What is a problem? What is problematic about any problem whatsoever, philosophical or otherwise? As the origin of assertion and apodeiction, the problematic suspends the categories of necessity and contingency, possibility and impossibility. And it is this suspension that is the essence of the problem, which is why it is so suspenseful. But then, how is the problem problematic? Only if what is suspended neither comes to presence, nor simply goes out into absence, that is, if the suspension continues, which (...) continues the problem. But what is problematic about suspension? As a consideration of language shows, the problem of suspension is the problem of implication. If being, for example, is merely implied, neither present nor absent, then it is the suspension of both, at least insofar as it is problematic. And this not only says something about language; rather, it has ontological implications as well — it speaks of being, and the being of anything whatsoever. For if being is implied, if that is the problem of being, it is because being is an implication. Then the being of things like problems is implied as well; or being is in things by implication. But what does it mean for being to be neither presence nor absence, but an implication? It means that being is implied in a way that is problematic — before it is necessary, or even possible. For being’s way of being is characterized by suspension — which has implications for thinking and speaking about being, and about things like problems, even about anything whatsoever. And this has implications for what being implies, namely, unity and time and aspect. (shrink)

El artículo busca discutir algunos de los posicionamientos de Heidegger en su época nazi, mostrando que la base de su error político está en su nacionalismo. Esto lo ha hecho caer en una interpretación de la historia de Alemania como una opción opuesta a la modernidad y lo ha inducido a perder de vista las relaciones de interdependencia mutua entre facticidad y trascendencia. El nacionalismo se presenta así como un desvío del propósito universalista de la filosofía y el error de (...) Heidegger como un abandono del propósito esencial de la filosofía. We discuss some aspects of Heidegger's stance during his nazi period. We show that the root of his political error lies in his nationalism. This led him to understand the history of Germany as an option opposed to modernity, while losing sight of the mutual dependence of facticity and transcendence. Nationalism appears thus as a deviation from the universalist aim of philosophy and Heidegger's error as defection from philosophy's essential purpose. (shrink)

Philosophers and artists consider the relevance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for understanding art and aesthetic experience. This collection of essays brings together diverse but interrelated perspectives on art and perception based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty focused almost exclusively on painting in his writings on aesthetics, this collection also considers poetry, literary works, theater, and relationships between art and science. In addition to philosophers, the contributors include a painter, a photographer, a musicologist, and an architect. This widened (...) scope offers important philosophical benefits, testing and providing evidence for the empirical applicability of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic writings. The central argument is that for Merleau-Ponty the account of perception is also an account of art and vice versa. In the philosopher’s writings, art and perception thus intertwine necessarily rather than contingently such that they can only be distinguished by abstraction. As a result, his account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. The contributors examine various aspects of this intertwining across different artistic media, each ingeniously revealing an original perspective on this intertwining. (shrink)

Das Leben hat sich auf unserem Planeten zu einer unermesslichen Fülle von Formen ausdifferenziert, die in komplexen Weisen interagieren. Durch die Zerstörung unserer natürlichen Umwelt bedrohen wir das Wunder der globalen Biodiversität in seinem Fortbestand. Dabei verdrängen wir, dass auch die Menschheit weiter von der Produktivität jener Ökosysteme abhängig bleibt, zu denen sich das Leben evolutionär organisiert hat. Doch wie lässt sich überzeugend für den Erhalt von Biodiversität argumentieren? Sind Arten und Ökosysteme nur als Voraussetzungen gelingenden menschlichen Lebens schützenswert? Oder (...) haben sie darüber hinaus einen von uns unabhängigen Eigenwert? Andreas Hetzel gibt philosophisch fundierte Antworten auf diese Fragen und diskutiert konkrete Möglichkeiten des Biodiversitätsschutzes. (shrink)

A work of and about comparative philosophy that stresses the importance of language in intercultural endeavors.

In this paper, I present an interpretation of Wittgenstein's remarks on the experience of wonder at the existence of the world. According to this interpretation, Wittgenstein's feeling of wonder stems from perceiving the existence of the world as an absolute miracle, that is, as a fact that is in principle beyond explanation. Based on this analysis, I will suggest that Wittgenstein's experience is akin to what has been described by other authors such as Coleridge, Pessoa, Heidegger, Scheler, Sartre, and Hadot, (...) among many others. Through a comparison between Wittgenstein and Coleridge on the experience of existence, I shall highlight some core features of this experience, chief among them the use of the notion of nothingness in clarifying what is understood in the experience, the role of intuition, and the presence of a specific pathos. As a whole, this paper aims to provide a contribution to the project of a phenomenology of the experience of existence and intends to create a bridge for a dialogue between Wittgenstein and the phenomenological tradition on the enigma of existence. (shrink)

_A work of and about comparative philosophy that stresses the importance of language in intercultural endeavors._.

Universalist and nihilist answers to philosophical questions may be extreme, but they are clear enough. Aliquidist answers, by contrast, are typically caught between the Scylla of vagueness and indeterminacy and the Charybdis of ungroundedness and arbitrariness, and steering a proper middle course—saying exactly where in the middle one is going to settle—demands exceptional navigating powers. I myself tend to favor extreme answers precisely for this reason. Here, however, I consider one sense in which Something may claim superiority over its polar (...) competitors, Everything and Nothing, when it comes to answerting the ontological question, “What is there?”. (shrink)

The article « La Défenestration » by Belgian philosopher Marc Richir has been translated into Russian for the first time for this issue of the “Horizon. Studies in Phenomenology.” In his early work “The Defenestration” Richir raises the question of relation between the subject and conceivable world. Here, a philosopher is pictured contemplating the world through the window of his tower. In such detachment from the world the thinker finds himself according to all Modern philosophies of consciousness. Husserl’s phenomenology inherits (...) this detachment, since Husserl imposes the structure of transcendental ego as external to the world. Richir abolishes the concept of transcendental ego with the help of heideggerian Dasein, but analyzing Heidegger’s ontology he comes to the conclusion that the latter remains fixated on beings. Believing a person to live in the fundamental openness of Being, Heidegger places such a person in the secondary world of “truth.” In order to overcome the remains of traditional philosophy in Heidegger’s ontology Richir turns to Merleau-Ponty’ “cosmology of the visible.” The author takes the Merleau-Ponty’s thesis that everything visible has something fundamentally invisible in it. This allows him to discover the universe of “nothing”, which includes both the visible and what is “behind” it. As a result Richir overcomes the classical dualism of the sensual and the intelligible. The concept of defenestration places the subject and the world in the same universe. (shrink)

This paper argues that Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy attempts to reopen the question of human transcendence in contemporary terms. While his conception of language as self-transcending is deeply Husserlian, Ricoeur also responds to the analytical challenge when he deploys a basic distinction in Fregean logic in order to clarify Heidegger’s phenomenology of world. Ricoeur’s commitment to a transcendental view is evident in his conception of narrative, which enables him to emphasize the role of the performative in literary reading. The meaning (...) of the self in time provides Ricoeur with a discursive basis for distinguishing his own position from that of Kant and other philosophers in the transcendental tradition. (shrink)

a Anaximandro, procurando una lectura de los mismos a partir de su contexto. Para esto, por un lado, se recabaron las principales y más recientes fuentes y, por el otro, se indagó la influencia que el milesio pudo haber ejercido en autores posteriores. Como resultados tenemos, de una parte, aunque no en la misma intensidad y extensión que otros filósofos clásicos como Platón y Aristóteles, que Anaximandro fue de gran consideración para Bruno, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger y Gadamer; de la otra, (...) procuramos una interpretación que toma distancia de la usual, sosteniendo que en Anaximandro no hay un sistema metafísico en sentido estricto ni como “henología” —lo uno como origen de todo lo existente, del que se deriva el ser (Platón, 1992, 16 c, 509 b)— ni como ontología —ciencia del ser en cuanto ser, donde lo uno es un predicado del ser (Aristóteles, 1994, I,2,1053b 25-29)—. Se concluye que aquello de lo que ἄπειρον fuera atributo no podría ser otra cosa que de la physis misma, naturaleza indeterminada, unidad especular en la que co-inciden los contrarios que inteligentemente gobierna. (shrink)

Does the recent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks require a re-evaluation of his thought? In the present text we will deal with this question and reach the conclusion that a change of theoretical perspective on Heidegger’s work is indeed justified. The franker and less cautious style of the Black Notebooks puts in the foreground stances that were already known, but were previously relegated to the background: it becomes possible thereby to establish that Heidegger’s philosophical views host a significant lot of (...) unwarranted prejudices, which are incorporated in his picture of the ‘history of being’. We argue that in his process of radical questioning Heidegger progressively drops all available rational methods and epistemic criteria, and that this paves the way to the unwitting reception of personal prejudices in his theoretical frame: Heidegger knowingly abandons all the theoretical instruments that could enable him to discriminate between deeply felt prejudices and proper philosophical intuitions. We conclude our analysis by proposing some criticisms that should be acceptable also to scholars sympathetic with Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger’s vindication of an ‘erratic’ way of thinking, where the journey is more qualifying than the result, turns out to be incompatible with the assertiveness of the many unjustified claims disseminated across the Black Notebooks. Moreover, Heidegger wants to show the narrowness of an overwhelmingly dialectical and argumentative attitude, while his late style of thinking unwittingly discredits an alternative philosophical style, that widely appeals to a ‘principle of charity’ in the collaboration between author and reader. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Beitrag argumentiert, dass die mediterrane Mythenwelt, wie sie im philosophischen Werk Albert Camus’ begegnet, eine kritische Theorie sui generis – verstanden als eine rationalitäts- und ideologiekritische Position – in sich birgt. Als solche, so lautet die hier vertretene These, ist sie – zumindest unter bestimmten Gesichtspunkten – der Frankfurter Schule überlegen. Das griechische Denken à la Camus teilt mit jener zwar den wachen Blick für die Schattenseiten der Moderne, vermeidet dabei aber die allzu große Reserviertheit gegenüber Anthropologie, Ästhetik (...) und Mythos, wie sie im Umfeld der Kritischen Theorie häufig anzutreffen ist. Camus’ tragisches Denken, das an der mediterranen Mythologie – unter anderem am griechischen Nemesis-Mythos – geschult ist, erörtert die natürlichen Grenzen, die nicht verletzt werden dürfen, von modernen politischen Heilslehren aber in maßloser und folglich verhängnisvoller Weise überschritten werden. (shrink)

In times of the Anthropocene, we are in need of philosophical anthropology, revisiting the question concerning the human condition. I suggest rethinking what one may call ‘human transcendence’ in terms of a responsivist paradigm. Drawing on Heidegger and Plessner, the idea is that we should think of the eccentric or ecstatic position of the human in terms of something we undergo, instead of it being a human capability or something we do. It is a gift, emplacing us to the time-space (...) of responsive embodied existence. The paper will follow this agenda in five steps. Having introduced what I take to be the challenge for a timely ontology, I will unfold the problem entailed in the very idea of philosophical anthropology according to Heidegger. I then focus on Heidegger’s (hidden) rapprochement to Helmuth Plessner’s anthropology, recalling Plessner’s analysis of laughter as a bodily expression displaying the ‘eccentric positionality’ of the human. I suggest rephrasing this kind of transcendence in a responsivist paradigm: Humans are responsive beings. (shrink)

During the past two centuries, and in particular during the inter-war period, American ways of living and of thinking have become one principal object of European reflections on modernity. This essay explores some of the ways in which the rejection or affirmation of modernity in Europe has been channelled through observations on America. It is argued that the variety of European ways of looking at America also demonstrates the range of forms available to social theory for thinking the social world (...) under conditions of modernity and that this European debate provided some seeds for the current discussion about `multiple modernities'. (shrink)

Against the background of worldwide, intentional or unintentional everyday violations of human dignity and the epochal need to experience oneself as a human being in one’s specific way of being, this article attempts to pursue the question of human dignity and its concealment. On the one hand, it seeks to ask whether human dignity has become obsolete due to social and epochal developments and preconditions and whether it can only appear and be experienced as antiquated in the context of a (...) technological language or an administered world. On the other hand, it asks whether ethical and anthropological thinking have not sufficiently experienced, thought, and conceptualized man. From the context of these perspectives that determine the question of dignity, Heidegger’s article seeks to take up Heidegger’s repeated search for an original ethics based on Heraclitus’ fragment 119, and from this point of view to ask for a perhaps deeper and more adequate understanding of human dignity. At the centre of this is Heidegger’s thesis that human dignity is based on the protection of the unhidden and, ever before, the hiddenness of all beings. Without wanting to ignore the difficulty and complexity of Heidegger’s thinking, the author seeks to find access to this understanding of our dignity based on the experience of personal encounters. (shrink)

Based on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger the article presents the possibility of actualizing Heidegger’s main question about the meaning of Being in the context of the analysis of so-called “a priori perfect.” During the development of fundamental ontology in the second half of the 1920s, Heidegger ponders the approach to Being in the history of philosophy and identifies such a feature of Being as a priori, a kind of antecedence of Being in relation to being. Although tradition invariably understands (...) Being in this way, in it, according to Heidegger, the question is no longer raised either about the sense of such antecedence, or about the temporal basis of this sense, and therefore a priori as the essential character of Being is left in total oblivion. We suggest that it is the problematization of apriority in its temporal origin that can contribute to resolving Heidegger’s fundamental philosophical question of time as the transcendental horizon of any concept of Being that precedes being. In this precedence there is a cherished temporal moment, the comprehension of which allows us to develop the “basic question of metaphysics” about the relationship of Being and time in a more concrete way than Heidegger’s four main themes of the question of Being: the ontological difference; the basic articulation of Being ); the truth-character of Being; the possible modifications of Being and the unity of Being’s variety. Revealing a priori question as the central question of all Heideggers thinking before the “Turn” we attempt to update this question and justify the need for its renewal on the basis of a fundamental ontology. With this task we relate the question of the essence of philosophy in general in its existential-temporal concept since philosophy appears as a temporality-based possible of the questioning return to the “earlier”: to the essential structures of being, knowledge, Being, Dasein. Our analysis is based on the following decisions: Being in relation to being is always pre-understood as “earlier,” and in this understanding a temporal definition operates, hence the main question of fundamental ontology about the relation of Being and time can be developed or at least clarified through the problem of meaning of a priori. The question of the meaning of the “earlier” and of the temporal basis for understanding Being as “earlier,” a priori, is concretized into the question of the conditions for the possibility of any ontology, including the fundamental ontology, which raises the question of the earlier in relation to Being and therefore “lives” in the light of the understanding of the “earlier” as such. This reflexive foundation of the fundamental ontology from itself is a necessary stage on the way of developing its project, if we remember that the main “duty” of the philosopher is to clarify “our inner nature” for the sake of opening the boundaries and conditions of the possibility of philosophy. The conclusion is that the possibilities of fundamental ontology in making sense of Being, time, and philosophy in general are far from exhausted, but await the questions that actualize them and new readings that allow to see the hidden richness of Heidegger’s thought. (shrink)

F.W.J. von Schelling’s positive philosophy of mythology and revelation questions how one can move from the natural (the negative or mythology) to freedom (the positive or revelation), i.e. from the natural to the supernatural. The move from nature to freedom surpasses the traditional metaphysics of presence. Being is not simply the presencing of nature but the result of a decisive deed surpassing and supplementing nature. Nature can do nothing other than presence. Freedom, however, could also not be. It could remain (...) in concealment and must not necessarily presence as nature does. The origin is a supplement because an unnecessary excess extraneous to nature. In other words, origins always supplement the natural, i.e. they are supernatural and revelatory. Origins bring something novel, i.e. something original, into being but origins themselves remain in non-being and consequently remain un-revealed. The origin cannot exist, i.e. cannot become present, because it is always qualitatively Past. The origin never was but always already has been . Primal repetition was freedom’s subjection of nature to the Past and a deferral of this deed’s consequences to the indefinite Future. (shrink)

Is it possible to think about “the Greeks” without exposing oneself to what they call their gods? Feeling called upon to respond to this question, precisely within the constellation of Europe’s most gloomy hour, Martin Heidegger employs the instruments that come to him through his own “turn,” but also from further back: the “Fourfold” and the “Holy” may thus be studied in their crucial confrontation with Parmenides. A corollary resides in the link with the famous problem of “Hellenization” in Christianity.

El artículo expone y analiza la crítica de Heidegger al conceptismo de la metafísica clásica y a su teoría de la abstracción, que se fundarían según el pensador alemán en el desgaste del lenguaje y el uso impropio que de él se hace en la metafísica clásica, tergiversando y ocultando el auténtico sentido del pensamiento y del ser en lo genuinamente griego. Sobre esta base Heidegger postula la insuficiencia del concepto y de lo lógico a la vez que la necesidad (...) de un método hermenéutico. El artículo señala los puntos de coincidencia de esta perspectiva con la crítica zubiriana al idealismo y al conceptismo. Teniendo en cuenta todo ello, se trata de mostrar, no obstante, que son posibles conceptos descriptivos capaces de adecuarse a lo real, lo que supone en la realidad misma un momento sustancial de presencia de una cierta permanencia. Se hace una exposición y análisis de la magnífica crítica de Zubiri a la teoría clásica de la abstracción intentando conciliarla, empero, con la validez de los conceptos descriptivos y con momentos universales de la realidad. La tesis de fondo es que la filosofía primera no puede reducirse a hermenéutica. (shrink)

Straipsnyje analizuojamas unheimlich fenomenas Heideggerio filosofijoje, keliamas klausimas tiek apie patį šį fenomeną, jo įvairius aspektus, svarstoma, kokiu būdu šis fenomenas pasirodo. Pirmoje straipsnio dalyje analizuojama, kaip šis slėpiningumas, svetimybė gali būti suprasta Būties ir laiko kontekste. Tai atliekama aptariant Dasein būtį pasaulyje – pamatinę baimės nuotaiką ir sąžinės fenomeną. Antroje straipsnio dalyje žmogaus slėpiningumas analizuojamas taikant Antigonės mito heideggerišką interpretaciją 1935 ir 1942-ųjų metų Heideggerio tekstuose.

Early Heidegger argues that a “homogenous space of nature” can be revealed by stripping away the intelligibility of Dasein's everyday world, a process he calls “deworlding.” Given this, some interpreters have suggested that Heidegger, despite not having worked out the details himself, is also committed to a notion of deworlded time. Such a “natural time” would amount to an endogenous sequentiality in which events are ordered independently of Dasein and the stand it takes on its being. I show that Heidegger (...) was indeed committed to such a temporal realism even though his treatment of these issues is somewhat scattered and pulled in different directions. In the course of my reconstruction, I renew an interpretation of Heidegger that stresses Dasein's thrownness into nature and I answer William Blattner's powerful interpretation of Heidegger as a failed temporal idealist who was unable to derive the sequentiality of ordinary time from Dasein's non-sequential originary temporality. Heidegger did not attempt to derive sequentiality; instead, he understood it as a built-in feature of the natural universe by which Dasein's activities are constrained. World-time turns out to be a co-production of Dasein's non-sequential originary temporality and the endogenous sequentiality of events in nature. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical investigation of the theological assumptions that lie within three forms of modern feminist ethics, with a view to challenging feminist ethics to enter the new theological possibilities opened up in postmodernity for the conceiving of god. The first part of the paper considers the conceiving of god in modern feminisms, in which theology becomes ethics. The consequences of this development are considered. The second part of the paper investigates the turn into postmodernity which hears the (...) saying of the death of god and the critique of onto-theology. This disturbance to the foundations of feminist ethics is understood as part of a wider critique of humanism manifest particularly in gender theory. That the end of the modern human subject might allow a conceiving of god through an understanding of the performative is the restored orthodoxy to which the paper points. (shrink)

En este articulo analizamos el fenómeno del Ereignis en la obra de Heidegger posterior a la Kehre para confrontar su origen conflictivo. Para esto, presentamos la influencia de su lectura del πόλεµοç de Heráclito y una interpretación de la estructura y sus dimensiones gracias a la tensión de las partes que se mantienen en continua oscilación por la naturaleza abismal de la donación. Asimismo, revisamos el camino que presentan los ensambles del fenómeno a la luz de su obra Beiträge zur (...) Philosophie. De esto modo, comprenderemos un poco más el sentido complejo de este fenómeno y su aporte al problema de la diferencia. In this paper we analyze the phenomenon of Ereignis in Heidegger's work after the Kehre, in order to question his conflicting origin. To do this, we show the influence of his reading of Heraclitus' πόλεµοç as well as an interpretation of the structure and its dimensions, thanks to the tension between the parts kept in continuous oscillation due to the abysmal nature of donation. We also revised the path shown by the gatherings of the phenomenon, in the light of his work Beiträge zur Philosophie. This way, we may get greater insights into the complex sense of this phenomenon and its contribution to the issue of difference. (shrink)

RESUMO O propósito deste artigo é aproximar o significado do pensar calculador de Heidegger e a teoria sobre a sociedade do risco de Beck, considerando suas interpelações com o significado da técnica na modernidade. Porém, mais que tratar das aproximações entre ambos os pensadores, este estudo pretende também demonstrar a importância da filosofia da técnica de Heidegger para pensar o sentido do cálculo do risco e do risco do cálculo na sociedade do risco. Assim, argumenta-se que a teoria do risco (...) de Beck confirma e atualiza o pensamento de Heidegger sobre a técnica moderna, quando se observa que o pensar calculador, que dirige e controla o modo de ser na era do técnico, manifesta-se hoje com toda claridade na sociedade do risco global. ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to bring the meaning of Heidegger’s calculative thinking and Beck’s risk society theory closer, as well as their interpellations with the meaning of technique in modernity. Nevertheless, more than dealing with the convergences between both thinkers, this study also intends to demonstrate the importance of Heidegger’s technique philosophy in order to investigate the meaning of risk calculation and of calculation risk in risk society. Therefore, it argues that Beck’s risk theory confirms and updates Heidegger’s thinking on modern technique, as one observes that calculative thinking, which directs and controls the way of being in the age of technicality, clearly manifests itself nowadays, in the global risk society. (shrink)

Scotus’ theory of univocity is described: his exact definition of univocity and his view of transcendental concepts that are ‘simply simple’. These concepts are said to be univocally applied to God and creatures. Next, we describe Scotus’ views on univocity in ‘being’ and the precise meaning of the infinite and finite ‘mode’ of being. Finally, we apply these results to work of Heidegger and Marion. It appears that they had an insufficient grasp of the intricacies of Scotus’ theory of univocity (...) and that Marion’s religious phenomenology could have benefitted from these scotistic tools. (shrink)

Two major twentieth century philosophers, of East and West, for whom the nothing is a significant concept are Nishida Kitarō and Martin Heidegger. Nishida’s basic concept is the absolute nothing upon which the being of all is predicated. Heidegger, on the other hand, thematizes the nothing as the ulterior aspect of being. Both are responding to Western metaphysics that tends to substantialize being and dichotomize the real. Ironically, however, while Nishida regarded Heidegger as still trapped within the confines of Western (...) metaphysics with its tendency to objectify, Heidegger’s impression of Nishida was that he is too Western, that is, metaphysical. Yet neither was too familiar with the other’s philosophical work as a whole. I thus compare and assess Nishida’s and Heidegger’s discussions of the nothing in their attempts to undermine traditional metaphysics while examining lingering assumptions about the Nishida–Heidegger relationship. Neither Nishida nor Heidegger means by “nothing” a literal nothing, but rather that which permits beings in their relative determinacy to be what they are and wherein or whereby we find ourselves always already in our comportment to beings. Nishida characterizes this as a place that negates itself to give rise to, or make room for, beings. For Heidegger, being as an event that clears room for beings, releasing each into its own, is not a being, hence nothing. We may also contrast them on the basis of the language they employ in discussing the nothing. Yet each seemed to have had an intuitive grasp of an un/ground, foundational to experience and being. And in fact their paths cross in their respective critiques of Western substantialism, where they offer as an alterantive to that substantialist ontology, in different ways, what I call anontology. (shrink)

This essay focuses on and attempts to uncover the truly radical character of Nietzsche’s early “philological” work, specifically asking after the benefit he claims the study of classical culture should have for our present, late-modern historical moment. Taking up his study of the Pre-Platonic thinkers in 1873’s Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen , the first section analyzes Nietzsche’s statement that history’s principle task is the uncovering of Persönlichkeiten . I argue that it is not at all the subjective character (...) of a psychologized individual that Nietzsche has in mind, but rather the moment of persönliche Stimmung or ‘being attuned’ to the world, which grounds and gives rise to thinking. In the second section, I show that the phusis or ‘nature’ to which the thinker is exposed in this attunement is comparable to the tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian natural forces in tragic poetry, as Nietzsche understands it. This dynamic conception of phusis does not provide a metaphysical substrate or an objectively real ground to which we might return via that Greeks, but is rather essentially phenomenal , i.e. it is nothing other than the movement into and out of appearance, which always entails and requires its reception by the human being to whom it appears. In the final section of the essay, this origin proves for Nietzsche not to be located in a distant past moment. Rather, it is the abyssal origin of the tradition that is always already effective in our present moment, informing our contemporary conceptions of our world and ourselves. (shrink)

To be human is to be in the world with others, and so what it means to be goes to the root of ethical and political life. One would have to be exceptionally obtuse not to recognize that this age, which we now share as a planetary humanity, is indeed in crisis, despite all our apparent progress if not because of it: the economic and political upheavals that threaten to throw whole regions into uproar, the shifts in climate that threaten (...) the entire globe with unparalleled disruption, the “advances” in technology that threaten to lay waste to entire cities and reduce human beings to “human resources.” Despite these ongoing or potential disasters, what Heidegger’s work challenges us to think is that the most fundamental disaster is a failure to think what it means to be human, that these other dangers can only be addressed if we confront this question first. My argument here is that Heidegger misreads a form of thinking vital to ethical–political life, phronêsis, so-called practical wisdom, because his radical historicism prevents him from seeing the intersection of principled norms with life as we find it. (shrink)

Modernity is not only the culmination of the “oblivion of being,” for it also provides, in the form of transcendental thinking, a way to recover the original relation of thought to being. Heidegger develops this account through several lecture courses from 1935–1937, especially the 1935–1936 lecture course on Kant, and the account receives a kind of completion in the 1936–1938 manuscript, Contributions to Philosophy. Kant limits the dominance of rationalistic prejudices by reconnecting thought to the givenness of being. He thereby (...) shows the way to overcome the West’s rationalistic oblivion of being. By returning to Kant and repeating him more fundamentally we prepare ourselves for Heidegger’s non-rationalistic thinking of being. This paper, then, reconsiders Heidegger’s relation to modern philosophy, demonstrating on the basis of his own texts that he appropriates modern philosophy but in a non-rationalistic way. Transcendental philosophy plays an essential though ambiguous transitional role in his thinking. (shrink)

Recapitulating two recent trends in Heidegger-scholarship, this paper argues that the transcendental theme in Heidegger’s thought clarifies and relates the two basic questions of his philosophical itinerary. The preparatory question, which belongs to Being and Time , I.1–2, draws from the transcendental tradition to target the condition for the possibility of our openness to things: How must we be to access entities? The preliminary answer is that we are essentially opened up ecstatically and horizonally by timeliness. The fundamental question, which (...) belongs to the unpublished Being and Time , I.3, and the rest of Heidegger’s path of thinking, is accessed by means of the first. In a turn of perspective, it targets that in terms of which we relate to the givenness of being. Heidegger first attempts to handle this question using the transcendental language of temporal horizon before happening upon the terminologically more fitting “event of appropriation” and thereafter criticizing transcendental terms. By reconstructing the preparatory question and its reversal, we can see that Heidegger’s later criticism of transcendence in fact relies on its initial success. The turn from timeliness to appropriation (initially by means of transcendental temporality) happens within the domain initially disclosed by the preparatory question. (shrink)

In Verfassungslehre, Carl Schmitt spells out the radical implications of his own analysis in Der Begriff des Politischen of the concept of the political. He argues in this respect that the political component of modern constitutions, which is suppressed by liberal thinking through its privilege of the rule of law, is the most important component of these constitutions. The political component refers essentially to the form of the political unity of a people. In showing the priority of the political component, (...) Schmitt inter alia insists on drawing a distinction between the constitution and constitutional laws, the resurrection of the concept of sovereignty, understanding equality as first of all and necessarily implying an inequality in respect of those who are excluded from the political unity, and on the subjection of freedom to the political component of the constitution. What would the implications be for constitutional theory if one were to take seriously Derrida’s deconstruction of Schmitt’s concept of the political in Politiques de l’amitié? This essay takes the first tentative steps in this direction, by exploring in detail Derrida’s analysis as well as the new structure of the political that comes to the fore in this text. (shrink)

Resumen: El siguiente artículo parte reconociendo el carácter protector de la téchne y sus momentos constitutivos. De acuerdo a esta determinación es posible advertir el límite de la téchne a partir de la cuestión socrática de la virtud. La virtud, en la medida que no es un asunto análogo a los objetos de la téchne, precisa de un especial acceso. Desde la constatación del diálogo como el único modo de conocer la virtud, se pone de relieve su sentido comunitario y (...) el carácter del examen socrático. En el diálogo socrático se anuncia, así, que la virtud no es nunca algo técnicamente clausurado ni epistémicamente conceptualizado, sino el mayor bien humano que se cumple en su aproximación a través del examen conjunto de la propia vida.: This article starts by recognizing the protective nature of téchne and its development. It is thereby possible to understand the limits of téchne based on the Socratic question of virtue. Virtue, insofar as it is not a matter analogous to the objects of téchne, requires a special access. The communitarian sense and the character of the Socratic inquiry are made plain, given dialogue as the only way of knowing virtue. Socratic dialogue discloses that virtue is never technically closed or epistemically conceptualized, but that this greatest human good is fulfilled through the joint examination of life itself. (shrink)

RESUMO Este ensaio examina algumas possibilidades de diálogo da filosofia heideggeriana e o tema trágico. Concentramo-nos especialmente em três aspectos: a finitude humana, o conceito de angústia e o questionamento da estrutura de domínio prevalecente na técnica moderna. Como buscamos evidenciar, o gesto trágico fundamental não é o da violência que instaura, ou do aniquilamento que imagina desmentir todo o sentido, mas do movimento humano finito que segue nas bordas da existência, sem nunca intuir o quadro completo da sua vida. (...) ABSTRACT This essay deals with some possibilities of the dialogue between Heideggerian philosophy and the question of the tragic. We focused mainly on three features: the human finitude, the concept of anxiety, and the questioning of the prevailing control structure in modern technology. We insisted on that the fundamental tragic act relates not to violence it inaugurates, or to annihilation, which imagines removal of all sense, but to the finite human movement, which follows the margins of existence, without grasping the full picture of his life. (shrink)

In modern continental thought, natural science is widely portrayed as an exclusively instrumental mode of reason. The breadth of this consensus has partly preempted the question of how it came to persuade. The process of persuasion, as it played out in Germany, can be explored by reconstructing the intellectual exchanges among three twentieth-century theorists of science, Heidegger, Habermas, and Werner Heisenberg. Taking an iconic Heisenberg as a kind of limiting case of “the scientist,” Heidegger and Habermas each found themselves driven (...) to place new constraints on their previously more capacious assessments of science, especially its capacity to reflect on its method. Tracing how that happened, through archival and historical contextualization and close readings of their texts, lets us make visible Heidegger and Habermas’s intellectual affinities and argumentative parallels, which derived not only from their shared grounding in earlier reactions against positivism, but also from confrontation with contemporary events. The latter included, for Heidegger, the rise of a technically powerful science exemplified by nuclear physics, and for Habermas, post-World War II controversies over science, technology, and their socially critical possibilities. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHeidegger maintained that Nietzsche was a metaphysical thinker. What did he mean by that? Not that Nietzsche advanced purely theoretical doctrines that might be perfected or refuted by rational argument. Instead, he meant that Nietzsche’s thinking is a ‘representational thinking’ that preserves a commitment to a conception of truth as correctness. Nietzsche’s apparent denials of the intelligibility of truth, Heidegger argues, are in fact expressions of our growing insensitivity to truth understood as unconcealment. Nietzsche’s thinking is thus deeply attuned to (...) metaphysics as Heidegger came to understand it in the late 1930s, namely as a forgetting of being, beginning with Plato. His interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought, particularly the idea of eternal recurrence, changed less because he changed his mind about Nietzsche than because he reconceived the philosophical tradition since Plato as metaphysical, and so reframed his own project as an attempt to think beyond metaphysics. (shrink)

The paper presents, firstly, a brief review of the long history\nof information ethics beginning with the Greek concept of parrhesia\nor freedom of speech as analyzed by Michel Foucault. The recent concept\nof information ethics is related particularly to problems which arose\nin the last century with the development of computer technology and\nthe internet. A broader concept of information ethics as dealing\nwith the digital reconstruction of all possible phenomena leads to\nquestions relating to digital ontology. Following Heidegger{\textquoteright}s\nconception of the relation between ontology and metaphysics, (...) the\nauthor argues that ontology has to do with Being itself and not just\nwith the Being of beings which is the matter of metaphysics. The\nprimary aim of an ontological foundation of information ethics is\nto question the metaphysical ambitions of digital ontology understood\nas today{\textquoteright}s pervading understanding of Being. The\nauthor analyzes some challenges of digital technology, particularly\nwith regard to the moral status of digital agents. The author argues\nthat information ethics does not only deal with ethical questions\nrelating to the infosphere. This view is contrasted with arguments\npresented by Luciano Floridi on the foundation of information ethics\nas well as on the moral status of digital agents. It is argued that\na reductionist view of the human body as digital data overlooks the\nlimits of digital ontology and gives up one basis for ethical orientation.\nFinally issues related to the digital divide as well as to intercultural\naspects of information ethics are explored {\textendash} and long\nand short-term agendas for appropriate responses are presented. (shrink)

Guided by key insights of the four great philosophers mentioned in the title, here, in review of and expanding on our earlier work (Burchard, 2005, 2011), we present an exposition of the role played by language, & in the broader sense, λογοζ, the Logos, in how the CNS, the brain, is running the human being. Evolution by neural Darwinism has been forcing the linguistic nature of mind, enabling it to overcome & exploit the cognitive gap between an animal and its (...) world by recognizing environmental structures. Our work was greatly influenced by Heidegger’s lecture notes on metaphysics (Heidegger, 1935). We found agreement with recent progress in neuroscience, but also mathematical foundations of language theory, equating Logos with the mathematical concept of structure. The mystery of perception across the gap is analyzed as radiation and molecules impinging on sensory neurons that carry linguistic information about gross environmental structures, and only remotely about the physical reality of elementary particles. The most important logical brain function is Ego or Self, guiding the workings of the brain as a logos machine. Ego or Self operates from neurons in frontopolar cortex with global receptive fields. The logos machine can function only by availing itself of global context, its internally stored noumenal cosmos NK, and the categorical-conceptual apparatus CCA, updated continually through the neural default mode network (Raichle, 2005). In the Transcendental Deduction, Immanuel Kant discovered that Ego or Self is responsible for conscious control in perception relying on concepts & categories for a fitting percept to be incorporated intoNK. The entire CNS runs as a “movie-in-the-brain” (Parvizi & Damasio, 2001), at peak speed processing simultaneously in a series of cortical centers a stack of up to twelve frames in gamma rhythm of 25 ms intervals. We equate global context, or NK, with our human world, Heidegger’s Dasein being-in-the-world, and are able to demonstrate that the great philosopher in EM parallels neuro-science concerning the human mind. (shrink)

Recent advances in neuroscience lead to a wider realm for philosophy to include the science of the Darwinian-evolved computational brain, our inner world producing organ, a non-recursive super- Turing machine combining 100B synapsing-neuron DNA-computers based on the genetic code. The whole system is a logos machine offering a world map for global context, essential for our intentional grasp of opportunities. We start from the observable contrast between the chaotic universe vs. our orderly inner world, the noumenal cosmos. So far, philosophy (...) has been rehearsing our thoughts, our human-internal world, a grand painting of the outer world, how we comprehend subjectively our experience, worked up by the logos machine, but now we seek a wider horizon, how humans understand the world thanks to Darwinian evolution to adapt in response to the metaphysical gap, the chasm between the human animal and its environment, shaping the organism so it can deal with its variable world. This new horizon embraces global context coded in neural structures that support the noumenal cosmos, our inner mental world, for us as denizens of the outer environment. Kant’s inner and outer senses are fundamental ingredients of scientific philosophy. Several sections devoted to Heidegger, his lizard debunked, but his version of the metaphysical gap & his doctrine of the logos praised. Rorty and others of the behaviorist school discussed also. (shrink)

From the earliest times, American ethics, the rules for the moral \& intellectual life of the West, used to be founded upon the two principles of self-reliance and good neighborliness. Here we consider the underlying functions of neural brain circuits, organic structures that have evolved adaptively by Darwinian rules subject to selection pressure. In the left brain resides our self-reliant private Ego, making plans, launching initiatives. Your public Ego dwells in the right brain, looking around, meeting with your friendly neighbor. (...) A main component is our bilateral interior cosmos, providing us with all the detailed information about our environment as well as the universe at large. (shrink)

In this essay, our goal is to discover science in Martin Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, lecture notes for his 1935 summer semester course, because, after all, his subject is metaphysica generalis, or ontology, and this could be construed as a theory of the human brain. Here, by means of verbatim quotes from his text, we attempt to show that indeed these lectures can be viewed as suggestion for an objective scientific theory of human perception, the human capacity for deciphering phenomena, (...) ie. hermeneutics in its broadest sense. His added notes from the 1953 edition, all of which are comments, not corrections, imply that he never abandoned these thoughts on metaphysics, despite all of his utterances about a need to overcome it, and their popular interpretations to that effect. In his presentation, he further develops the colorful and intuitive style, an hermeneutic language, that he had created in his earlier work Being and Time. Of human existence he speaks in such expressions as being-there -- ``Dasein" -- and being-in-the-world, the latter term no longer explicit in the 1935 lectures. The lectures can be read as a pre-scientific analysis of how man, being-there, perceives his environment, artfully managing to deal with the manifold challenges posed by the phenomenal structures of the universe. Man attentively recognizes and deciphers their pre-linguistic contents and, while trying to make sense of it all, puts into words his awareness. There are numerous passages in Heidegger's work where he in fairly concrete terms provides us with hints for a perceptive science that, as it turns out and is demonstrated below in this essay, can be explained in terms of recent advances in neuroscience. It would be implausible, even unthinkable, unimaginable, for there not to be found essential agreement between on one hand his philosophical insights gained by hermeneutics of Dasein, into how our brain functions to let us know what's happening & on the other hand, scientific discoveries obtained through anatomy, EEG, fMRI, TMS, electrode implants, etc, of brain structures & functions employed in perception of the momentary scene. A nexus between science and philosophy is provided in Heidegger's definitive treatment of the Logos, here interpreted as a structural version of Platonic forms (Burchard, 2014). This allows for neurolinguistic brain functions to serve as meta-context for Heidegger's being-in-the-world. The logical functions of Dasein's anatomical brain are performed by the logos machine, formerly the human soul, using top-down processing based on a global context, the noumenal cosmos which humans maintain internally. Heidegger's 1942/43 winter semester lectures Parmenides extend in unbroken fashion his 1935 work, proving that he never abandoned, as is widely claimed, his metaphysical avenue of thought. (shrink)