The present text is the revised and corrected English translation of the book published in German by the Lang Verlag, Bern 2008. Unfortunately the text still has some minor flaws (especially in the Index Locorum) but they do not concern the main thesis or the arguments. It will still be the final version, especially considering my age. It is among the most widespread and the least questioned convictions that in Metaphysics Lambda Aristotle presents a theology which has its basis in (...) a metaphysics of substance. Doubts about theological interpretation are beginning to stir in a growing number of publications, but nevertheless the majority of research literature, compendiums and histories of philosophy argues within this frame. A closer look at the facts reveals that this conviction has no basis in the text. Quite the contrary it is based on a reception with theological interests. It arised over centuries, starting from Patristic times and the Middle Ages; it was influenced by Neoplatonic texts as the Liber de Causis or the Theologia Aristotelis, texts for a long time considered as original Aristotelian books. And, if you read not translations but the Greek text, you see that the word 'god' occurs much less than in a theological book should be. In some translations we find more occurences of that word, and especially in French, Italian, English translations some words as le Bien, l'Intelligence etc. are written with capitals to inticate that it is about god. To make it even more clear, we read often the term 'First Mover' or 'Unmoved Mover' as an other name for god, but this expression is never used by Aristotle. So the reader has the impression that Aristotle speaks continuously about god. In addition, in the present book you will find arguments which clean up with the outdated concept of substance in the Aristotelian text, a concept which was developed for quite other problems than Aristotle had, namely theolgical ones. And, if there is no substance, there is no corresponding metaphysics of substance and no theology or onto-theology. If substance, metyphysics, theology play no role in Metaphysics Lambda, what else is its content and aim? That is not so difficult to say because Aristotle says it sufficiently clear in his first sentence, περὶ οὐσίας ἡ θεωρία: our inquiry is about being; its aim is to develop the Frage nach dem Sein and to state a speculative answer: being is noesis, Sein ist Gewahren. (shrink)

La lección de metafísica que imparte Heidegger durante el invierno de 1929/30 caracteriza el pensamiento metafísico como un pensamiento comprensivo, es decir, un pensamiento que “entiende” y que “incluye”. En este contexto, Heidegger busca definir con mayor precisión el vínculo que une su propia metafísica con la tradición moderna criticada unos años antes por “incluir”, precisamente, al sujeto humano en su propia elaboración. Es la ocasión para Heidegger de presentar un retrato mucho más matizado de su vinculación con la filosofía (...) moderna, retrato que pone de manifiesto lo que el Dasein ha heredado del sujeto moderno. (shrink)

This study explores the views of death in the ideas of Kierkegaard and Heidegger to discuss the educational meaning of death and the direction of death education. What both thinkers have in common...

This paper contrasts the notion of “willing” in Heidegger’s politics with the notion of “dawning” in Heidegger’s philosophy. It argues that, in the political text, the attunement of Dasein to what-is is centred in the notion of Dasein’s “willing” of what-is, while in the philosophical text it is centred in the notion of what-is “dawning” on Dasein. It maintains that the attitude to anxiety essential to a “dawning” of what-is is not reached in Heidegger’s “The Self-Assertion of the German University”. (...) It concludes by maintaining that, rather than being attuned to what-is, the will in the “The Self-Assertion of the German University” is attuned to its own relationship to what is in a narcissistic rather than a philosophical way; that is, it territorializes “dawning” as a relation to “what is”, and makes “dawning” of “what-is” its “own” in the same way as any nationalism makes a culture, a language or a geographical region its own. In contrast to the narcissism of nationalism, philosophy, as outlined by Heidegger in the essay “What Is Metaphysics?”, is the experience of allowing what-is to “dawn” on Dasein rather than a preoccupation with “willing” of “dawning” as one’s own relation to Being. (shrink)

Using abstract art as a paradigm, this paper attempts to think, in a provisional manner, the parameters of what the author calls `abstract hermeneutics'—a way of thinking capable of responding to the withdrawing, or abstracting , movement of Being. Such abstract thinking—which is an abstracting thinking of the abstract—aims to step beyond objectivity precisely in order to return to phenomenological concreteness. Through an engagement with Heidegger's understanding of the formal indicative role of the human being as sign ( Zeichen ), (...) the affinity between the abstracting gestures of abstract art, and the absenting characteristic of human existence, is explored. (shrink)

In this article, the differences between Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger’s approaches to ontotheology are discussed. Whereas Marion argues for a historical approach to this question, i.e., testing whether ontotheology can be detected in this or that thinker in this history of philosophy, this article aims, with Levinas and Heidegger, for an ontological approach to the question concerning ontotheology. In this regard, this text expresses wonder about Marion’s claim that Medieval theology would not have succumbed to ontotheology whereas (...) ancient and modern did. It is shown that ontotheology, for Levinas as well as Heidegger, might not be overcome with a simple command but rather belongs to the very structure of thought. The article concludes with offering some corrections to the Levinasian ‘God outside of onto-theology’ by a more phenomenological account of being-in-the world. (shrink)

I clarify some ambiguities in blame-talk and argue that blame's potential for irrationality and propensity to sting vitiates accounts of blame that identify it with consciously accessible, personal-level judgements or beliefs. Drawing on the cognitive psychology of emotion and appraisal theory, I develop an account of blame that accommodates these features. I suggest that blame consists in a range of hostile, negative first-order emotions, towards which the blamer has a specific, accompanying second-order attitude, namely, a feeling of entitlement—a feeling that (...) these hostile, negative first-order emotions are what the blamed object deserves. (shrink)

This paper investigates the strange case of an argument that was directed against a positivist verification principle. We find an early occurrence of the argument in a talk by the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden at the 1934 International Congress of Philosophy in Prague, where Carnap and Neurath were present and contributed short rejoinders. We discuss the underlying presuppositons of the argument, and we evaluate whether the attempts by Carnap (especially) actually succeed in answering this argument. We think they don’t, and offer (...) instead a few sociological thoughts about why the argument seems to have disappeared from the profession’s evaluaton of the positivist criterion of verifiability. (shrink)

The notion of a constitutive lack, which formed the ambivalent initial framework of Western metaphysics, marks the contemporary attempt to think anew the social and the subject. While metaphysics had difficulties to justify ontologically the event of sociality and was tempted to construct a closed subjectivity, post-metaphysical thought by contrast justifies often the sociality of a non-identity. The presuppositions of Orthodox-Christian theology allow us to think of subjectivity and sociality in terms of a different ontology, elaborating a new synthesis between (...) anthropology and eschatology, within which the subject can emerge as radical sociality and natal receptivity, as free and true in its very relationality. The most profound and acute intellectual demands of our present time could then meet central notions of the Orthodox-Christian heritage and point at the perspective of a new historical encounter, which enriches both traditions by mutually engaging to each others fundamental experiences. (shrink)

The paper deals with the notion of guilt according to Heidegger’s philosophy and its repercussions for the understanding of guilt according to criminal law doctrine and theory. Heidegger’s notion on guilt is tantamount to Dasein’s incapacity to exhaust all its existential possibilities, whereas legal guilt has to do only with man’s legal indebtedness, which is an aspect of inauthenticity, a deficient mode of ontological responsibility. This does not mean, though, sheer amoralism or apologetics to violence. In late Heidegger one may (...) discern traces of an ontological ethics, which refers to Dasein’s attunement to Being and especially to the sparing and healing of the Fourfold as these are coming to presence through poetic dwelling; through, that is, an authentic contact with the Uncanny, meaning a radical exposure to Being’s enigmatic hiddenness, the endurance in front of the abyss of Nothingness. In this framework there remains no space for assuming any moral-juridical responsibility, because Dasein is predestined to err constantly due to the ruptures and turnings of Being’s history. Legal blameworthiness is thus obsolete because, injustice being according to Heidegger the dis-jointure of Being’s order, there is ontologically no imputable ‘legal’ crime; there is only Dasein’s eventful projecting-opening within errancy. Whether though this notion of ‘Being’ is a new ‘arche’ to be superseded emerges then as the crucial question. To regain any non-metaphysical notion of guilt is after Heidegger only possible through a theoretical move which cannot ignore his legacy but also has to go beyond the Master. (shrink)

We all learn about the mistake of treating ‘nothing’ as if it were a term standing for something; but is it a mistake to treat it as an empty term, denoting nothing? We argue not, and we introduce ‘zilch’, defined as ‘the non-self-identical thing’, as a term which is empty as a matter of logical necessity. We contrast its behaviour with that of the quantifier ‘nothing’, and illustrate its uses. We use the same idea to vindicate Locke’s, Descartes’ and Hume’s (...) handling of ‘nothing’, and we show how Heidegger’s ‘das Nichts nichtet’ comes out as logically true. (shrink)

This paper focusses on two prima facie independent assumptions of a – broadly – “Heideggerian” approach to moods: One concerning an apparent methodological impact of moods for a fundamental-ontological enterprise and one concerning a presumed human tendency towards Verfallenheit or inauthenticity. It shows that the liaison of those two assumptions challenges theoretical claims according to which subjects are simply assailed by moods and passive with respect to being in a mood. To do so, it follows Heidegger’s reflections on the methodological (...) impact of moods before turning to Heidegger’s considerations about the fundamental disclosure of what he calls the “burden of existence” in anxiety, a burden which – according to Heidegger – we tend to evade most of the time. This paper suggests that the “evasive” character of this tendency is linked to Heidegger’s claim that anxiety latently structures being-in-the-world and that Heidegger’s brief allusion to a difference between the fact of attuned disclosure and conceding to a mood and to that which it discloses is his attempt to hint at what this ‘latency’ of anxiety might amount to. The focus, then, turns to Sartre, who not only shares Heidegger’s two assumptions but also emphasizes that if one wishes to make sense of such a structuring of life by a latent mood, a theory of moods should be saddled with a theory of la mauvaise foi, or self-deception in the broad sense. (shrink)

The work of Anthony J. Steinbock on emotions―particularly moral emotions―and on religious experience is closely related to a methodological claim. This claim is that the concepts of “experience” and “manifestation” should be understood in a broader manner than that of classical phenomenology, particularly Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In this paper, I examine the way in which Steinbock understands and conceptualizes the kind of givenness to which he refers with the notion of “vertical experience”. I focus on his claim that vertical experiences (...) are irreducible to the kind of experiences that can be described in terms of what he calls “provocation”, “presentation” and the “noesis-noema structure”. Even though I make a criticism of his assertion that the latter implies that they should not be understood as forms of givenness founded on the above-mentioned structure, I agree with some major implications that he draws from them. In the last part of the paper, I discuss his suggestion that the Husserlian conceptualization of emotional givenness should be revised to set forward their structure in terms of what he calls “evocation” and try to give additional reasons, drawn from Husserl himself, to support this claim. The paper comes concludes by stressing the relevance of Steinbock’s analyses concerning what he calls “idolatry”. I argue that his analyses of attitudes that negate the vertical dimension of experience have far reaching implications that go beyond the field of philosophy of religion and open new, promising paths for phenomenological research on social and moral problems. (shrink)

In this article, we trace and elucidate Heidegger’s radical re-thinking on the relation between science and technology from about 1940 until 1976. A range of passages from the Gesamtausgabe seem to articulate a reversal of the primacy of science and technology in claiming that “Science is applied technology.” After delving into Heidegger’s reflection on the being of science and technology and their “coordination,” we show that such a claim is essentially grounded in Heidegger’s idea that “Science and technology are the (...) Same [das Selbe].” In addition, we argue that, although different ontic epochs can be distinguished in the evolvement of science and/or technology, for Heidegger there is only one unique ontological Epoch of modernity that encompasses various ontic epochs. Therefore, the change from an “epoch of objectivity” to an “epoch of orderability [Bestellbarkeit]” cannot be considered to be an ontological shift. Furthermore, it is not right to ascribe to Heidegger the view that the development of quantum physics signals the beginning of a new ontological Epoch. (shrink)

ABSTRACTConsulting Heidegger's other texts composed during 1936–1942, this article employs a principle of charity and constructs a consistent discourse about an inceptual negativity Heidegger articulates through a confrontation with Hegel in GA 68. Heidegger deliberately differentiates his use of denial that bears Being-historical significance from Hegel's Negation that allegedly aims at synthesis or elevation as a dialectical movement. Being unsatisfied with his approach that remains entangled with metaphysics in the Contributions, Heidegger attempts to transform the question of the Nothing from (...) a subsidiary question to Beyng to an abyssal question. One needs to go under toward the Nothing in its concealed, conjoined, and most intimate relation to Beyng. The movement of going under is fundamentally significant for transitions that could occur from out of the history of Beyng. Never being the fullness of essence, the Nothing places a limit on Beyng, constantly thwarts its unfolding, and maint... (shrink)

A concepção heideggeriana da essência da linguagem é apresentada à luz dos princípios básicos de seu pensamento e em confronto com a perspectiva da filosofia analítica. Mostra-se que a radical diferença entre as duas concepções não implica contradição, já que o fenômeno ao qual se referem sob o nome de linguagem não é abordado na mesma perspectiva.

Carnap’s search for a criterion of empirical significance is usually considered a failure. I argue that the results from two out of his three different approaches are at the very least problematic, but that one approach led to success. Carnap’s criterion of translatability into logical syntax is too vague to allow for definite results. His criteria for terms—introducibility by chains of reduction sentences and his criterion from “The Methodological Character of Theoretical Concepts”—are almost trivial and have no clear relation to (...) the empirical significance of sentences. However, his criteria for sentences—translatability, verifiability, falsifiability, confirmability—are usable, and under the assumptions needed for the Carnap sentence approach, verifiability, falsifiability, and translatability become equivalent. As a result of the Carnap sentence approach, metaphysics is rendered analytic. (shrink)

Thus Plotinus (what is his status in the history of metaphysics and in the "Platonic" era, if one follows Heidegger's reading?), who speaks of presence, that is, also of morphē, as the trace of nonpresence, as the amorphous (to gar ikhnos tou amorphous morphē). A trace which is neither absence nor presence, nor, in whatever modality, a secondary modality.In his reading of Heidegger in his 2003 seminar, published as The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida is particularly troubled by one particular (...) aspect of Heidegger: Heidegger's "superabundant use" of the language of Walten.1 "As you see," Derrida writes of Heidegger's use of Walten, "late in my life of reading Heidegger, I have just discovered a word that seems to .. (shrink)

De acordo com as interpretações mais conhecidas (por exemplo, Hofmann, Strauss, Löwith ou Kuhn), o pensamento jurídico e político de Carl Schmitt mantém distância de Aristóteles. Este artigo tem a intenção de mostrar que a concepção de direito de Schmitt, apesar de ser desenvolvida em um contexto diferente, contém semelhanças significativas com o entendimento de direito em Aristóteles. Para mostrar essa proximidade, considera-se especialmente a noção de totalidade presente no conceito aristotélico de polis, que implica que a unidade política é (...) o principal modo de se realizar o direito. According to mostly known interpretations (e.g.: Hofman, Strauss, Löwith or Kuhn), the legal and political thought of Carl Schmitt keeps distance from Aristotle's. This article intends to show that Schmitt's concept of law, despite developed in a different context, holds significant likelihood with Aristotle's comprehension of law. With the Purpose of building this proximity, the notion of entirety present in the Aristotelic concept of polis implies that political unit is the main way to accomplish law. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the ontological meaning of mood in Heidegger’s conception of Attunement, in order to relate this notion of Stimmung specifically to our “attunement” to a form of life, as conceived in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. It claims that moods spell out the constitutive impossibility to grasp and found the human experience as such. However, this impossibility is not a lack of human knowledge, but rather corresponds to the necessary opacity, indeterminability and groundlessness of every human experience, which make (...) it possible as such. The paper argues that the ontological mood of anxiety in Heidegger’s thought cannot be understood as a dark feeling, since it points to a constitutive sense of disorientation, which involves the impossibility to found and ensure the very familiarity of our ordinary experience. Moreover, the paper claims that the same impossibility is also involved in our “attunement” to language and to a form of life, as described by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. By analyzing the mood of trust sketched out by Wittgenstein in On Certainty, the paper suggests that the ontological mood of trust, as the groundless certainty of our praxis, points to the very impossibility to found and ensure every human experience. From this perspective, moods reveal the groundlessness of human experience and make us acknowledge it. (shrink)

Pretendemos neste trabalho sustentar a ideia de que, seguindo um percurso que vai de Sein und Zeit aos textos mais tardios, a compreensão do pensar, especialmente tendo em conta a íntima relação desta compreensão com o conceito de existência, esteve caracterizada pela concepção de finitude. Assim, segundo esta hipótese, o pensamento da história do ser teria como meta revelar ao mesmo tempo o retraimento do ser que se opera por um pensar – chamemo-lo de “expropriador” – e a necessidade de (...) se inaugurar um novo pensar, que é o que estaria em jogo na viragem. Intuídos já em Sein und Zeit morte e finitude, firmar-se-iam como conceitos nucleares para a compreensão da importância, do alcance e da posteridade da filosofia heideggeriana. (shrink)

Heidegger thinks that humans enjoy openness to being, an openness that distinguishes them from all other entities, animals included. To safeguard openness to being, Heidegger denies that humans are animals. This position attracts the criticism of Derrida, who denies the difference between humans and animals and with it the human openness to being. In this paper, I argue that human difference and human animality are not mutually exclusive. Heidegger has the conceptual resources in his thought and in the history of (...) philosophy to affirm human animality while safeguarding the human difference. A cause transforms the meaning of a condition. The case of the human hand, an animal appendage that serves our openness to being, illustrates splendidly this transformation. The human hand not only grasps things in its environment but also points things out, makes things, acts, and welcomes others in the world. Humans are animals transformed by openness to being. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 64 Heft: 6 Seiten: 894-924.

Pseudoproblems, pseudoquestions, pseudosentences (etc.) constitute an iridescent group of concepts which were prominently used by the Vienna Circle (including Wittgenstein). In the course of an explication this paper presents a compilation of the many different meanings that were given to these expressions. This includes the more prominent Viennese approaches as well as a more recent one by Roy Sorensen. A novel proposal concerning the use ofthe term is made, suggesting that nothing is just a pseudoproblem, but only relative to a (...) certain state of discourse. While the paper follows an explicative methodology, several uses of 'pseudoproblem', including the explicated one, relate pseudoproblemhood to other kinds of analysis. (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)

This essay in the comparative metaphysic of nothingness begins by pondering why Leibniz thought of the converse question as the preeminent one. In Eastern philosophical thought, like the numeral 'zero' (śūnya) that Indian mathematicians first discovered, nothingness as non-being looms large and serves as the first quiver on the imponderables they seem to have encountered (e.g., 'In the beginning was neither non-being nor being: what was there, bottomless deep?' RgVeda X.129). The concept of non-being and its permutations of nothing, negation, (...) nullity, etc., receive more sophisticated treatment in the works of grammarians, ritual hermeneuticians, logicians, and their dialectical adversaries variously across Jaina and Buddhist schools. The present analysis follows the function of negation/the negative copula, nãn, and dialetheia in grammar and logic, then moves onto ontologies of non-existence and extinction and further suggestive tropes that tend to arrest rather than affirm the inexorable being-there of something. After a discussion of interests in being (existence), non-being and nothingness in contemporary metaphysics, the article examines Heidegger’s extensive treatment of nothingness in his 1929 inaugural Freiburg lecture, 'Was ist Metaphysik?', published later as 'What is Metaphysics?' The essay however distances itself from any pretensions toward a doctrine of Metaphysical Nihilism. (shrink)

The essay explores how God is conceived—if only just—in the works of two existentialist philosophers: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, one considers the mutual convergence and disarming divergence of their respective positions. In 1919, Martin Heidegger announced his distancing of himself from the Catholic faith, apparently liberating himself to pursue philosophical research unfettered by theological allegiances. Thereafter, the last of the Western metaphysicians takes his hammer to the ‘destruktion of onto-theology’—the piety of Greek philosophy and of Hellenized Judaeo-Christianity. The essay (...) argues that Heidegger provided both the platform and challenges reins for his long-time friend Karl Jaspers’ thinking on the question of the absconditus—‘absconded into hiding; hence lost, or better, the missing condition’—of the transcendent. One might avail one's critical perspective by considering ideas from Indian philosophy to balance the respective positions of the two humanist-Germanic protagonists. We proceed so with a view to reconfiguring the predominant monotheistically conceived conception of the deity, the place and limits of belief and philosophical faith, and the future of postdivinism in the global axis. (shrink)

The paper will study an unpublished 1930–31 seminar where Heidegger reads Plato’s Parmenides, showing that in spite of his much-criticized habit of dismissing Plato as the progenitor of “idealist” metaphysics, Heidegger was quite aware of the radical potential of his later dialogues. Through a temporal account of the notion of oneness (to hen), the Parmenides attempts to reconcile the plurality of beings with the unity of Being. In Heidegger’s reading, the dialogue culminates in the notion of the “instant” (to exaiphnēs, (...) Augenblick)—a high point in the entire metaphysical tradition—where the temporal plurality of presence and un-presence converges into a unified disclosure. (shrink)

In the early Analytic Philosophy, the concept of a pseudosentence was used as a polemical device. To try and formalize a sentence without success was a means to ›debunk‹ it as a pseudosentence. The classical example is Heidegger’s dictum of the nothing which noths. But, according to Carnap, not only did Carnap not understand what Heidegger said, but also Heidegger himself must have misunderstood his own utterances! Does Carnap's diagnosis remain intact if one admits the possibility of a misunderstanding and (...) misconstrual on Carnap’s side, too? Should not Carnap's concept of formalization be substituted by that of logico-hermeneutical reconstruction in order to obviate any such infelicities? In everyday communication, we very rarely ever feel the need to undertake a significant effort to understand each other. This attitude is at odds with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s view that misunderstandings are ubiquitous and that one has to actively invest into the establishment of correct understandings. Therefore, one should ask: Are there good reasons to reject the view that we misunderstand ourselves all the time? Or: Is there any worth in the view that misunderstandings are prevalent? The answers developed in this paper are generalized so that they apply to philosophical contexts and a maxim of escalating formalization is formulated. The debate about peer disagreement is adduced as an illustration of philosophical practices that evade the maxim and thus stagnate cognitively. (shrink)

Languages involving modalities and languages involving vagueness have each been thoroughly studied. On the other hand, virtually nothing has been said about the interaction of modality and vagueness. This paper aims to start filling that gap. Section 1 is a discussion of various possible sources of vague modality. Section 2 puts forward a model theory for a quantified language with operators for modality and vagueness. The model theory is followed by a discussion of the resulting logic. In Section 3, the (...) framework will permit us to address a puzzle raised by Elizabeth Barnes and Robert Williams. (shrink)

Although Flusser does not explain and develop his philosophical and methodological claims on the first three pages of his mini treatise „Für eine Phänomenologie des Fernsehens“, there is enough evidence for Flusser’s fundamentally phenomenological credo. The philosophers of Flusser’s implicit references can be unmistakably detected: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Immanuel Kant and Günther Anders. On the one hand, Flusser appears to be strongly rooted in the phenomenological tradition. On the other, in a text on Husserl’s philosophy written in (...) 1986/87, Flusser reveals that he had changed his mind in the meantime turning to a sociology of media that dispenses with the phenomenological stance that was the main aim of his thinking on media in the 1970ies. (shrink)

This dissertation is an investigation into the relation between mind and language from different perspectives, split up into three interrelated but still, for the most part, self-standing parts. Parts I and II are concerned with the question how thought is affected by language while Part III investigates the scope covered by mind and language respectively. Part I provides a reconstruction of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous Private Language Argument in order to apply the rationale behind this line of argument to the relation (...) between mind and language. This argumentative strategy yields the conclusion that reasoning – an important type of thought – is constitutively dependent on language possession and is therefore not available to non-linguistic creatures. This result is achieved by considering the preconditions for reasoning – given that it is a rule-governed activity – and eliminating competitors to language for providing reasoners with what it takes to reason. Part II provides a critical outlook on the wide and highly heterogeneous field of linguistic relativity theories. It is argued that no kind of linguistic relativity whatsoever follows from the conclusion of Part I – i.e., the claim that reasoning is constitutively dependent on having a language. While Part II does not provide a conclusive argument against the linguistic relativity hypothesis, it is argued that endorsement of linguistic relativity theories often rests on a mistaken assumption to the effect that language and culture are interwoven in a way which makes it impossible to separate culture and language, as well as their respective studies. This assumption is undermined by providing examples of languages which clearly predate their culture or do not even have a culture at all. So, the assumption that language and culture are inextricably intertwined is refuted by way of counterexample. Part III provides an in-depth examination of the Principle of Expressibility – prominently endorsed and formulated by John Searle – which claims that whatever can be thought can also be said. The domains of what can be thought and of what can be said are considered in set theoretic terms in order to determine whether one is contained in the other, so that everything we can think can also be adequately communicated. After thorough study of interpretative issues regarding the Principle of Expressibility and consideration of the most pressing potential counterexamples to the principle, we can conclude that we have good reason to believe in the truth of the Principle of Expressibility. In conclusion, the achieved results are related back to prominent positions in the discussion about thought and language which already make their appearance in the very beginning of this investigation. The final chapter of this dissertation reminds us that eminent figures in philosophy have often taken a wrongheaded perspective on the relation between language and thought, so that language has frequently appeared to be an impediment to thought. We can, however, confidently conclude that language, on the contrary, is by far our most apt means for thought and that reasoning would not even be possible without the resources language provides. (shrink)

G. F. Stout is famous as an early twentieth century proselyte for abstract particulars, or tropes as they are now often called. He advanced his version of trope theory to avoid the excesses of nominalism on the one hand and realism on the other. But his arguments for tropes have been widely misconceived as metaphysical, e.g. by Armstrong. In this paper, I argue that Stout’s fundamental arguments for tropes were ideological and epistemological rather than metaphysical. He moulded his scheme to (...) fit what is actually given to us in perception, arguing that our epistemic practices would break down in an environment where only universals were given to us. (shrink)

Se busca resaltar el topos de la proximidad en la lectura que hace Derrida de Heidegger, conectándolo con la presuposición de la unidad de la palabra en tanto que núcleo de la posibilidad del sentido del ser, y con la autoafección como condición de la unidad del sentido y de la proximidad, condición..

In this text I would like to show two things. Firstly, that the so-called “timelessness” of the Freudian unconscious can be elucidated through an interpretation of the concept of Nachträglichkeit, and showing thereby that there is indeed a temporality specific to the workings of the unconscious. Freud’s analysis of early psychic trauma related to sexual phenomena pointed to a serious complication for all believers in the immediate transparency of consciousness. For the “wound” itself was constituted over time, and the possibility (...) of coming to understand the trauma (thereby achieving a certain freedom from its repercussions) was again only possible after the event had passed. The Nachträglichkeit involved in the psychoanalytical understanding of sexual trauma thus hinges on a threefold temporal process at work in subjective life. Secondly, I wish to show that Husserl, in his analyses of time and intersubjectivity, delivered the materials with which a phenomenological clarification of Nachträglichkeit can be given. Since Nachträglichkeit is essentially tied to the structure of repression (and thus the very constitution of the unconscious), what I am suggesting is a prolegomenon to a phenomenological clarification of Freudian repression. This clearly suggests the need for further investigations into the phenomenology of sexual life. (shrink)

The studies carried out in recent years on the molecular dynamics of consciousness, especially in relation to diseases such as major depression and bipolar disorder, on man considered as a synthesis of nature and culture, in their interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary expression, prompted us to carry out the molecular logic involving the human component of Christ (Christ-Man). On the basis of evidence presented in the Holy Scriptures, regarding the hours that preceded his death, we tend, in the light of the molecular (...) pathway related to mood disorders, to attribute a possible form of depression to Christ-Man, without of course, undermining the faith in the transcendent nature of the Christ-God. (shrink)

O presente artigo examina a relação entre lógica e filosofia a partir das teses críticas apresentadas por Heidegger ao longo dos escritos que culminam em "O que é metafísica?". Em particular, mostra-se que a polêmica afirmação sobre o fim do primado da lógica na filosofia, enunciada com a tese acerca da relação entre o nada e a negação, tem como alvo crítico o assim chamado idealismo lógico da Escola de Marburg, não representando um ataque geral à lógica enquanto lógica formal, (...) pura e simplesmente. Tomando a noção de "idéia", em sentido kantiano, com a tese da dissolução da idéia da lógica, Heidegger pretende uma limitação fundamental em toda investigação ontológica conduzida por uma reflexão lógico-transcendental, independentemente do modo como possa ser melhorada ou até mesmo reformulada. O problema do nada, tematizado em "O que é metafísica?", é analisado aqui como o caso limite do primado da lógica no questionamento ontológico.Based on the critical theses presented by Heidegger in texts which culminate in Was ist Metaphysik?, the present paper deals with the relation between Logic and Philosophy. It shows specifically that the polemic statement about the end of the primacy of Logic in Philosophy, founded on the thesis of the relation between negation and nothing, has as its critical target the so-called logical idealism of the Marburg School, and does not intend a general attack on formal Logic simpliciter. Taking in account the Kantian notion of "idea", Heidegger intended in the thesis of the dissolution of the idea of Logic a fundamental limitation for every ontological investigation grounded in logical-transcendental reflection, regardless of the way it can be improved, or reformulated. The question of nothing approached in Was ist Metaphysik? is analyzed here as a case that demonstrates the limits of the primacy of Logic in ontological questions. (shrink)