Levinas maintains that there is a lasting significance to hedonism if we consider the important role of pleasures for our embodied existence. In this essay, we go back to Plato to explore the nature of pleasure, different kinds of pleasures, and their contribution to the good life. The good life is a considerate mixture of pleasures which requires knowing, understanding and remembering. Pleasures take us to the most basic level of existence which the Presocratics can help us understand through their (...) idea of elements. With the help of Levinas, we can expand the concept of elements to include elemental states. As a result, we see how our embodied existence opens us up to various levels of otherness. (shrink)

This article discusses the gap in Martin Heidegger’s ontology pertaining to the transformative affectivity arising in the interactions between beings, particularly how this affectivity is responsible for changes in those beings. It thus explores the possibility of bridging this gap by including an additional dimension of being. For this purpose, it draws upon Aristotle’s concept of affecting/being affected (On Generation and Corruption, Book I), which aims to explain the origin of alteration in beings. The Aristotelian juxtaposition of action and passion (...) serves as a backdrop for the incorporation of the concept of “shapeability” into Heidegger’s ontology. This involves a dimension of revealing being related to the active and passive aspects of beings’ capacity to shape and be shaped by others. Investigating the idea of shapeability, I shall argue, can shed some new light on the multidimensionality of how being is disclosed. (shrink)