This essay demonstrates the prominence of imitation in Kierkegaard’s ethics. I move beyond his idea of authentic existence modeled on Christ and explore the secular dimension of Kierkegaard’s insights about human nature and imitation. I start with presenting imitation as key to understanding the ethical dimension of the relationship between the universal and individual aspects of the human self in Kierkegaard. I then show that Kierkegaard’s moral concepts of “primitivity” and “comparison” are a response to his sociological and psychological observations (...) about imitation from an ethical point of view. In the final section of this paper, I briefly engage Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “ethics of individuality” and Gabriel Tarde’s “laws of imitation” to explore Kierkegaard’s consideration of ethics and imitation as situated within the context of a broader conversation on imitation. (shrink)

Scientific narratives about cosmology often present black holes as frightening objects of both creation and destruction, the centres of which are concealed behind event horizons. According to studies, black holes are capable of distorting time and tearing apart anything that plunges toward them. This article asks what the latest knowledge about the properties of black holes can contribute to philosophical understandings of being and time. Drawing on both scientific and narrative constructions of black holes in books written by physicists, the (...) article analyzes black holes in relation to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of ontology in Being and Time. The article argues that the topics of concealment, time, and mortality form interrelated points of intersection among scientific constructions of black holes and Heidegger’s philosophy. First, scientific commentaries on the concealment of singularities speak to Heidegger’s interpretation of the ways being is concealed in modern society. Second, with regard to time, the phenomenon of gravitational redshift invokes Heidegger’s criticisms of clock time and, by extension, notions of infinitude. On the other hand, theories about Hawking radiation and the decay of black holes also invoke Heidegger’s thesis that time subsists predominantly as a passing away toward the cessation of existence. Third and finally, Heidegger’s renowned and controversial explication of mortality helps frame black holes symbolically as forward-projections toward the impossibility of existence. Bringing these three subjects together, the article concludes that, as Heideggerian symbols of being and time, black holes represent projections toward the possibility of impossible modes and forms of existence. In this sense, black holes emblematize a relationship between being and time that marks the potential limits of existence, as humanity and science understand it. (shrink)