PDF with introduction and front and back materials. Abstract: A provocative examination of the consequences of Levinas’s and Adorno’s thought for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. This book unfolds a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the “non-identity thinking” of Adorno and the “ethics of the Other” of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and “inhuman” material others (...) such as environments and animals; the bonds and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life. -/- “This is an extremely impressive, original, and thorough treatment of two key twentieth-century thinkers and their applicability to the most pressing social and political issues of our time.” — Jeffrey A. Bernstein, author of Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History -/- “This book is an excellent and timely contribution to political and environmental philosophy, located around a nuanced historical and philosophical approach to Levinas and Adorno. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with these figures or with the current moment.” — Martin Shuster, author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity. (shrink)

: This article contributes to the contemporary debate regarding the young Heidegger’s method of formal indication. Theodore Kisiel argues that this method constitutes a radical break with Husserl---a rejection of phenomenological reflection that paves the way to the non-reflective approach of the Beiträge. Against this view, Steven Crowell argues that formal indication is continuous with Husserlian phenomenology---a refinement of phenomenological reflection that reveals its existential sources. I evaluate this debate and adduce further considerations in favor of Crowell’s view. To do (...) so, I analyze the young Heidegger’s account of phenomenological communication and argue that it further reflects the continuity that Crowell identifies: as he does with reflection, Heidegger refines Husserl’s account of phenomenological communication and sheds light on its existential sources. (shrink)

Heidegger's notion of philosophical concepts as “formal indications” is rightly viewed as a crucial development. The idea of formal indication is partly intended to answer concerns that phenomenology objectivizes conscious life. Formal indication responds—in what would become a signature feature of much of Heidegger's early work—by setting up a unique dependency of the meaning of phenomenological concepts on their “enactment” in the first‐personal life of the investigator or reader. Commentators have appropriately wondered whether this move succeeds. Yet relatively little emphasis (...) has been placed on the potential problem of underdetermination: whether this model of deferring meaning to “enactment” leaves the reader with a sufficient understanding of the term that they know what to enact and (hopefully) gain some positive self‐understanding through it. This problem becomes more or less acute depending on how we model the “deferred meaning” of formal indication. Here I study candidate models of “deferred meaning,” including those prominent in the literature, to determine whether any are suitable to model the meaning‐structure of formal indication and stave off the underdetermination problem. (shrink)

Of all the methodological terms used by Heidegger in the early Freiburg period, few have attracted less consensus than Formal Indication. With its relation to the earliest lecture series, critical debate has tended to focus on the extent to which this concept defines the difference between Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. The argument of this paper is that Formal Indication is best understood in its relation to Heidegger’s other key methodological term from this period, Phenomenological Destruction. Not only do both concepts (...) grow out of the same problem set, but they act in a limited sense as counter-movements to one another. Considered together, I argue, they make up Heidegger’s response to the problem of language as expressed by Paul Natorp, and first dealt with in the Kriegsnotsemester in 1919. (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)