Explorations in Systems Phenomenology in Relation to Ontology, Hermeneutics and the Meta-dialectics of Design -/- SYNOPSIS A Phenomenological Analysis of Emergent Design is performed based on the foundations of General Schemas Theory. The concept of Sign Engineering is explored in terms of Hermeneutics, Dialectics, and Ontology in order to define Emergent Systems and Metasystems Engineering based on the concept of Meta-dialectics. -/- ABSTRACT Phenomenology, Ontology, Hermeneutics, and Dialectics will dominate our inquiry into the nature of the Emergent Design of the (...) System and its inverse dual, the Meta-system. This is an speculative dissertation that attempts to produce a philosophical, mathematical, and theoretical view of the nature of Systems Engineering Design. Emergent System Design, i.e., the design of yet unheard of and/or hitherto non-existent Systems and Metasystems is the focus. This study is a frontal assault on the hard problem of explaining how Engineering produces new things, rather than a repetition or reordering of concepts that already exist. In this work the philosophies of E. Husserl, A. Gurwitsch, M. Heidegger, J. Derrida, G. Deleuze, A. Badiou, G. Hegel, I. Kant and other Continental Philosophers are brought to bear on different aspects of how new technological systems come into existence through the midwifery of Systems Engineering. Sign Engineering is singled out as the most important aspect of Systems Engineering. We will build on the work of Pieter Wisse and extend his theory of Sign Engineering to define Meta-dialectics in the form of Quadralectics and then Pentalectics. Along the way the various ontological levels of Being are explored in conjunction with the discovery that the Quadralectic is related to the possibility of design primarily at the Third Meta-level of Being, called Hyper Being. Design Process is dependent upon the emergent possibilities that appear in Hyper Being. Hyper Being, termed by Heidegger as Being (Being crossed-out) and termed by Derrida as Differance, also appears as the widest space within the Design Field at the third meta-level of Being and therefore provides the most leverage that is needed to produce emergent effects. Hyper Being is where possibilities appear within our worldview. Possibility is necessary for emergent events to occur. Hyper Being possibilities are extended by Wild Being propensities to allow the embodiment of new things. We discuss how this philosophical background relates to meta-methods such as the Gurevich Abstract State Machine and the Wisse Metapattern methods, as well as real-time architectural design methods as described in the Integral Software Engineering Methodology. One aim of this research is to find the foundation for extending the ISEM methodology to become a general purpose Systems Design Methodology. Our purpose is also to bring these philosophical considerations into the practical realm by examining P. Bourdieu’s ideas on the relationship between theoretical and practical reason and M. de Certeau’s ideas on practice. The relationship between design and implementation is seen in terms of the Set/Mass conceptual opposition. General Schemas Theory is used as a way of critiquing the dependence of Set based mathematics as a basis for Design. The dissertation delineates a new foundation for Systems Engineering as Emergent Engineering based on General Schemas Theory, and provides an advanced theory of Design based on the understanding of the meta-levels of Being, particularly focusing upon the relationship between Hyper Being and Wild Being in the context of Pure and Process Being. (shrink)

Being and Time argues that we, as Dasein, are defined not by what we are, but by our way of existing, our “existentiell possibilities.” I diagnose and respond to an interpretive dilemma that arises from Heidegger's ambiguous use of this latter term. Most readings stress its specific sense, holding that Dasein has no general essence and is instead determined by some historically contingent way of understanding itself and the meaning of being at large. But this fails to explain the sense (...) in which Being and Time is a work of fundamental ontology, concluding in Heidegger's claim to have found the meaning of Dasein's being in the concept of originary temporality. On the other hand, readings that stress the general sense of “existentiell possibilities” find Heidegger on a fruitless quest for the transcendental conditions necessary for Dasein's existence, which seems to founder on the claims that Dasein is constitutively thrown, factical, and “in-each-case-mine” [jemeinig]. Both readings are problematic and, I contend, result from a failure to disambiguate and explain the ontologically unique relationship between the specific and general aspects of Dasein's essence. I argue that we can better explain this relationship, Heidegger's method for investigating it, and the sense in which Dasein has an essence that is open to philosophical investigation, if we read Being and Time's ontology of Dasein in terms of what Anton Ford calls “categorial” genus-species relationships. (shrink)

At the core of Heidegger's philosophy, there lies this nagging question: what is the link between language and being? Using a famous formulation by Heidegger as a guide (‘When we go to the well, when we go through the woods, we are always already going through the word “well”, through the word “woods”’), the analysis focuses on the connection Heidegger establishes between being (what woods and well ‘are’), understanding (something is understood ‘as’ woods or well), and temporality (human understanding of (...) woods and well has changed since ancient Greek times, for example). Language is both what grants things their way to matter to us and thus to ‘be’ for us to the extent that we understand them, but language is also linked to a ‘happening’ (Geschehen) or an event so that things are not bound to their Geek being or current being: things ‘become being’ (seiend werden). Language is both the means for things to materialize in historical times: ‘being woods’ or ‘being a well,’ as well as a testimony to their entry into being. This is why language in its poetic use can make beings ‘more being’ (seiender). (shrink)

Heidegger’s discussion about the rise of the arbitrary power of “machination” in his late 1930s writings does not just echo his well-known later thinking on technology, but also affords a profound insight to the ontological mechanism of oblivion behind the history of Western thinking of being. The paper shows how this rise of the coercive power of ordering signifies an emergence of historically and spatially significant moment of completion: outgrowth of the early Greek notions of tekhne and phusis in terms (...) of globally expanding systems of calculative orderings. The paper thus aims to show how the condition of machination marks a fundamental implementation of the hidden consummation of the mechanism of oblivion now being re-adopted into the operational clarity of calculative rationality. It is argued that the rise of machination became possible through the historical process of replacing the early Greek disposition of existence, the wonder, with calculative rationality of ordering. (shrink)

In this text, Heidegger's notion of the event is understood as a rupture on an ontological level. From this follows the aporia of whether the event concerns the coming about of being itself, or of beings. To address the ontological as well as the ontic aspect of the event, the article suggests to understand the event in a subjective framework, in line with transcendental conditions of experience, specifically as a "receptivity" to the event. The main part of the article considers (...) existing phenomenological approaches to the event and the possibility or impossibility of a receptivity to the event expressed therein. In conclusion, the article suggests that the subjective event can be conceived as a rupture within subjective experience, as being tied to the necessary coming about of experience. (shrink)

Las reflexiones que Heidegger plantea sobre la ipseidad y el ser sí-mismo en Ser y tiempo, y que están recibiendo un nuevo impulso hermenéutico en los últimos años, distan mucho de desaparecer a partir de la Kehre. Al contrario, en el marco conceptual de los tratados del Ereignis, el problema asume una nueva forma. La aclaración de este problema exige, por un lado, desarrollar una crítica histórica de las «egologías» pertenecientes a la filosofía moderna, y por otro lado, replantear, a (...) partir de la pregunta por «quiénes somos», el sentido del ser humano y del Da-sein en la llamada historia del Ser. Son estos dos aspectos, íntimamente ligados, los que queremos elucidar en este artículo, para determinar mejor la lectura heideggeriana de la tradición y a su vez, reconsiderar el alcance del ser sí-mismo en el pensar del Ereignis. (shrink)

The style of weak thought associated with Gianni Vattimo involves positing that we are living after the death of God in an age of nihilism that is our ‘sole opportunity’. Nihilism, the lack of highest values, frees one from the ‘violence’ of metaphysics that silences one by reducing everything back to first principles. This article focuses on Vattimo’s return to Christianity, analysing in particular his use of terms found in the New Testament, kenosis and caritas. Vattimo sees the history of (...) the West as the secularisation of Christianity, reaching its culmination in the nihilism of late-modernity through the liberation of a plurality of interpretations from metaphysics. By analysing Vattimo’s notion of Being and use of Joachim of Fiore’s historical schema in relation to Paul’s distinction between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘letter’, it shall be argued that Vattimo’s understanding of Christianity does not involve the religion ‘superseding’ Judaism. However, this resolution comes at the cost of highlighting the lack of importance of Christianity for Vattimo if a broader understanding of Heidegger than Vattimo deploys is used to put Vattimo’s understanding of Being under scrutiny. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger was not only one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century but also a supporter of and a contributor to one of the most discriminatory ideologies of the recent past. Thus, "the Heidegger's case" gives us philosophers an opportunity to work on discrimination from a philosophical perspective. My aim in this essay is to question the relationship between freedom and discrimination via Heidegger's philosophy. I will show that what bridges the gap between Heidegger's philosophy and a discriminatory (...) ideology such as the National Socialist ideology is Heidegger's conceptualization of freedom with the aid of a monolithic understanding of history--one that refuses to acknowledge the plurality and heterogeneity in the socio-historical existence of human beings. Accordingly, I will claim that the Heideggerian freedom depends on the social, if not literal, murder of the marginalized segments of a given society. However, I will refuse to conclude that Heidegger's philosophy is a Nazi philosophy and that it should never be appropriated as long as we want to purify our thoughts from discriminatory ideas. Rather, I will re-appropriate Heidegger, against Heidegger, to read and interpret Michel Foucault's and Judith Butler's philosophies. My aim here is to construct a social ontology that may justify anti-discriminatory policies. More specifically, through my Heideggerian readings of Foucault and Butler, I will argue that one's freedom is dependent on the cultural resuscitation of socially, and sometimes literally, murdered racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and sectarian/confessional minorities. (shrink)

Heidegger’s 1938–1939 seminar on Nietzsche ’s On the Utility and Liability of History for Life continues Heidegger’s grand interpretation of Nietzsche as a metaphysical thinker of presence. Nietzsche ’s conceptions forgetting, memory, and even life itself, according to Heidegger, are all complicit in the privileging of presence. Simultaneous with his seminar, Heidegger is also compiling the notebook, Die Geschichte des Seyns, 1938–1940, wherein he sketches his own conception of history. Examining Heidegger’s criticisms of Nietzsche in the light of his contemporaneous (...) notebook allows us to articulate Heidegger’s concern for history and for “what has-been” as a thinking of the “coming” of being. For Heidegger, to exist historically is to exist as something sent, something arriving, as something that “comes” to us. This coming of history is an ontological determination of all that is, no longer construed as present-at-hand objects, but as always arriving, relational beings. After presenting Heidegger’s view of the coming of history, I return to Nietzsche ’s Utility and Liability of History to draw attention to an aspect of his text that is neglected by Heidegger, that of the political. The concluding sections of Nietzsche ’s text confront the politics of the present, in both senses of the genitive, in order to rally against the closure of society. In the conclusion to the paper, I turn to the political dimension of Nietzsche ’s thinking of history with an eye to how it might elude Heidegger’s interpretation. (shrink)

In this article, I examine a number of closely connected issues in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy; god, gods, decision,the modern danger, and the salvation of humanity which is associated with the upsurge of a radically different age of being, what he calls, “the other beginning”.Heidegger situates the other beginning in the context of the emergency of a profound danger linked with the modern technological world. This prospect of danger calls for a decision in which human beings need to participate.Heidegger seems (...) to present an intimating, refusing and passing god as the only alternative beyond the onto-theo-logical tradition that lies behind the modern world. In this connection, I also suggest that the other beginning as “the history of the preservation of god”represents a sort of salvific conception, in a sense, a salvation from objectifying reason. As I see it, Heidegger offers the last godand gods asan antidote to the hegemony of objectifying reason. (shrink)

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)

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)

In Heidegger’s last seminar, which was in Zähringen in 1973, he introduces what he called a “phenomenology of the inconspicuous”. Despite scholars’ occasional references to this “approach” over the last 40 years, this approach of Heidegger’s has gone largely under investigated in secondary literature. This article introduces three different, although not necessarily conflicting ways in which these sparse references to inconspicuousness can be interpreted: The a priori of appearance can never be brought to manifestation, and the unscheinbar is interwoven with (...) the scheinbar as an active characteristic or form of “hiddenness”, therefore making inconspicuousness inherent within all phenomenology. Or, there is now a particular step or reduction within phenomenology that involves one’s being attuned to the various modes of potential hiddenness, of which “inconspicuousness” is a particular character trait. Or there are particular, unique, and specific phenomena that give themselves “inconspicuously,” and there is also thus a corresponding, particular phenomenology in which one must engage in order to gain some kind of access to these specific things’ phenomenal strata. This paper introduces Heidegger’s “phenomenology of the inconspicuous” most especially in his last seminar in Zähringen in 1973, engages related references to unscheinbar in his 1942/1943 Seminar on Parmenides, and then puts forward an interpretation of what these somewhat ambiguous references could mean when contextualized according to Heidegger’s overall interests. This essay brings these references to light, and puts forward a proposal as to what kind of phenomenology Heidegger was–somewhat inconspicuously–referring. (shrink)

McMullin argues persuasively that individualized interpersonal encounters entail the mutual recognition of the particularity of each participant’s temporalizing way of Being-in-the-world.

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the interrelations between the notions of one’s own and the foreign in later Heidegger’s philosophy. It is pointed out that later Heidegger contextualized the notion of the world by the notion of home and its derivatives “homelessness” and “homecoming” that are of great value in his philosophy. The scrutiny proceeds from the study of the peculiarities of Heidegger’s approach to the problem of being that is considered to be the knot of his (...) philosophy. It is noted that Heidegger, having deserted the traditional ontology already in his early works, continued, nevertheless, using its terms including “being” for a long time and thereby in a way obscured the peculiarities of his approach. Only later Heidegger tried to reject the traditional concept of being as infinitely continuing state in favor of the concept of Ereignis that is usually translated as “appropriating event” or “event of appropriation”. Thus, according to Heidegger, being gives us beings as a whole by appropriating sense to them and thereby turning them into the familiar and accessible environment for dwelling. Just the “givenness” of beings as a whole makes them familiar, one’s own. Accordingly, the “dwelling” means for Heidegger not only the security, but also the intelligibility of the environment, whereas the homelessness means the latter’s uncanny incomprehensibility. It is emphasized that Heidegger’s interpretation of homelessness is closely connected with a standard theoretical model explaining the emergence of the private and public realms. According to this model, just the extension of family as the initial one’s own resulted in the turning of household into city-state that, having been specified by the image of one super-family, added the elements of the foreign to the initial state of society. (shrink)

Alterity, the difference that being-other makes, is not an overt theme in the writing of Ueda Shizuteru, and yet by bringing alterity to the fore we are able to connect and examine several themes that Ueda does engage explicitly. It will turn out that several models of alterity are discernable in Ueda’s philosophy, and their common ground opens a mode of being-other that offers an alternative to dominant models of irreducible difference. Ueda’s philosophy of language suggests four alternative configurations that (...) increasingly allow for the dual emergence of authentic otherness and selfhood. Those configurations are intimated in his interpretations of Nishida’s pure experience, of the interplay of language and silence, of a dialogue envisioned in a Zen oxherding picture, and of the poetic form known as linked verse, which best models how discrete beings help create a world in common. (shrink)

The non-credit bearing and ongoing education and development of mid- to late-career corporate executives is known by the compound term executive education. Reductively stated, executive education, for its corporate consumers and its business school providers, is predicated on the relationship between an order and its execution ; a relationship I call the “order-execution cognate”. With the word execution derived from Greek for sequence, and with the sequence of an execution following-on from its corresponding order, sequentiality is the essence of execution, (...) and the cognate. Executive education involves the amelioration of this order-execution cognate, to the ends of increased profits and competitiveness for the corporation concerned, and increased career prospects for the individual executive. Concerning sequentiality, and as a thesis on the philosophy of executive education, I apply a strand of ontological reflection to examine this cognate, namely philosophy concerning time and temporal succession. To aid in this task I use the English translations of writings on time by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Emerging from Heidegger’s thought are two temporal types that acknowledge and critique temporal succession; chronological time and Kairotic time respectively. By associating Heidegger’s philosophic method with that of early German Romantic philosophy, I articulate how it is possible to reconceive the temporal sequence of the order-execution cognate as a productive oscillation between chronic and Kairotic time; I call this oscillation “ironic temporality,” and its productivity “ironic productivity”. My philosophical analysis of commercially lucrative and neoliberal executive education is at odds with traditional knowledge-based analyses, affording a critique of the capitalist order which the educative event serves. Disrupting temporal notions of that event then becomes a dangerous political act; becomes the means to frame the educative event for the management of our age; and becomes the new orders for executive education. (shrink)