First published in 1988 as volume 63 of his Collected Works, Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity is the text of Heidegger's lecture course at the University of Freiburg during the summer of 1923. In these lectures, Heidegger reviews and makes critical appropriations of the hermeneutic tradition from Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine to Schleiermacher and Dilthey in order to reformulate the question of being on the basis of facticity and the everyday world. Specific themes deal with the history of (...) ontology, the development of phenomenology and its relation to Hegelian dialectic, traditional theological and philosophical concepts of man, the present situation of philosophy, and the influences of Aristotle, Luther, Kierkegaard, and Husserl on Heidegger's thinking. Students of Heidegger will find initial breakthroughs in his unique elaboration of the meaning of human experience and the "question of being," which received mature expression in Being and Time. (shrink)

This paper examines the concept of the world elaborated by Heidegger in the early Freiburg lecture courses of the years 1919 to 1923, in which he proposes a renewed conception of phenomenology through a comparison with Husserlian phenomenology. First, I show that although the theme of the lifeworld became central only in late Husserlian works, especially in _The Crisis of European Sciences_, Husserl began to deal with this concept before 1920, anticipating some fundamental issues of the _Crisis_, as (...) it results from the lectures of 1919 on _Natur und Geist_. Husserl had addressed the concept of the world already in the lectures of 1910/11, _The Basic Problems of Phenomenology_, and, subsequently, in the second book of _Ideas_, which was published posthumously, but which was known to the young Heidegger. Then, I discuss the way in which Heidegger revisited the issue of the world in the early Freiburg lecture courses by means of a critique of Husserl’s analysis, focusing on perceptual experience as “environmental experience” and on the “world-character” of life. Particular emphasis is placed on the distinction between “environing-world,” “with-world,” and “self-world,” which Heidegger introduces in the lectures of 1919–1920. Finally, I point out that the Heideggerian rethinking of the concept of lifeworld is closely connected to the recognition of the immanent historicity of life, while Husserl only later takes into account the historicity of the lifeworld. (shrink)

Heidegger reflects on technology, language, and tradition, and he guides us into rethinking the common conceptions of technology and language. He argues that the anthropological-instrumental conception of modem technology is correct but not true, as it does not capture what is most peculiar to technology: the demand to challenge nature. The common conception of language as a mere means for exchange and understanding, on the other hand, is taken to its extremes in the technological interpretation of language as information. (...) Heidegger also argues that the technological transformation of language represents an attack on what is peculiar to language as saying, i.e., as letting-appear. Such attack constitutes a threat to our very essence. The traditional or non-technologized everyday language, however, preserves what is original and contains new possibilities. The opposition between traditional language and technological language thus concerns our essence, our world-relation and world-living. (shrink)

Heidegger reflects on technology, language, and tradition, and he guides us into rethinking the common conceptions of technology and language. He argues that the anthropological-instrumental conception of modem technology is correct but not true, as it does not capture what is most peculiar to technology: the demand to challenge nature. The common conception of language as a mere means for exchange and understanding, on the other hand, is taken to its extremes in the technological interpretation of language as information. (...) Heidegger also argues that the technological transformation of language represents an attack on what is peculiar to language as saying, i.e., as letting-appear. Such attack constitutes a threat to our very essence. The traditional or non-technologized everyday language, however, preserves what is original and contains new possibilities. The opposition between traditional language and technological language thus concerns our essence, our world-relation and world-living. (shrink)

"Fried and Polt's translation of Martin Heidegger's Being and Truth is a well-crafted and careful rendering of an important and demanding volume of the Complete Works."-Andrew Mitchell, Emory University In these lectures, delivered in 1933-1934 while he was Rector of the University of Freiburg and an active supporter of the National Socialist regime, Martin Heidegger addresses the history of metaphysics and the notion of truth from Heraclitus to Hegel. First published in German in 2001, these two lecture courses (...) offer a sustained encounter with Heidegger's thinking during a period when he attempted to give expression to his highest ambitions for a philosophy engaged with politics and the world. While the lectures are strongly nationalistic and celebrate the revolutionary spirit of the time, they also attack theories of racial supremacy in an attempt to stake out a distinctively Heideggerian understanding of what it means to be a people. This careful translation offers valuable insight into Heidegger's views on language, truth, animality, and life, as well as his political thought and activity. Gregory Fried is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Suffolk University. He is author of Heidegger's Polemos: From Being to Politics and editor of A Companion to Hedegger's Introduction to Metaphysics. Richard Polt is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Xavier University. He is author of The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy and Heidegger: An Introduction. (shrink)

'There is something absolute about the letters between you & me; … The letter is a form of communion of the soul-spirit – … one that is faded & yet unimpeded, complete’, wrote Martin Heidegger to his fiancée Elfride Petri shortly before their wedding. In the course of a marriage that lasted almost sixty years Martin and Elfride were often apart, and the letter thus remained a vital means of communication right through to the final years. The letters he (...) sent her are snapshots of the ups and downs, the crises and everyday minutiae from Heidegger’s life: their engagement, the building of the Cabin at Todtnauberg, the part he played in the two world wars, the difficulties of his early professional career, their financial problems, his dealings with women, and his constant concern with expounding his ideas. Apart from three letters now in the hands of the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Elfride Heidegger kept all of the countless letters and cards from her husband locked away in a wooden chest. After reading them one final time, in 1977 she gave the key to this chest to her granddaughter Gertrud Heidegger on condition that she should not open it until after Elfride’s death. After years spent deciphering, transcribing and ordering the letters with the help of her father and her uncle, Gertrud Heidegger has here made a selection of them available to the public and added a commentary that provides relevant background material. This selection from the many letters written by Martin Heidegger to his wife provides an invaluable insight into their life together, their friendships and relationships, and sheds fresh light on the ideas and beliefs of one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. (shrink)

'There is something absolute about the letters between you & me; … The letter is a form of communion of the soul-spirit – … one that is faded & yet unimpeded, complete’, wrote Martin Heidegger to his fiancée Elfride Petri shortly before their wedding. In the course of a marriage that lasted almost sixty years Martin and Elfride were often apart, and the letter thus remained a vital means of communication right through to the final years. The letters he (...) sent her are snapshots of the ups and downs, the crises and everyday minutiae from Heidegger’s life: their engagement, the building of the Cabin at Todtnauberg, the part he played in the two world wars, the difficulties of his early professional career, their financial problems, his dealings with women, and his constant concern with expounding his ideas. Apart from three letters now in the hands of the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Elfride Heidegger kept all of the countless letters and cards from her husband locked away in a wooden chest. After reading them one final time, in 1977 she gave the key to this chest to her granddaughter Gertrud Heidegger on condition that she should not open it until after Elfride’s death. After years spent deciphering, transcribing and ordering the letters with the help of her father and her uncle, Gertrud Heidegger has here made a selection of them available to the public and added a commentary that provides relevant background material. This selection from the many letters written by Martin Heidegger to his wife provides an invaluable insight into their life together, their friendships and relationships, and sheds fresh light on the ideas and beliefs of one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. (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)

For Heidegger, world is constitutively bound up with human being’s way of being. Yet after Being and Time he criticizes an excessively one-sided pragmatic reading of his concept of world, insisting that world is more than a referential totality of use involvements, tools, or existential projections. This article examines how Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis should be understood to promote both a practical orientation as well as a more transcendental dimension. The centrality of praxis in Heidegger’s (...) work will not be contested. What will be explored is whether what Heidegger calls “worldliness” or the “phenomenon of world” can be reduced to contexts of use relations or social practices and projects. The argument is made that world, for Heidegger, should be understood as an open space of meaning emergence through which diverse activities, some of which are practical, first become accessible to the human being. The claim will be advanced that world is more than the human being’s disclosive understanding and that an overly pragmatic interpretation circumvents the surpassive dimension of world. (shrink)

하이데거는 건축을 탈은폐함의 한 방식으로 이해한다. 하이데거의 기술론을 참조하여 건축의 탈은폐함을 포이에시스적인 탈은폐함과 무리하게 요구하는 탈은폐함으로 구분해서 고찰한다면, 전자의 경우에는 집이 ‘거주하는 곳’으로 이해되지만, 후자의 경우에는 집 이 ‘재산증식수단’이라는 의미로 고정된다. 이러한 상황에서 논자는 하나의 철학적 문제 로서 집의 의미를 숙고하기 위해 하이데거의 건축론에서 개진되는 집의 의미를 고찰한다. 하이데거는 집이 인간의 존재 의미와 어떻게 연관되는지를 고려해야 한다고 주장한다. 그에 따르면, 무리하게 요구하는 탈은폐함의 차원에서 이루어지는 건축은 집을 재산증식 수단이라는 의미-고정된-것으로 배치하는 공-배치-틀로 작동하는데, 인간은 이러한 배 치를 주문하는 자가 됨으로써 인간 (...) 자신도 하나의 의미-고정된-것으로 된다. 이와 같이 인간이 하나의 의미-고정된-것으로 배치되는 경우 인간은 ‘존재의 개방성’이라는 그 본 질 영역으로부터 완전히 벗어날 수밖에 없다. 하이데거는 우리가 인간의 본질 영역에서 벗 어나지 않고자 한다면 건축하다(짓다)’, ‘거주하다(살다)’라는 말들이 우리에게 말해주는 말을 경청해야 한다고 주장한다. 이 말들은 우리에게 포이에시스적인 탈은폐함의 차원에 서 집을 짓고 집에서 살아가는 것이 곧 우리가 ‘사는 자’로서의 ‘사람’으로서 존재하는 방 식이라고 말하고 있기 때문이다. (shrink)

This paper presents a paragraph of my thesis whose guiding thread is the theme of language in Heidegger, and which advances two basic claims: 1) Being and Time is an unfinished book and it is thus in the understanding of the planetary achievement of “nihilism” – i.e., of “technique” – that this work from 1927 assumes its whole meaning; and 2) that said, Heidegger’s work, taken as a whole, is a cohesive work that aims at overcoming “nihilism” (...) understood originarily as “forgetfulness of being”. This overcoming is therefore achieved in two stages: 1) the understanding of the phenomenon of “being” arising from the transcendental understanding of the “world”; and 2) the overcoming of that transcendental understanding of the “world” in the full understanding of the phenomenon of “being” as “history,” a process in which the dialogue with poetry will prove to be decisive. This paper emphasizes one aspect of that evolution of Heidegger’s thought “in dialogue with Heidegger,” showing how the understanding of “Ereignis” allows us to conciliate the understanding of the concept of “Entschlossenheit,” presented in Being and Time, with the concept of “Gelassenheit,” that is central in the second stage of Heidegger’s work. (shrink)

In "The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World, " Lubica Ucnik examines the existential conflict that formed the focus of Edmund Husserl s final work, which she argues is very much with us today: how to reconcile scientific rationality with the meaning of human existence. To investigate this conundrum, she places Husserl in dialogue with three of his most important successors: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jan Patocka. For Husserl, 1930s Europe was characterized by a growing (...) irrationalism that threatened to undermine its legacy of rational inquiry. Technological advancement in the sciences, Husserl argued, had led science to forget its own foundations in the primary life-world: the world of lived experience. Renewing Husserl s concerns in today s context, Ucnik first provides an original and compelling reading of his oeuvre through the lens of the formalization of the sciences, then traces the unfolding of this problem through the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Patocka. Although many scholars have written on Arendt, none until now has connected her philosophical thought with that of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patocka. Ucnik provides invaluable access to the work of the latter, who remains understudied in the English language. She shows that together, these four thinkers offer new challenges to the way we approach key issues confronting us today, providing us with ways to reconsider truth, freedom, and human responsibility in the face of the postmodern critique of metanarratives and a growing philosophical interest in new forms of materialism.". (shrink)

If there is such a ‘post-secular’ milieu, mindset, or thesis, it will need to furnish its own interpretation of the ‘world’ in ways distinct from those championed by the secular. Indeed an essential aspect of the ‘secular’ is how it has interpreted the ‘world’ as the ‘space, time, and age’ in which things come into presence clearly, neutrally, and obviously. This paper interprets and compares some of Heidegger’s and Henry’s specific engagements with the theme of ‘world’, (...) and how each thinker claims the world itself is presentable as a phenomenon, namely, via disclosive moods and the self-revelation of life. Since the world can appear, and its phenomenality can be presented, an inquiry into the specific, inconspicuous means by which the experiences of the world’s neutrality, clarity, and obviousness might yield phenomenological description. What presents itself as neutral is precisely what demands attention by merit of its hiddenness. (shrink)

This essay engages ways in which the manifestation of ‘world’ occurs in poetry specifically through images, and how we can conceive of the imagination in this regard without reducing the imagination to a mimetic faculty of consciousness subordinate to cognition. Continental thought in the last century offers rich resources for this study. The notion of a ‘world’ is related to the poetic image in ways fundamental to the Heidegger’s theory of language, and may be seen in Continental (...) poetics following Heidegger, including Blanchot’s examination of poetry in his account of the space of literature. By means of images, I shall demonstrate, poetic language is exemplary in relation to ‘world’ in two ways. (1) Images, poetically arranged, generate and open up a sense or experience of a world, specific to that poem, for its reader. Poetic images then, exhibit a generative evocation of world. (2) Through images, a poem may evoke the way in which space and time are inhabited as a world of human dwelling in an ontologically or existentially meaningful way. The relation of images to world is, then, an illumination or a disclosure of world. The first of these relations remains, to a large extent, immanent to the poem, but may be seen as an analogue of the essentially human experience of inhabiting a world. The second relation transcends the poem and relates the poem immediately to the existential framework of human dwelling. (shrink)

Dasein is an entity that can be understood as being-in-the-world, in which the "world" refers to the referential context of meanings. In this context are the environments where the human being as historically constituted relates to other entities, among them the entity called "book" which can mean more than a mere instrument in its instrumentality (Zuhandenheit), but be this entity "the book of my childhood", "of adolescence", etc., unveiling his deliverance in the "for what it is read". The (...) book speaks because the one who wrote it, the Dasein-author, is possessed of language just as the Dasein-reader who relates to the work. Calvin states that the book, as an author’s self-portrait, presents a written world, whose source is the unwritten world, that is, the reality that is more surprising and frightening than what is in the book. The relationship of literature with the philosophy that once belonged to opponents has changed with the writers' attempt to reconcile both movements, including one more element in a triple relationship - Science - Philosophy - Literature. Like the human being, the book has undergone significant changes, such as the rise of digital books. The purpose of the article is to understand these aspects and philosophically interpret some excerpts from world-known works. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to determine the nature of the artwork and the scope of the world revealed therein. the artwork is that by which art becomes actual. it is that in which art is expressed. however, it is more than an object of aesthetic experience. it is the revelation of a people's world. here the world means the world of a particular people at a particular time, the cultural and "intellectual atmosphere" of a (...) historical people. a people's world is their being, therefore, artwork is an epochal manifestation of a people's openness to being. (shrink)

The thesis presented here focuses on the concept of totality in the work of the contemporary cultural critic Fredric Jameson (1934–). By totality, we mean how the human heart enables the human body, but without the body, the heart has no part concerning the whole; they are mutually dependent. This work shall argue that totality is the allegorical figuration framing Jameson’s political critiques of modernity in The Political Unconscious (1981) and Postmodernism (1991). The postmodern world today as an absent (...) totality represents the contradiction in Jameson: We live in a complex world despite its unrepresentability. Whilst studies of early Jameson have interpreted his works through postmodernity and cognitive mapping, their unsubstantiation of Jameson’s later totality has resulted in not being able to explicate Jameson’s view of the a-historicity of postmodernity. Part One shall examine Jameson’s readings of Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel, demonstrating that Hegel’s critique of Kant concerning the boundary of knowledge includes its overcoming and that Hegelian totality is not closed, permitting Jameson to represent the world as an open totality. Part Two shall argue that Jameson’s reading of the works of Karl Marx and the Marxist tradition of Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin reinforces totality in their writing styles, which allows Jameson to glimpse totality through writing. Part Three shall argue that totality in Jameson’s interpretation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) is at work and that Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde (1799) elucidates a counterpoint to totality which can be used to understand non-dialectical thinkers which Jameson examines such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Part Four shall argue that Jameson’s reading of these thinkers is justified in critiquing their productive misreadings of totality as closed, informing their political quietism, thereby re-politicising totality as an allegory. (shrink)

Heidegger has been taken by many as a prophet of extremity, a nihilist, an existentialistic individualist, and a destroyer of normativity. This article offers a sympathetic reading of Brandom’s efforts to extricate Heidegger from such readings and to set out a way to read Heidegger’s philosophy of language and action that underscores their fundamental sociality and normativity. Herein it is shown specifically why Brandom must turn to Heidegger’s work as a testing ground for his own proposal (...) of an inferentialist semantics. In tandem, Brandom’s Kantian reading of Heidegger is analysed and assessed. Key Words: Dasein • Martin Heidegger • language • normativity • objectivity • pragmatics • referential • Richard Rorty • semantics • sociality • world-disclosing. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Religious Life presents the text of Heidegger’s important 1920–21 lectures on religion. The volume consists of the famous lecture course Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion, a course on Augustine and Neoplatonism, and notes for a course on The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism that was never delivered. Heidegger’s engagements with Aristotle, St. Paul, Augustine, and Luther give readers a sense of what phenomenology would come to mean in the mature expression of his thought. (...) class='Hi'>Heidegger reveals an impressive display of theological knowledge, protecting Christian life experience from Greek philosophy and defending Paul against Nietzsche. (shrink)

In this volume Martin Heidegger confronts the philosophical problems of language and begins to unfold the meaning begind his famous and little understood phrase "Language is the House of Being." The "Dialogue on Language," between Heidegger and a Japanese friend, together with the four lectures that follow, present Heidegger's central ideas on the origin, nature, and significance of language. These essays reveal how one of the most profound philosophers of our century relates language to his earlier (...) and continuing preoccupation with the nature of Being and himan being. One the Way to Language enable readers to understand how central language became to Heidegger's analysis of the nature of Being. On the Way to Language demonstrates that an interest in the meaning of language is one of the strongest bonds between analytic philosophy and Heidegger. It is an ideal source for studying his sustained interest in the problems and possibilities of human language and brilliantly underscores the originality and range of his thinking. (shrink)

Publisher's description: The Phenomenology of Religious Life presents the text of Heidegger's important 1920621 lectures on religion. First published in 1995 as volume 60 of the Gesamtausgabe, the work reveals a young Heidegger searching for the striking language that eventually formed the mature expression of his thought. The volume consists of the famous lecture course "Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion," a course on "Augustine and Neoplatonism," and notes for a course on "The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism" (...) that was never delivered. Heidegger's engagements with Aristotle, St. Paul, Augustine, and Luther give readers a sense of what phenomenology would come to mean in his later works. Here, Heidegger reveals an impressive display of theological knowledge, protecting Christian life experience from Greek philosophy and defending Paul against Nietzsche. The appearance of this first English translation marks a significant event in Heidegger scholarship and affords a unique look into his phenomenology. (shrink)

In the writings of Martin Heidegger being has again been singled out as the primary factor from which both world and meaning are ultimately derived. Owing to the focusing on what we call the world by recent phenomenological investigations, to which Heidegger himself has made important contributions, his philosophy shows many novel and original features. But as he sees it, being is again the primary factor which manifests itself, through man, in the meaningful clearing of (...) the life-world. So in this respect we must think of his style of thought as a new development of the classical tradition. (shrink)

Philosophy is one of the disciplines that can more adequately provide a contribution to the definition of the focus and limits of psychiatry in the definition of human being. Substantial, comprehensive contributions to this field come from Martin Heidegger, one of the most prominent and seminal philosophers of the 20th century. During the 50's the Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia comes up with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and he gains the concept of human being as’Being-in-the- world’, central (...) point in every relationship with the others.’Being-in-the-world’ is not a merely spatial relation with ourselves and the others, but is the fundamental meaning of human existence and of the Care. The Care is not only a medical concept but also an ontological and ethical one: overcrossing the concept of empathy, Heidegger argues that all objectifying representations of a capsule-like psyche, subject, person, ego or consciousness in psychology and psychopathology must be abandoned in favor of a new understanding of human being, starting from its ontological characters:’Being-in-the-world’,’Being-with-the-others’ and’Being-toward-death’. (shrink)

This collection is the final volume of a four book survey of the state of phenomenology fifty years after the death of Edmund Husserl. Its publication represents a landmark in the comprehensive treatment of contemporary phenomenology in all its vastness and richness. The diversity of the issues raised here is dazzling, but the main themes of Husserl's thought are all either explicitly treated, or else they underlie the ingenious approaches found here. Time, historicity, intentionality, eidos, meaning, possibility/reality, and teleology (...) are the main concerns of this collection devoted to studies in aesthetics, metaphysics and literary interpretation, written by such authors as, among others, R. Cobb-Stevens, C. Moreno Marquez, J. Swiecimski, Sitansu Ray and M. Kronegger. These original studies of phenomenological aesthetics and literary theory by scholars from all parts of the world were gathered by the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learn ing during the year 1988/89 during its assessment of the phenomeno logical movement, fifty years after Husserl's death. IX A -T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXVII, ix. (shrink)

Michel Houellebecq’s Anéantir has received mixed reviews. Houellebecq’s focus on loving intimacy and care for the elderly within the nuclear family allegedly showcases his transformation from an embittered critic of the capitalist status quo to an apolitical novelist interested in the private sphere. I argue that this criticism overlooks Houellebecq’s concerns about old age and love in his earlier novels and how they relate to his social critique. Particularly Houellebecq’s Possibilité d’une île presents a critique of lonely precarity as the (...) dominant mode of being-in-the-world today. Though critics of post-Fordism have already described post-Fordist forms of life as opportunistic, fearful, and cynical, Houellebecq adds that this uncertain marketized lifestyle also leads to bitterness that increases with old age. By confronting Houellebecq’s phenomenology of contemporary life to Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, I argue that, whereas Heidegger highlights the role of anxiety and death in fostering a sense of meaning to human existence, Houellebecq rather argues that such an authentic confrontation with death has become impossible in contemporary culture and that love is instead the emotional tonality most responsive to the cultivation of a meaningful good life. (shrink)

The Concept of Time presents the reconstructed text of a lecture delivered by Martin Heidegger to the Marburg Theological Society in 1924. It offers a fascinating insight into the developmental years leading up to the publication, in 1927, of his magnum opus Being and Time, itself one of the most influential philosophical works this century. In The Concept of Time Heidegger introduces many of the central themes of his analyses of human existence which were subsequently incorporated into Being (...) and Time, themes such as Dasein, Being-in-the-world, everydayness, disposition, care, authenticity, death, uncanniness, temporality and historicity. Starting out by asking: What is time?, Heidegger proceeds to radicalise the concept of time and our relation to it, ending with the question: Are we ourselves time? Am I time? (shrink)

Is the tick a machine or a machine operator? Is it a mere object or a subject? With these questions, the pioneering biophilosopher Jakob von Uexküll embarks on a remarkable exploration of the unique social and physical environments that individual animal species, as well as individuals within species, build and inhabit. This concept of the umwelt has become enormously important within posthumanist philosophy, influencing such figures as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari, and, most recently, Giorgio Agamben, who has called (...) Uexküll "a high point of modern antihumanism." A key document in the genealogy of posthumanist thought, _A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans_ advances Uexküll's revolutionary belief that nonhuman perceptions must be accounted for in any biology worth its name; it also contains his arguments against natural selection as an adequate explanation for the present orientation of a species' morphology and behavior. _A Theory of Meaning_ extends his thinking on the _umwelt_, while also identifying an overarching and perceptible unity in nature. Those coming to Uexküll's work for the first time will find that his concept of the _umwelt_ holds out new possibilities for the terms of animality, life, and the whole framework of biopolitics itself. (shrink)

The present study concerns the issue of meaning in contemporary continental philosophy. In particular, it develops the two accounts of meaning offered by Heidegger and Levinas, each of whom presents us with a differing break from Husserl. As a first attempt to name the difference between these three thinkers, one could say that Husserl gives us an epistemological notion of meaning; whereas Heidegger gives us an ontological account, and Levinas gives us an ethical account. We (...) will refine and reformulate this division in relation to the issues of each chapter. ;We will thus see how both Heidegger and Levinas develop their separate notions in relation to Husserl's own revolutionary approach to the question of meaning. Whereas Husserl both replaced the term "experience" with the term "intuition" and gave a compelling account of the "prepredicative" roots of the meaningful, Heidegger advances the articulation of such a prepredicative realm of meaning even further than Husserl. He did so, however, in a way that ends up displacing Husserl's notion of intuition. This is the move from Husserl's account of phenomenological intuition to Heidegger's own notion of a more hermeneutic phenomenology . ;I will show how Heidegger articulates an account of meaning as that upon which any projection of understanding takes shape. Meaning becomes a quasi-transcendental, non-subjective notion of that which makes possible the disclosure of any "world." Levinas, on the other hand, offers an account of meaning---in intended opposition to Heidegger---as located primarily in the ethical exposure at the heart of language: in the "face-to-face" relation of Same and Other. He further develops his notion of meaning in terms of the notion of the saying and the said. Both Heidegger and Levinas give us a non-intentional account of the meaningful. For Heidegger it takes the form of a non-intentional background that makes possible both the "worldhood of the world" and the possibilities of Dasein . For Levinas, the meaningful is thought in terms of an interpersonal, quasi-ethical face to face relation between persons exposed to the vulnerability, obligation, and height of an "Other" in what he calls the "saying.". (shrink)

Volume 18 of Martin Heidegger's collected works presents his important 1924 Marburg lectures which anticipate much of the revolutionary thinking that he subsequently articulated in Being and Time. Here are the seeds of the ideas that would become Heidegger's unique phenomenology. Heidegger interprets Aristotle's Rhetoric and looks closely at the Greek notion of pathos. These lectures offer special insight into the development of his concepts of care and concern, being-at-hand, being-in-the-world, and attunement, which were later elaborated (...) in Being and Time. Available in English for the first time, they make a significant contribution to ancient philosophy, Aristotle studies, Continental philosophy, and phenomenology. (shrink)

This volume consists of two lecture series given by Heidegger in the 1940s and 1950s. The lectures given in Bremen constitute the first public lectures Heidegger delivered after World War II, when he was officially banned from teaching. Here, Heidegger openly resumes thinking that deeply engaged him with Hölderlin's poetry and themes developed in his earlier works. In the Freiburg lectures Heidegger ponders thought itself and freely engages with the German idealists and Greek thinkers who (...) had provoked him in the past. Andrew J. Mitchell's translation allows English-speaking readers to explore important connections with Heidegger's earlier works on language, logic, and reality. (shrink)

This collection presents a broad and compelling overview of the most recent work by a world-renowned figure in contemporary thought. The book is in four parts: Koinonia, Polis, Psyche, Logos. The opening section begins with a general introduction to the author's views on being, time, creation, and the imaginary institution of society and continues with reflections on the role of the individual psyche in racist thinking and acting. The second part is a critique of those who now belittle and (...) distort the meaning of May 1968 and other movements of the sixties as well as the French Revolution. In part three, Castoriadis shows how psychoanalysis, like politics, can contribute to the project of individual and collective autonomy and challenges Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, and others in his report on 'The State and Subject Today'. Finally he examines how Aristotle's original aporetic discovery and cover-up of the imagination were repeated by Kant, Freud, Heidegger, and even Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Heidegger through Hegel's "Phenomenology of Mind" from the absolute beginning and returns the absolute prerequisite for the analysis, while abandoning Hegel skillfully expounded his own view of hermeneutics, in particular related to the limited and infinite nature of the relationship, the meaning of existence and there are other issues, for we understand the "Phenomenology of Mind", to understand Heidegger's own thinking and in philosophical method, as well as between the two thinkers and critical internal succession relations are (...) very instructive. (shrink)

On Inception is a translation of Martin Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe 70. This work belongs to the crucial period, before and during WWII, when Heidegger was at work on a series of treatises that begins with "Contributions to Philosophy" and includes "The Event" and "The History of Beyng." These works are difficult, even hermetic, but represent a crucial development in Heidegger's thinking. On Inception deepens the investigation underway in the other volumes of the series and provides a unique perspective (...) on Heidegger's thinking of Being and of Event. Here, Heidegger asks, with a greater insistence than anywhere else in his work, what it might mean to think of being as event, and not as presence. Event cannot be thought without the sense of a beginning - an inception - and so, Heidegger insists, we must try to think of being as inception, as fundamentally inceptive. On Inception pursues rigorously the difficult and puzzling implications of this speculation. It does not merely extend work already undertaken but also opens doors onto wholly other pathways. (shrink)

First published in German in 1995, volume 77 of Heidegger's Complete Works consists of three imaginary conversations written as World War II was coming to an end. Composed at a crucial moment in history and in Heidegger's own thinking, these conversations present meditations on science and technology; the devastation of nature, the war, and evil; and the possibility of release from representational thinking into a more authentic relation with being and the world. The first conversation involves (...) a scientist, a scholar, and a guide walking together on a country path; the second takes place between a teacher and a tower-warden, and the third features a younger man and an older man in a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, where Heidegger's two sons were missing in action. Unique because of their conversational style, the lucid and precise translation of these texts offers insight into the issues that engaged Heidegger's wartime and postwar thinking. (shrink)

This volume reconstructs Martin Heidegger's lecture course at the University of Marburg in the winter semester of 1924-25, which was devoted to an interpretation of Plato and Aristotle.

In the traditional sense, a work of art creates an illustration of the outside world, or of a certain text or doctrine. Sometimes it is considered that such an illustration is not literal, but is an interpretation of what is visible, or an interpretation of a certain literary or ideological message. It can also be assumed that a work of art creates its own visual world, a separate story or a separate philosophical statement. The Parc de La Villette (...) represents the last of these possibilities: it is a philosophical statement that develops the premises derived from poststructuralist philosophies and the philosophy of deconstruction. The uniqueness of its being status, however, is that it does so not only at the level of the theoretical assumptions, but also through its functioning as an active philosophical work. This means that a park is a happening philosophy. Its activity, however, does not refer only to the present tense, but is also an attempt to penetrate the future, all otherness and impossibility. This kind of activity assumes that the work, in a sense, does not yet fully exist, but is also still produced in the processes of its interpretation. The theoretical foundations of the park included texts by Bernard Tschumi, in which he questioned traditional ways of creating a work of architecture, postulating in return the use of a long series of negations, which were comparable to the crisis of metaphysics characteristic of contemporary philosophy. It is therefore no coincidence that the publication containing Tschumi’s theoretical text on Parc de La Villette was accompanied by an essay by Jacques Derrida developing some of the architect’s concepts. The next step in integrating philosophy into the process of park design was a series of discussions between Peter Eisenman and Derrida, who completely moved the creation of the park into the world of thoughts, without accentuating the need for their realization in the material reality. The main topic of these discussions was the problem of the chôra, which was taken up by later commentators and used to interpret the park as a work in which the philosophy of the beginning is manifested relating to issues of politics, morality and religion. The park was therefore interpreted as a space of invention within the scope of creating new rules of functioning of the community and democracy. Thinking about the political future may, however, exceed the horizon of ordinary expectations. Although philosophical thought is always connected with contemporary problems and metaphysics sometimes intertwines with current politics, yet at the same time the customs of philosophy also include crossing horizons and thinking about absolute otherness and impossibility. Initially, the chôra, différance, Absolute Otherness (tout autre) and the Impossibile were concepts of pure philosophy of atheistic character, but with the further development of the discussion, more and more theological motifs began to emerge. One of the reasons for this phenomenon was the fact that radical negations of all being, which were contemplated in contemporary philosophy (by Heidegger and Derrida, among others), had previously been manifested in negative and apophatic theologies (by Master Eckhart, among others). Also the category of the “Other”, taken from Emmanuel Levinas, was clearly connected with the thought about God. A further reason for connecting the chôra with the theological thought was the interest in the philosophy of deconstruction expressed by some theologians. Caputo in particular managed to persuade Derrida to participate in discussions on the current status of religion. In the late period of Derrida’s writing, further statements on religious topics appeared. All these reasons led to posing a question about the identity of the chôra and God. Although there were no satisfactory conclusions on this issue, the discussion was also important to create an interpretation of the park as a place of worship. The chôra, representing, according to Plato, the preoriginal emptiness is the place of every beginning, but it turns out that it is not neutral to the being created in it. The chôra deposits itself in every being as an irremovable beginning that interferes with its stability. The chôra, therefore, forces us into a palintropical movement, but it also turns out to be a pure compulsion, an erring necessity and a fundamental force from which, in the human perception, motifs useful to the individual and to the community are extracted. All definitions of this force, including its anthropomorphisation, are formulated in such a way that they allow for building private and collective morality upon them. Such definitions are changed depending on variable political situations. It is difficult to determine whether in the processes of changes in the formulation of “God’s names” any essential value is retained, which is not subject to change. The current definitions of the chôra (God?), which can be found, for example, in the philosophy of Caputo, stress that she is a combination of various and contradictory forces. This characteristic inherits much of Plato’s concept, reminds us of Master Eckhart’s views on Gottheit and, at the same time, is not unfamiliar to Tschumi, whose essays were an apologia of contradictions. The current concept of chôra, transferred into the sphere of politics, is the praise of social diversity and the protection of the difference from the forces of order. In the Parc de La Villette, the future community and democracy were elevated as a system of safe existence of individuals in all their singularity. The park is a temple of a future community in which individual beings have nothing in common. (shrink)

In this book, Andrew Inkpin considers the disclosive function of language—what language does in revealing or disclosing the world. His approach to this question is a phenomenological one, centering on the need to accord with the various experiences speakers can have of language. With this aim in mind, he develops a phenomenological conception of language with important implications for both the philosophy of language and recent work in the embodied-embedded-enactive-extended tradition of cognitive science. -/- Inkpin draws extensively on the (...) work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, showing how their respective conceptions of language can be combined to complement each other within a unified view. From the early Heidegger, Inkpin extracts a basic framework for a phenomenological conception of language, comprising both a general picture of the role of language and a specific model of the function of words. Merleau-Ponty’s views are used to explicate the generic “pointing out”—or presentational—function of linguistic signs in more detail, while the late Wittgenstein is interpreted as providing versatile means to describe their many pragmatic uses. Having developed this unified phenomenological view, Inkpin explores its broader significance. He argues that it goes beyond the conventional realism/idealism opposition, that it challenges standard assumptions in mainstream post-Fregean philosophy of language, and that it makes a significant contribution not only to the philosophical understanding of language but also to 4e cognitive science. (shrink)

Duns Scotus's Doctrine of Categories and Meaning is a key text for the origins of Martin Heidegger's concept of "facticity." Originally submitted as a doctoral thesis in 1915, it focuses on the 13th-century philosopher-theologian John Duns Scotus. Heidegger first analyzes Scotus's doctrine of categories, then offers a meticulous explanation of the Grammatica Speculativa, a work of medieval grammar now known to be authored by the Modist grammarian Thomas of Erfurt. Taken together, these investigations represent an early foray (...) into Heidegger's lifelong philosophical concerns, "the question of being in the guise of the problem of categories and the question of language in the guise of the doctrine of meaning." This new and unique translation of one of Heidegger's earliest works offers an important look at his early thinking before the question of being became his central concern and will appeal to readers exploring Heidegger's philosophical development, medieval philosophy, phenomenological interpretations of the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and poetry in his habilitation and his first lectures in Freiburg. Although poetry as a particular phenomenon was not yet thematized by Heidegger, philosophy and language developed in its proximity since the habilitation text. Subsequently, a tragic quotation exemplifies the characterization of language as a premundane generality in his first lessons. The article elaborates an interpretation of the implicit relationship between philosophy and poetry based on the pre-mundane language [Vorweltliche] and (...) its critique of neo- Kantianism. This relationship is the phenomenological possibility of letting see through language, especially the phenomena of world and meaning. Therefore, phenomenology and poetry came together in Heidegger’s thought around those two central phenomena of his later ontology. (shrink)

A lecture course that Martin Heidegger gave in 1927, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology continues and extends explorations begun in Being and Time. In this text, Heidegger provides the general outline of his thinking about the fundamental problems of philosophy, which he treats by means of phenomenology, and which he defines and explains as the basic problem of ontology.

Reviews the book, Being-in-the-world: A commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time by Hubert L. Dreyfus . The publication of Dreyfus' Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division 1 proves an occasion for considerable disappointment, as it reinforces and in some ways even deepens previous misreadings of Heidegger. Dreyfus has concentrated his study almost entirely on the first 200 pages of Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, first published in 1927. These are the (...) pages that constitute the first division of the first part of Heidegger's first major text—a relatively small section devoted to what Heidegger calls in the division title a "preparatory fundamental analysis of Dasein." That title itself should sufficiently indicate the provisional character of the analysis contained therein. But Dreyfus overlooks that explicit characterization and interprets what little of the text he does address as if the remainder of the book were not only superfluous, but virtually unintelligible. Dreyfus begins his book by claiming that "as a first step in his project [Heidegger] attempts to work out a fresh analysis of what it means to be human." This claim is extremely misleading and the reason is twofold: it is true only in a very limited sense ; and even in the limited sense in which it is true, what Dreyfus fails to tell his readers is that Heidegger's analysis is never completed and therefore cannot lend itself to even indirect application without considerable care and much more than a passing understanding of Heidegger's work. In fact, if we are speaking with strict regard to the question of what it means to be human, we must in the end say that Heidegger's analysis of that question is never even begun! The relevance of all of this for psychology is that very little if anything in Heidegger's preparatory analysis of Dasein can be directly adopted by any of the applied sciences. A considerable amount of it may prove to be indirectly helpful , but only if one is willing to use considerable caution and develop much more than a passing acquaintance with Heidegger's work in particular and phenomenology in general. Like Dreyfus, I believe the human sciences can learn a great deal from Heidegger, but unlike Dreyfus I believe that most of it will be indirectly applicable, a lot of it will be found in texts other than Being and Time, and Dreyfus' Being-in-the-World will lamentably not be the book they can learn it from. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)