The aim of this article is to demonstrate that even if Popper’s and Patočka’s interpretations of Plato originate in philosophical and intellectual traditions that have nothing or very little to do with each other, they share a common target, that is, modern biopower, which culminated in twentieth-century totalitarianism. If we examine Popper’s and Patočka’s interpretations of Plato from a biopolitical angle, it is possible to view them in a new light, that is, as two different, even opposing, intellectual and philosophical (...) approaches to the very same tragic events that European culture and politics experienced in the twentieth century. Despite the radically divergent results of their readings, Popper and Patočka share a starting point, that is, the effort to outline a genealogy of European cultural and intellectual history in the light of Plato. The first section of this article explains why and to what extent Popper’s and Patočka’s interpretations can be considered genealogical readings. The second section elaborates on their different approaches to the relationship between justice and power in Plato. The third section concentrates on the relationship between Plato and twentieth-century biopower. (shrink)

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...

The present article aims to illuminate a notion of finite freedom in both Heidegger and Levinas. Levinas criticizes the Heideggerian ontology for holding an egoistic, unconstrained notion of freedom. The article first responds to such a criticism by showing that the Heideggerian notion of freedom as self-binding involves normativity. It then argues that both Heidegger and Levinas propose a notion of finite freedom as the unity of autonomy and heteronomy. Finally, the article also sheds light on what different approaches to (...) the source of normativity separate the two philosophers’ understandings of freedom. (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)

This article challenges the claim that the rise of naturalism is devastating to religious belief. This claim hinges on an extreme interpretation of naturalism called scientism, the metaphysical view that science offers an exhaustive account of the real. For those committed to scientism, religious discourse is epistemically illegitimate, because it refers to matters that transcend—and so cannot be verified by—scientific inquiry. This article reconstructs arguments from the phenomenological tradition that seem to undercut this critique, viz., arguments that scientism itself cannot (...) be justified without recourse to matters that transcend scientific inquiry. If this is true, then scientism and religion share a cognitive conundrum: a commitment to truths that cannot in principle be known from our current perspective. (shrink)

In this paper I challenge Merold Westphal's claim that Jean-Luc Marion's hermeneutical phenomenology is especially useful for theology. I argue that in spite of his explicit allegiance to Husserl's "principle of all principles," Marion fails to embody a commitment to phenomenological seeing in his analyses of revelation. In the sections of Being Given where he discusses revelation, Marion allows faith-based claims to bleed into his phenomenological analyses, resulting in what I call his 'blurred vision'—the pretension that phenomenological seeing can be (...) extended to theological matters. This pretension undermines Marion's phenomenological aspirations, because it invests his analyses with a theological content that phenomenological intuition cannot account for or clarify. At the same time, this blurring of the line between theology and phenomenology also makes Marion's work theologically ineffective. For it furnishes the theologian and believer with the false assurance that faith-based commitments can be grounded in phenomenological knowledge—a claim that he simply cannot make good on. In light of these problems, I propose an alternative Heideggerian approach that maintains the boundary between philosophical and theological discourse and thereby safeguards the integrity of both. (shrink)

In this paper I challenge Merold Westphal’s claim that Jean-Luc Marion’s hermeneutical phenomenology is especially useful for theology. I argue that in spite of his explicit allegiance to Husserl’s “principle of all principles,” Marion fails to embody a commitment to phenomenological seeing in his analyses of revelation. In the sections of Being Given where he discusses revelation, Marion allows faith-based claims to bleed into his phenomenological analyses, resulting in what I call his ‘blurred vision’—the pretension that phenomenological seeing can be (...) extended to theological matters. This pretension undermines Marion’s phenomenological aspirations, because it invests his analyses with a theological content that phenomenological intuition cannot account for or clarify. At the same time, this blurring of the line between theology and phenomenology also makes Marion’s work theologically ineffective. For it furnishes the theologian and believer with the false assurance that faith-based commitments can be grounded in phenomenological knowledge—a claim that he simply cannot make good on. In light of these problems, I propose an alternative Heideggerian approach that maintains the boundary between philosophical and theological discourse and thereby safeguards the integrity of both. (shrink)

The publication of the revised edition of Jeff Malpas’s Place and Experience in 2018 gives the opportunity to reconsider this book and the debates that it originally...

This paper explains the nature and origin of what I am calling Transgressive Realism, a middle path between realism and anti-realism which tries to combine their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses. Kierkegaard created the position by merging Hegel’s insistence that we must have some kind of contact with anything we can call real (thus rejecting noumena), with Kant’s belief that reality fundamentally exceeds our understanding; human reason should not be the criterion of the real. The result is the idea that (...) our most vivid encounters with reality come in experiences that shatter our categories, the way God’s commandment to kill Isaac irreconcilably clashes with the best understanding of ethics we are capable of. I explain the genesis of this idea, and then show it at work in Heidegger and Levinas’ thought. Understanding this position illuminates important aspects of the history of continental philosophy and offers a new perspective on realism. (shrink)

My aim is to depict Schutzian phenomenology as a whole. In order to do so, I will start by presenting Schutz’s ideas on the phenomenological, egological,and eidetic reductions as mere technical devices. Then I will show how they are interconnected with phenomenological psychology. After that, I will argue thatphenomenological psychology leads to worldly phenomenology and I will explore its consequences for transcendental philosophy and the empirical sciences. I will conclude with some reflections on naturalized phenomenology and how it finds absolute (...) certainty in the life-world, not in the transcendental realm. (shrink)

This article argues that there is ultimately a very close convergence between prominent conceptions of being in mainstream Anglo‐American philosophy and mainstream postmodern Continental philosophy. One characteristic idea in Anglo‐American or analytic philosophy is that we establish what is meaningful and so what we can say about what is, by making evident the limits of sense or what simply cannot be meant. A characteristic idea in Continental philosophy of being is that being emerges through contrast and interplay with what it (...) is not, with what has no being at all and so is beyond sense. The two traditions consequently conceive being in significantly related ways. As a result, what the Continental tradition gets at with “the meaning of being as such and in general,” and how it gets at it, has much in common with what the Anglo‐American tradition gets at, and how it gets at it, by establishing “what can be meaningfully said.”. (shrink)

Gilbert Simondon has recently attracted the interest of political philosophers and theorists, despite the fact that he is renowned as a philosopher of technics – author of Of the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects – who also elaborated a general theory of complex systems in Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and Information. A group of scholars has developed Gilles Deleuze’s early suggestion that Simondon’s social ontology might offer the basis for a re-theorisation of radical democracy. (...) Others, following Herbert Marcuse, have instead focused on Simondon’s analysis of the relationship between technology and society. However, only a joint study of Simondon’s two major works can reveal their implicit political stakes. As I will argue, Simondon’s anti-Aristotelianism and his anti-Heideggerian understanding of the Greek origins of philosophy, allow us to conceive philosophical thought as a ‘tradition of invention’, that is, a pedagogical technē endowed with the political task of maintaining the openness of the social system and allowing normative invention to emerge from within. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the first notebook published in Überlegungen II-VI, which covers the years 1931 and 1932, Martin Heidegger uses a conception of power that is different to that found in his later work. Rather than power being the expression of the will to will and source of ruin for humanity, he says that humanity can only be saved from ruin if it can pave the way for an “empowerment of being”. This article will show that this early understanding of power is (...) related to Heidegger’s conception of freedom as the essence of truth, developing his thinking on this topic from the period of 1927–1930. It will show that the terms “empowerment of being” and “letting be” are akin, and that Heidegger uses the former to distance his thinking from potential misinterpretations of the essay “On the Essence of Truth”. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates how the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority governs advertising ethics with and on behalf of its members and stakeholders. Drawing on an archive of 310 non-commercial adjudication reports, we highlight the substantive norms and procedural mechanisms through which the ASA governs advertising complaints alleging offence and/or harm. Substantively, the ASA precludes potential normative transgressions by publishing, disseminating, consulting upon, and updating detailed codes of advertising conduct. Procedurally, the ASA adjudicates between allegations and justifications of offence and harm on (...) a received complaint-by-complaint basis, often upon consequentialist grounds. Such consequentialism, we claim, has the effect of normalizing power imbalances between the ASA’s members, on the one hand, and wider stakeholders, on the other hand. The paper argues that, in the context of UK advertising, what Michel Foucault called the right ‘to be or not to be governed like that’ is enjoyed by relatively few subjects. Having demonstrated how UK advertising practices are governed, the paper closes with suggestions as to how they might be governed otherwise. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw on Heidegger’s phenomenology of “moods” (_Stimmungen_) to interpret loneliness as a diffused and atmospheric feeling-state that often undergirds the lives of older adults, shaping the ways in which they are attuned to and make sense of the world. I focus specifically on residents in long-term care facilities to show how the social isolation and lockdown measures of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically intensified the mood. The aim is to shed light on how profound and totalizing the (...) experience has been for residents. Making use of Heidegger’s account of the affective “collapse” or “breakdown” (_Zusammenbruch_) of meaning, I argue that when older adults are functionally locked in their rooms for months at a time and cut off from the orienting routines and rhythms of the relational world, the result is a crumbling of the fundamental meaning-structures that constitute subjectivity. The global sense of abandonment and disconnection strips away the possibility for self-understanding, and residents are often left confused and abandoned to an existence that has been drained of meaning and significance. (shrink)

The philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that the truthful life was at risk of being lost in Western technological culture in the name of increasing control, efficiency, and agility. As the risk is actualised, so the human essence as truth maker is obscured and life itself feels poorer. This thesis draws on Heideggerian philosophy to demonstrate the loss in two dominant styles of contemporary strategic management: the world-picturing and, more recent, agile style. It builds a theory of post-agile strategic practice, which (...) I call adaptive, to address this loss. Consistent with Heideggerian philosophy, I utilise a transformative disclosure methodology and a literary, paradigmatic case reading method to address the questions: Why is agile strategic management so unsatisfying? How do Heideggerian scholars shed light on this dissatisfaction? How do Heideggerians understand the emerging style and what strategic management practices can I propose for the future? After introducing agile strategic management and the impoverishment of life that it fosters, I set out how Heidegger’s philosophy of truth, thinking, and the sacred both sheds light on the problem and suggests a remedy for it. I closely read paradigmatic texts of the world-picturing and agile strategic management styles to demonstrate how business strategy theorisation lines up with extraordinary closeness to Heidegger’s philosophical assessment. I then analyse three Heideggerian prototypes for an adaptive style of strategy practice, concentrating on one paradigmatic text to identify their principal weakness: the omission of the sacred. I illustrate and contrast paradigmatic cases of both the agile and adaptive styles drawn from the beer industry and draw on the adaptive case to construct a theory of adaptive strategy practice, which addresses the problem of the loss of truth, suggesting pedagogical and strategic management practices. I conclude by summarising its findings and contributions, noting some limitations and connections to other studies and suggesting further lines of research. (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)

In this thesis, I use a close reading of the silent films of Charlie Chaplin to examine a question of listening posed by Jean-Luc Nancy, “Is listening something of which philosophy is capable” (Nancy 2007:1)? Drawing on the work of Nancy, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, I consider a claim that philosophy has failed to address the topic of listening because a logocentric tradition claims speech as primary. In response to Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism, Nancy complicates the problem of listening (...) by distinguishing between l’écoute and l’entente. L’écoute is an attending to and answering the demand of the other and l’entente is an understanding directed inward toward a subject. Nancy could deconstruct an undervalued position of l’écoute, making listening essential to speech. I argue, Nancy rather asks what kind of listening philosophy is capable of. To examine this question, I focus on the peculiarly dialogical figure derived from Chaplin that communicates meaning without using speech. This discussion illustrates how Chaplin, in the role of a silent figure, listens to himself (il s’écoute) as other. Chaplin’s listening is Nancean resonance, a movement in which a subject refers back to itself as another subject, in constant motion of spatial and temporal non-presence. For Nancy, listening is a self’s relationship to itself, but without immediate self-presence. Moving in resonance, Chaplin makes the subject as other as he refers back to himself as other. I argue that Chaplin, through silent dialogue with himself by way of the other, makes his listening listened to. Chaplin refused to make his character speak because he believed speech would change the way in which his work would be listened to. In this way, Chaplin makes people laugh by making himself understood (se fait entendre) as he makes himself listened to (se fait écouter). In answer to Nancy’s question, I conclude philosophy is capable of meeting the demand of listening as both l’entente and l’écoute when it listens as Chaplin listens. (shrink)

Hegel and Heidegger are leading figures of modern philosophy, but their interpretation of being, metaphysics, truth, ontology, epistemology, dialectic, alienation and art, among other central questions of philosophy, are radically different. Taking these aspects into account, my paper tries to dismiss Heidegger’s critiques towards Hegel arguing that, from the point of view of 20th century phenomenology, and although using a dissimilar philosophical vocabulary, Hegel was rather a phenomenologist than a metaphysician. Not only that: in many respects, Heidegger’s Dasein toys with (...) metaphysic to an extent that Hegel’s spirit never did. (shrink)

Este artigo argumenta, começando pela justaposição de Heidegger ao lado dos geógrafos Ratzel e Vidal de la Blanche, e do etologista von Uexküll, realizada por Giorgio Agamben, em seu ensaio The Open, que a estética da morada , que encontramos no último Heidegger, tem que ser entendida em termos da centralidade para o pensamento de Heidegger de um conceito que também é central para o pensamento geográfico-cultural , nomeadamente, o conceito de lugar ou ‘espaço geográfico’. A centralidade dada ao ‘geográfico’ (...) no pensamento de Heidegger é freqüentemente tomada como diretamente conectada, como ela é entendida por Agamben, com o problemático engajamento de Heidegger com os nazistas nos anos 1930; e Agamben apresenta a posição heideggeriana como paralela a de von Uexküll quanto a isso. Porém, não apenas a maneira pela qual Agamben faz essa conexão é altamente enganosa, mas ela também não atenta para qualquer real consideração para o que pode estar em questão na ênfase no ‘geográfico’ em Heidegger. Há, de fato, razão para pensar que o papel desempenhado pelos conceitos de lugar e espaço no pensamento de Heidegger vai de encontro às associações que Agamben e outros supõem. Este artigo é então uma exploração do ‘geográfico’ tal como ele aparece em Heidegger e das associações políticas que podem ser pensadas como acompanhando-o, bem como da relação de Heidegger com uma certa linha da tradição geográfica exemplificada por Ratzel e Vidal de la Blanche.Beginning with Giorgio Agamben’s juxtaposition, in his essay The Open, of Heidegger alongside the geographers Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche, and the ethologist, von Uexküll, this paper argues that the aesthetics of dwelling that we find in later Heidegger has to be understood in terms of the centrality to Heidegger’s thinking of a concept that is also central to cultural-geographic thought , namely, the concept of place or ‘geographic space’. The centrality given to the ‘geographic’ in Heidegger’s thinking is often taken to be directly connected, as it is taken to be by Agamben, with Heidegger’s problematic engagement with Nazi in the 1930s, and Agamben presents Heidegger’s position as parallelling that of von Uexküll in this regard. Yet not only is the manner in which Agamben makes this connection highly misleading, but it also neglects any real consideration of what might be at issue in the emphasis on the ‘geographical’ in Heidegger. There is, indeed, reason to think that the role played by the concepts of place and space in Heidegger’s thought actually runs counter to the associations that Agamben and others assume. This paper is thus an exploration of the ‘geographical’ as it appears in Heidegger, and of the political associations that might be thought to accompany it, as well as of Heidegger’s relation to a certain strand within the geographical tradition exemplified by Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche. (shrink)