The question of nothingness occupies the thinking of a number of philosophers in the first half of the twentieth-century, with three of the most important responses being those of Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Surprisingly, however, there has been little discussion of their specific comments on nothingness either individually or comparatively. This paper starts to remedy this by suggesting that, while Bergson dismisses nothingness as a pseudo-problem based in a flawed metaphysical understanding, Heidegger, in What is Metaphysics?, claims (...) that metaphysics entails a covering of being meaning that Bergson’s analysis actually depends on and so brings thinking to a questioning of being. In turn, Heidegger’s insight acts as the transitional point for Sartre who criticizes Bergson’s description of nothingness to show that, following Heidegger, nothingness is a real ontological problem. From this insight, Sartre distinguishes between negativity, nothingness, and nihilation to show that the issue of nothingness is intimately connected to the freedom of human consciousness, which, by distinguishing between ontological and practical freedom, reveals that nothingness has ethical and political significance. By way of conclusion, a number of problems in Sartre’s account are identified. (shrink)

Both Heidegger and Wittgenstein consider the possibility of a philosophical inquiry of an absolutely universal scope—an inquiry into the being of all beings, in Heidegger’s case, and into the logical form of everything that can be meaningfully said, in Wittgenstein’s. Moreover, they both raise the worry that the theoretical language by means of which we speak of particular beings and assert particular facts is not suited to this task. And yet their own philosophical work seems to include many assertions of (...) ordinary, theoretical language. Are they being inconsistent? Or are they hoping to use theoretical language in a way that conveys what cannot be said in that language? Much of the scholarship on each of these thinkers takes the form of one of the two horns of this dilemma. In the context of Wittgenstein scholarship, however, a third alternative has been proposed: the Resolute Reading of the Tractatus. My aim is to establish the availability of a similar solution to Heidegger’s predicament. It will emerge that Heidegger rejects the possibility of a theoretical account of being and pursues a project of a radically different sort, whose goal is to bring about a transformation of our fundamental relation to being. (shrink)

This article is a Heideggerian inquiry into the possibility of ontological experience, that is, the possibility of experiencing the ontological difference, something wholly distinct from beings. Heidegger, as we know, articulated this as the question of Being. It is a paradoxical question that cannot, at first sight, be answered phenomenologically : if any conscious experience presupposes the constitution of an intentional object in the act of experience, there must be something in any experience. In this article, I set out to (...) defend the position that ontological experience is possible and central to the human existence. This view rests on the Heideggerian notion of the affective grounds of all thinking, the attunement of any experience by moods. I will argue that: 1) any thinking is attuned by moods; 2) ontological experience occurs in certain negative moods. 3) ontological experience is possible only through failure, a malfunction in the fulfilment of meaning; 4) ontological experience is possible in art rather than in science. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt is well known that, from the beginning to the end of his philosophical trajectory, Martin Heidegger tries to develop a fundamental ontology which aims at answering the so-called question...