines, or vacuum cleaners might be compared with what Heidegger calls the “Ready-to-hand” (das Zuhandene) with regard to utilitarian objects such as a hammer, planer, needle and door handle in Being and Time. Our life with our equipment, which represents the “Ready-to-hand” in Heidegger's sense (...) of the word, is determined by temporalization (Zeitigung) which cannot be separated and isolated from the wholeness of things in the world. In the second part of my paper, I explore the positive achievement of material hermeneutics (Don Ihde) with regard to its extension to technoscience and the discussion of how such hermeneutics can contribute to the preservation of our threatened lifeworld, but also to explore the possibilities of how technical inventions, medical innovations could improve our way of life. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 66 Heft: 6 Seiten: 802-804.

Straipsnyje siekiama atskleisti antikinės ir moderniosios technikos sampratos panašumus ir skirtumus. Moderniosios technikos analizė rodo, kad ši technika pasižymi svetima autentiškai kultūrai, gruobuoniška prigimtimi. Išryškėja esminis tradiciškai suprantamos technē ir moderniosios technikos skirtumas. Moderniosios technikos esmė, kuri įvardijama žodžiu „po-stata“, yra tokia: vietoj savaimingo esinių atsiskleidimo būties šviesoje, kai žmogus dalyvauja šiame atsiskleidimo procese tik kaip tarpininkas bei kūrėjas, vyksta grobuoniško-prievartinio pobūdžio atsiskleidimas, žmogui dalyvaujant kaip reikalaujančiai jėgai. Naudojantis moderniojo mokslo pajėgomis, kaskart vis labiau objektinama gamta šiais laikais tampa paprasčiausia (...) išteklių talpykla. Modernioji technika ir jos inicijuotas globalaus išteklių kaupimo ir vertimo preke procesas neišvengiamai gilina krizės tendencijas ir stiprina susvetimėjimo procesą. Straipsnis atskleidžia potencialios disharmonijos, siejamos su globalios, autonomiškos technokratijos iškilimu, horizontą. (shrink)

El desarrollo actual de la ecología ha abierto nuevos desafíos para la reflexión filosófica contemporánea. En este sentido, ya no es posible interpretar la naturaleza humana a partir de una reflexión sobre el hombre como un ser aislado de su ambiente. El paradigma de ecología humana que se presenta aquí quiere heredar la reflexión sobre la filosofía de la naturaleza (y también sobre la filosofía de la naturaleza humana), proponiendo la cuestión ecológica actual como un tema eminentemente antropológico: el lugar (...) del hombre en el cosmos indica asimismo su esencia. Esta tarea nos obliga a replantear la especificidad del ser humano en relación con el mundo a través del tema del habitar, que nos invita a reflexionar sobre las actividades del custodiar y del construir la casa. Se hace así posible replantear el tema ecológico actual como una crisis predominantemente antropológica: para sanar la herida del ecosistema, primero hay que curar la fractura dentro del hombre. (shrink)

Yuk Hui refers to cosmotechnics as the deep interweaving of human action and technology as shaped by diverse moral universes. In this article, I pit two views of cosmotechnics against each other. I...

This article probes the practical ethical implications of AI system design by reconsidering the important topic of bias in the datasets used to train autonomous intelligent systems. The discussion draws on recent work concerning behaviour-guiding technologies, and it adopts a cautious form of technological utopianism by assuming it is potentially beneficial for society at large if AI systems are designed to be comparatively free from the biases that characterise human behaviour. However, the argument presented here critiques the common well-intentioned requirement (...) that, in order to achieve this, all such datasets must be debiased prior to training. By focusing specifically on gender-bias in Neural Machine Translation systems, three automated strategies for the removal of bias are considered – downsampling, upsampling, and counterfactual augmentation – and it is shown that systems trained on datasets debiased using these approaches all achieve general translation performance that is much worse than a baseline system. In addition, most of them also achieve worse performance in relation to metrics that quantify the degree of gender bias in the system outputs. By contrast, it is shown that the technique of domain adaptation can be effectively deployed to debias existing NMT systems after they have been fully trained. This enables them to produce translations that are quantitatively far less biased when analysed using gender-based metrics, but which also achieve state-of-the-art general performance. It is hoped that the discussion presented here will reinvigorate ongoing debates about how and why bias can be most effectively reduced in state-of-the-art AI systems. (shrink)

Der Psychoanalytiker Herbert Stein nimmt die Herausgabe der Heraklit-Vorlesungen Heideggers zum Anlaß und Ausgangspunkt, die Stellung Freuds und der Psychoanalyse im Rahmen der Geschichte abendländisch-europäischen Denkens neu zu untersuchen. Freud steht mit seinem "Glauben" an "unseren Gott Logos" unwissentlich in der Nachfolge Heraklits. Hinsichtlich dieses seines damit ausgedrückten, wenn auch gemäßigten Wissenschaftsglaubens ist unsere Zeit eher pessimistischer als Freud. Unsere Logik der Wissenschaft und Technik scheint mit "Notwendigkeit" in ihre Krise zu geraten . Für künftige Lösungen der Krise muß das (...) Denken sich seinen Ursprüngen zuwenden. (shrink)

: This paper goes beyond critiques of western philosophical notions of space as passive, feminine, and unintelligent by reconfiguring containment as an (inter-)active process. The author draws on work in the history of technology, on a cybernetic epistemology that emphasizes the interdependence of organism and environment, and on intersubjectivist psychoanalytic theories of the maternal provision. A more unexpected ally is found in Heidegger, whose writings on holding and supply are read in ways that contribute to the development of an urgently (...) required philosophy of container technologies. (shrink)

This paper goes beyond critiques of western philosophical notions of space as passive, feminine, and unintelligent by reconfiguring containment as an active process. The author draws on work in the history of technology, on a cybernetic epistemology that emphasizes the interdependence of organism and environment, and on intersubjectivist psychoanalytic theories of the maternal provision. A more unexpected ally is found in Heidegger, whose writings on holding and supply are read in ways that contribute to the development of an urgently required (...) philosophy of container technologies. (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.

El pensamiento de Gianni Vattimo, padre del pensiero débole, se sitúa conscientemente en el marco de una historia de la metafísica, que tiene en Nietzsche y Heidegger, dos de los representantes más señeros de uno de sus giros o momentos álgidos. El pensiero débole, redefinido en su últimos escritos como comunismo hermenéutico, corresponde a un nuevo hito de esa historia de la metafísica que no es otra cosa que la historia de la onto-teo-logía occidental, donde los conceptos de Ser y (...) Dios, configuran todo el espacio de esa ciencia o filosofía fundamental, la metafísica, fundada por Aristóteles, reconfigurada por Tomás de Aquino, criticada por Nietzsche y redefinida por Heidegger. (shrink)

RESUMO Este artigo busca levantar algumas questões a respeito da proposta do filósofo alemão Peter Sloterdijk ao Antropoceno, termo em debate que define a época na qual o ser humano se configurou como um agente de transformação geológica e climática. O debate faz-se pertinente por conta da proximidade de Sloterdijk com nomes como Bruno Latour e Yuk Hui, autores que, de forma central ou tangencial, se debruçam sobre este problema. Neste artigo, começaremos trazendo alguns dos principais conceitos sloterdijkianos de sua (...) obra recente para, em seguida, analisar suas propostas de ‘paradigma homeotécnico’ e de ‘coimunismo’, levantando, ao fim, questões pertinentes às propostas mencionadas. ABSTRACT This paper aims to raise some questions concerning the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s propositions regarding Anthropocene, a debatable term that serves to define the epoch in which human being made itself an agent of geological and climatic transformation. This debate is important because of Sloterdijk’s closeness with names such as Bruno Latour and Yuk Hui, authors that, in a more or less central manner, engage with such a problem. Here, firstly we will gather some of the main concepts of Sloterdijk’s recent work in order to analyze the ‘homeotechnological paradigm’ and the ‘co-immunism’ propositions, raising, at last, some relevant questions to the aforementioned propositions. (shrink)

This paper aims to clear two regular misunderstandings when comparing the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze and Martin Heidegger: firstly, the alleged opposition between Heideggerian negativity and Deleuzian positivity; secondly, the assumed contrariety between Deleuzian immanence and Heideggerian transcendence. In this fashion, the proposal is not so much to point at coincidences as to underline the fact that the differences are not where they are usually sought. The method used consists in taking Deleuze’s mentions to Heidegger in Difference and Repetition as (...) a common thread for tracking the Deleuzian use of Heideggerian concepts. We will attempt to show that both aspects of the Deleuzian transcendental field, the virtual and the intensive, hold a certain “negativity” and “concealment”, respectively, which runs against the picture of Deleuze as a philosopher of thorough and unconcealed manifestation. We will likewise argue that Heideggerian transcendence is not necessarily opposed to Deleuzian immanence, and that the Heideggerian concepts of Zwiefalt and Selbe are used by Deleuze in order to think of immanence. We contend that the distinction between the negative and the problematic allows Deleuze to speak of being even while accepting ontological difference. (shrink)

En este articulo analizamos el fenómeno del Ereignis en la obra de Heidegger posterior a la Kehre para confrontar su origen conflictivo. Para esto, presentamos la influencia de su lectura del πόλεµοç de Heráclito y una interpretación de la estructura y sus dimensiones gracias a la tensión de las partes que se mantienen en continua oscilación por la naturaleza abismal de la donación. Asimismo, revisamos el camino que presentan los ensambles del fenómeno a la luz de su obra Beiträge zur (...) Philosophie. De esto modo, comprenderemos un poco más el sentido complejo de este fenómeno y su aporte al problema de la diferencia. In this paper we analyze the phenomenon of Ereignis in Heidegger's work after the Kehre, in order to question his conflicting origin. To do this, we show the influence of his reading of Heraclitus' πόλεµοç as well as an interpretation of the structure and its dimensions, thanks to the tension between the parts kept in continuous oscillation due to the abysmal nature of donation. We also revised the path shown by the gatherings of the phenomenon, in the light of his work Beiträge zur Philosophie. This way, we may get greater insights into the complex sense of this phenomenon and its contribution to the issue of difference. (shrink)

Este trabajo parte de la pregunta por la posibilidad de deducir un planteamiento estrictamente político de los análisis ontológicos de la modernidad llevados a cabo por Martin Heidegger. Con este fin, se examina su interpretación del fenómeno griego de la pólis, así como la distinción que en ella se establece entre esta forma de comunidad y el Estado moderno, fundado para Heidegger en la esencia metafísica de la modernidad. Para clarificar esta cuestión se atiende a la proclamación de valores que (...) Heidegger observa en los diferentes modos de organización estatal que aparecen en la época de la consumación técnica de la metafísica. En conexión con ello, se estudia su visión del nihilismo y se ofrece finalmente una hipótesis sobre la forma de Estado que resultaría coherente con la renuncia a los valores que, a su juicio, exige la manifestación del ente en la modernidad como objeto por entero producible. (shrink)

This paper is motivated by Heidegger’s invitation to think the essence of technics through a dialogue between technics and art. This dialogue is approached with the help of several artworks belonging to what can be called the “technological turn” in art. First, I draw a schematic picture of notions of instrumentality, rationality, totality, and teleology inherited from classical philosophy of art and technology and challenged by contemporary art. I underline the Romantic claim that art overcomes these features thanks to its (...) freedom and ask, referring to the work of Gilbert Simondon, whether technology could also be liberated from its subordination to utilitarian ends. Second, I look at how certain contemporary works of art attempt to solve some of these problems. Artists who seize technical objects generally seek to make their functioning visible and problematic by distorting, interrupting, or otherwise modifying the technical dispositif—this is when a machine becomes a work of art. I show how this happens in certain works of Rebecca Horn, Jean Tinguely, Anaïs Tondeur, Eduardo Kac, and Tomas Saraceno. In conclusion, I show how art can liberate technology by liberating it from utility and instrumentality and by exposing it as such in its functioning. On the other hand, I argue that technology can liberate art, both through artistic techniques and nonartistic technological processes. (shrink)

In this article, I elucidate the significance of Heidegger’s ‘question of being’ from a topological point of view by explaining the relationship between his thought of place and language. After exploring various hermeneutic strategies of reading Heidegger’s oeuvre, I turn to Richard Capobianco’s interpretation of Heidegger and critically engage with his idea of the experience of being itself as the ‘luminous self-showing of logos’. In doing so, I explain the later turn from ‘truth’ to ‘place’ and articulate why logos needs (...) to be conceived as the gathering site of the presencing of being. In arguing against the primacy of passive receptivity and active projection, I put forward the primacy of language as the topos and logos of being. In returning to the Capobianco-Sheehan debate, I conclude by explaining why Heidegger’s place-related notions cannot be thought metaphorically. (shrink)

In this article, I elucidate Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of Soph-ocles’ tragedy Antigone from a topological point of view by focusing on the place-character of Antigone’s poetic ethos. Antigone’s decision to defy Creon’s order and bury her brother Polynices is discussed as a movement that underpins her poetic disposition as a demigod. Antigone’s situatedness between gods and hu-mans is identified as the place of poetic dwelling, and the significance of Antig-one’s relation to the polis is explained. The main argument of the (...) article is two-fold: 1) When we read Antigone focusing on the notion of dwelling, we can better make sense how Heidegger’s engagement with the question of finitude closes the envisioned gap between ontology and ethics. 2) The idea of poetic dwelling is a confrontation with spatio-temporal limits of human existence, and requires a more holistic way of thinking about the place of humans in the world, thinking beyond being-action dichotomy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the Black Notebooks, Heidegger ascribes in 1938/9 to the Jewish race an “empty rationality and calculative ability,” in his view the cause of its “worldlessness.” To assess this characterisation, I present Heidegger’s theories of history as a decline in Being and Time and in his later history of Being. For this purpose, I discuss his notions of Rechnen, Machenschaft, and Geviert, several existentialia from Being and Time, and Heidegger’s identification of modern machination and modern technology. Furthermore, I examine Heidegger’s (...) attitude toward the Jews and the Holocaust. I present his alignment of the unconcealment of modernity and the Jewish race, and compare his theory of machination with the texts “Positionality” and “The Question concerning Technology”. Heidegger’s notes about the Jews in the Black Notebooks after 1944 confirm that he tried “to silence Auschwitz silently,” as I already argued in a paper from 1995. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es mostrar el sentido de la risa del filósofo Zaratustra en la obra de Friedrich Nietzsche. Su risa expresa una actitud filosófica y posee tres características: es signo de la sabiduría trágica, síntoma de una forma de vida saludable y una herramienta para la crítica de los ideales que dañan la vida. Concluimos el artículo considerando que la risa y la comedia es el necesario punto de llegada de la concepción dionisíaca del mundo.

: Catherine Malabou is a professor of philosophy at Paris-Nanterre. A collaborator and student of Jacques Derrida, her work shares some of his interest in rigorous protocols of reading, and a willingness to attend to the undercurrents of over-read and "too familiar" texts. But, as she points out, this orientation was shared by Hegel himself. Arguing against Heidegger, Kojève, and other critics of Hegel, the book in which this Introduction appears puts Hegel back on the map of the present.

Catherine Malabou is a professor of philosophy at Paris-Nanterre. A collaborator and student of Jacques Derrida, her work shares some of his interest in rigorous protocols of reading, and a willingness to attend to the undercurrents of over-read and “too familiar” texts. But, as she points out, this orientation was shared by Hegel himself. Arguing against Heidegger, Kojève, and other critics of Hegel, the book in which this Introduction appears puts Hegel back on the map of the present.

Heidegger understands technology as a mode of revealing, i.e., a way of discovering and comprehending reality, which is not merely the result of human invention and operation, but rather a destiny which surpasses and addresses the human being, insofar as its root lay deep in the very advent of philosophy, of the West and it position toward being as a whole. How can we still have interest in such ontological conception of technology as a destiny? What is its topical relevance (...) for the present? What is its contribution to think the transformative action of technology, i.e., the opportunity and threat it brings with it? (shrink)

By drawing on the insights of a number of continental as well as Asian thinkers, this article reflects on the "significance" of comparative philosophy—both in the sense of discussing the "meaning" and in the sense of arguing for the "importance" of this endeavor. Encountering another culture allows one to deepen one's self-understanding by learning to "see oneself from the outside"; this deeper self-understanding in turn allows one to listen to what the other culture has to say. These two moments, or (...) movements, are interdependent and mutually supportive. Without the step back to self-understanding, we unknowingly reduce the other to the unrecognized categories of our own thinking; but without encountering another culture, our understanding of our own culture remains shallow. This article argues that an engagement with non-Western philosophy, particularly with a set of traditions as rich and radically different as those of Asian thought, can and should take place as a hermeneutic circling between self-understanding and openness to encounter: the dialogical step back and step forward are mutually supportive endeavors. For only by way of such dialogue do we attain the concrete freedom and possibility for transformation and change, that is, the ability to critically and creatively develop old customs or modes of thought and to critically and creatively adopt new ones. Moreover, only through such dialogue can we learn to not only let others be, but to share insights with them, and to build together a global community which neither reifies nor abolishes cultural differences. (shrink)

L'envahissement de l'espace par la technique est un fait accompli. Non seulement l'espace physique et l'espace organisationnel, mais aussi l'espace du discours et celui de l'écriture sont déjà bien occupés. La technique est en effet devenue un sujet de conversation quotidien, remplit les colonnes de toutes sortes de journaux et de revues et fait l'objet d'un nombre considérable d'études monographiques. Alors pourquoi ce titre encore qui risque d'aggraver le resserrement des habitants des lieux et hâter leur étouffement?

If we examine the discussion between Carnap and Heidegger about metaphysics, we can easily see that epistemological, logical, and ontological issues were at the forefront of that debate, whereas at...

In his essay, ‘Heidegger's Categories in Sein und Zeit’, Robert Brandom argues that Heidegger, particularly in the notion of Zuhandenheit, anticipates his own normatively pragmatist conception of intentionality. He attempts to demonstrate this by marshalling short passages from right across the relevant sections of Sein und Zeit in such a way that they do seem to say what Brandom claims. But does one reach the same conclusion when one examines, more or less in sentence‐by‐sentence fashion, the large slab of text (...) in which Heidegger introduces the notion of Zuhandenheit? I believe not. First, however, let us look at how Brandom reads Heidegger, in particular, how he interprets the notion of Zuhandenheit, which, in contrast both to Macquarrie and Robinson and to Brandom, I shall translate as ready‐to‐handedness.1. (shrink)

Im Rahmen der Maßnahmen zur Eindämmung der Covid-19- Pandemie sind die Bürgerinnen und Bürger in Deutschland und vielen anderen Ländern dazu angehalten, weitestgehend in ihren Privatwohnungen zu bleiben. Wurde der Wert des Privaten in der liberalen Tradition gerade im Rückzug von und als Schutz vor der politischen Öffentlichkeit sowie administrativen Eingriffen gesehen, wird das Private damit nun unmittelbar politischen Anforderungen unterworfen. Indem die Kontrolle über die Gewährung und Verwehrung des Zugangs zum Privaten eingeschränkt worden ist und keinen frei gewählten Rückzugsort (...) mehr darstellt, verändert sich auch die Wahrnehmung lokaler Privatheit. Dabei stellt sich die Frage, ob die lokale Privatheit ihren Wert verliert und hier bereits von einer „Kolonialisierung“ der lokalen Privatheit gesprochen werden muss. Vor diesem Hintergrund soll ausgehend von feministischer Kritik liberaler Verständnisse lokaler Privatheit argumentiert werden, dass die These der strikten Trennung von Öffentlichkeit und Privatheit empirisch unzutreffend und normativ unangemessen ist. Davon ausgehend können Legitimitätsbedingungen öffentlichen Eingreifens in die lokale Privatheit entwickelt und die pandemiebedingten Maßnahmen hinsichtlich ihrer Legitimität überprüft werden. Dabei wird argumentiert, dass sich hierbei zwar nur eingeschränkt von einer Kolonialisierung sprechen lässt, sich die Wahrnehmung der lokalen Privatheit im Zuge der Ausgangs- und Kontaktbeschränkungen jedoch zu Lasten ihres Wertes verändert hat. (shrink)

The paper works out an account of the piety proper to philosophical thought. The investigation proceeds as a critical interpretation of three enigmatic claims made by Martin Heidegger about ‘the piety of thinking,’ but the paper is not simply exegetical; the interpretive work is constantly in service of an attempt to think through the phenomenon independently. Plato’s Euthyphro and Nietzsche’s critique of scientific piety both hover in the background of Heidegger’s pronouncements, and they are given special attention here. Through the (...) investigation, philosophical piety is shown to be a virtuous capacity to respond with fitting submission to the truth as what is insurmountably prior to us. To respond fittingly is, at least, to deal well with sameness and difference, which in the case of piety means to recognize two features of our situation: that philosophical questioning necessarily arises out of a fundamental listening, or affirmation, and that we always belong to being but only ever across a gap. (shrink)

In this article, the Heidegger and Derrida controversy about the nature of questioning is revisited in order to rehabilitate questioning as an essential characteristic of contemporary philosophy. After exploring Heidegger's characterization of philosophy as questioning and Derrida's criticism of the primacy of questioning, we will evaluate Derrida's criticism and articulate three characteristics of Heidegger's concept of questioning. After our exploration of Heidegger's concept of questioning, we critically evaluate Heidegger's later rejection of questioning. With this, we not only contribute to the (...) discussion about why Heidegger rejected questioning in his later thought and whether this rejection is legitimized, but also to the rehabilitation of questioning in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to begin to respond to the question of how to engage the presence of catastrophic climate change as a locus of philosophical thought. What has to be thought is the end of the world. Central to that project is Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and in particular, Heidegger’s thinking of the earth/world relation, both in itself and in terms of the limits it encounters. Heidegger’s use of “examples” of artwork, as well (...) as works by Nicolas Poussin and Anselm Kiefer, are deployed in order to begin to understand the role of art in thinking the end of the world. (shrink)

This paper compares two influential but conflicting contemporary models of politics as an activity: those of Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou. It discovers the fundamental difference between their approaches to politics in their opposing evaluations of the contemporary political significance of the legacy of Plato, Platonism, and the Platonic Idea. Karl Popper’s and Arendt’s analyses of the inherently ideological nature of totalitarianism are contrasted with Badiou’s vindication of an ideological “politics of the Idea.” Arendt and Badiou are shown to share (...) an understanding of politics as a realm for the human deployment of novelty and world-transformation. Their key disagreement concerns the form of activity that accomplishes this deployment. For Arendt, political activity has the basic form of noninstrumental and nonteleological action (praxis), devalued by the Platonic tradition of political philosophy. Badiou, by contrast, follows Plato in regarding politics essentially as a process of production (poiēsis) oriented to an ideal end. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida's scattered remarks on the ambiguous role examples play in the passage between the universal and the singular revolve around an often-neglected point: any attempt to theorise exemplarity will itself be subject to the law it seeks to account for. This oversight limits scholarship on the subject, but may be amended by returning to the loci classici on exemplarity in Derrida's Glas, La vérité en peinture, Passions, and elsewhere. Moreover, in three texts published in the 1980s: La loi du (...) genre, Préjugés and Psyché, Derrida emphasises how literature is particularly given to ‘remark’ its own status as literature and as such provides a privileged example of the problem of exemplarity. Another example in which exemplarity is in general singularly implicated is deconstruction itself. (shrink)

Proceedings of PhiloWeb 2012, workshop at WWW 2012, on the philosophy of the Web.

Artikkeli käy läpi Quentin Meillassoux’n Äärellisyyden jälkeen -teoksessa esittelemiä spekulatiivisen materialismin lähtökohtia: ajatuksen Kantin jälkeistä filosofiasta hallinneesta korrelationismista ja sen ”heikosta” ja ”vahvasta” muodosta sekä Meillassoux’n perusargumentin, jolla hän pyrkii osoittamaan vahvan korrelationismin pyrkimyksen absoluuttisista viitepiisteistä luopumiseen sisäisesti ristiriitaiseksi. Tarkastelun pääpaino on Meillassoux’n väitteessä, että ajattelun riisuminen kaikista absoluuttisista näkökohdista johtaa vahvan korrelationismin omaksumaan ”fideistisen”, uskon ja järjen erillisyyttä ja keskinäistä riippumattomuutta korostavan suhtautumisen uskonnolliseen uskoon. Tällainen fideismi voi Meillassoux’n mukaan suojella tai jopa palvella ”nykypäivän fanatismia”. Artikkeli esittää joukon kriittisiä (...) huomioita Meillassoux’n fideismin ja uskon, uskonnollisten absoluuttien sekä fanatismin käsitteistä. Hänen klassiseen valistusmoderniin nojaava fideismikritiikkinsä osoittautuu toistaiseksi puutteellisesti perustelluksi ja ongelmallisesti muotoilluksi. (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)