Drawing on recent phenomenological discussions of collective intentionality and existential phenomenological accounts of agency, this article proposes a novel interpretation of shared action. First, I argue that we should understand action on the basis of how an environment pre-reflectively solicits agents to behave based on (a) the affordances or goals inflected by their abilities and dispositions and (b) their self-referential commitment to a project that is furthered by these affordances. Second, I show that this definition of action is sufficiently flexible (...) to account for not only individual action (in which both (a) and (b) refer only to an individual) but also several distinct subtypes of shared action. My thesis is that behaviour counts as shared action if and only if it is caused by a solicitation in which either (a) the goals, or (b) the commitments, or both (a) goals and (b) commitments are joint, i.e., depend on several individuals. We thereby get three distinct subtypes of shared actions: (i) jointly coordinated individually committed action, (ii) individually coordinated jointly committed action, and (iii) jointly coordinated jointly committed action. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 2, Page 140-165, Spring 2023.

This article traces the development of how the early Heidegger tried to integrate the structures of social life into phenomenological ontology. Firstly, I argue that Heidegger's analysis of the three elements of the lifeworld—the with-world (Mitwelt), the environing world (Umwelt), and the self-world (Selbstwelt)—is ambiguous, because it shifts between defining sociality as a domain of entities and a mode of appearance. This is untenable because the social as a mode of appearance constantly overflows the definition as a domain by implicating (...) social structures in phenomenological explications of entities that, formally, belong to other domains. Secondly, I argue that Heidegger realized this and subsequently changed his terminology from Mitwelt to Mitsein in order to avoid confusing the mode of appearance with the innerworldly entities. The systematic consequence of this line of argument is that the object of social ontology must be the world as such rather than a particular domain. Lastly, I respond to the common worry that this position is unable to explain the significance of interpersonal encounters by arguing that the world not only makes the appearance of others possible but also that the world is itself at stake in these encounters. (shrink)

This article provides a detailed analysis of the function of the notion of _Volk_ in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. At first glance, this term is an appeal to the revolutionary masses of the National Socialist revolution in a way that demarcates a distinction between the rootedness of the German People and the rootlessness of the modern rabble. But this distinction is not a sufficient explanation of Heidegger’s position, because Heidegger simultaneously seems to hold that even the Germans are characterized by _a (...) lack of identity_. What is required is a further appropriation of the proper. My suggestion is that this logic of the _Volk_ is not only useful for understanding Heidegger’s thought during the war, but also an indication of what happened after he lost faith in the National Socialist movement and thus had to make the _lack of the People_ the basis of his thought. (shrink)

In Derrida’s reflection on hospitality, the figures of Oedipus and Antigone play a decisive role. Derrida describes Oedipus as being anomos, an outlaw, since he transgresses the established nomos. According to Derrida, both Oedipus and Antigone are involved an unsolvable tension between conditional and unconditional hospitality. A closer look at Sophocles’ Antigone, however, fits poorly with this understanding of the relation between hospitality and the nomos. Arguing against Derrida, I propose a phenomenological reading of Antigone’s actions as an attempt to (...) disclose her suffering with the community. In this way, she demands hospitality not for herself nor for her infinitely removed father but for the world disclosure that she embodies. Within this phenomenological framework, hospitality is not caught in an aporia between the general and the singular, the conditional and the unconditional; rather, it constitutes a site of dispute between conflicting configurations of the shared world. (shrink)

This article argues that Giorgio Agamben’s conceptions of kairos and messianic time are essentially to be understood in terms of experience. This becomes clear when we identify the methodological similarities between Agamben’s reading of Paulus in The Time That Remains and Heidegger’s lectures on Paulus from 1920-21: the doctrine of kairology is different from any eschatology, insofar as it involves an instantaneous modulation of our factical conditions, rather than a removal of them to come. In this way, I argue that (...) Agamben echoes Heidegger’s conception of formal indication and enactment-sense. But whereas Heidegger understood this modulation as an anticipatory resoluteness, in which Dasein identifies itself with its calling, Agamben emphasizes the very impossibility of such an identification. This is indeed a decisive difference between Agamben and Heidegger. I show, however, that Agamben phrases this difference in a language that recalls Heidegger’s thought, thus implicitly suggesting that the emancipatory potential of his philosophy is to be understood as the experiential enactment of an impotentiality that undermines any factical condition and any social identity. (shrink)

Heidegger is often criticised for having next to nothing to say about human sociality. Yet, his work provides neglected resources for understanding the nature of social life. Drawing on his celebrated philosophy of mind and philosophy of action, the book systematically reconstructs Heidegger’s social ontology. It argues that Heidegger’s famous claim that human mindedness and agency is constitutively being-in-the-world implies that we can only understand others, do things with others, and form lasting groups with others if we pre-reflectively correlate their (...) behaviour with our own projects and the world that lies between us. Drawing on both his published texts, lecture courses, and notebooks, the book puts Heidegger into dialogue with contemporary debates on social cognition, collective intentionality, and social normativity, while also reassessing the significance of his account of authenticity and criticising his affiliation with Nazism. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book is an essential contribution to contemporary phenomenology and social ontology. (shrink)

This article discusses the tension between social relationality and self-relationality central to Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein and the possible ways of reconciling this tension. Arguing that this is a tension between communicability and existential commitments, the article poses the question: How are existential commitments responsive to communication? After problematizing the quasi-Kantian and communitarian ways of settling the tension, the article uses Heidegger’s early reading of Aristotle to develop a third hermeneutic model of ethical relationality according to which existential commitments are (...) shareable in communication, since ethos – the existential posture towards the good – arises out of pathos that exposes Dasein to coexistence. The account of ethical relationality found in Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle thus takes the world to be a shared and dynamic ontological condition and emphasize that the world constitutes selfhood in a way that is constantly at stake in ethical communication. (shrink)

How are we to understand Agamben’s philosophical anthropology and his frequent invocations of the relation between bios and zoe? In Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben evokes a quasi-phenomenological account of shame in order to elucidate this question thus implying that the phenomenon of shame carries an ontological significance. That shame has an ontological significance is also a belief held in current debates on moral emotions and the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, but despite this common philosophical intuition phenomenologists have criticized Agamben’s account of (...) shame. In this paper, I will try to show how these criticisms often rely on misreadings of Agamben’s terminology. Once Agamben’s analysis of shame have been properly placed in the broader context if his work, I will outline how Agamben’s analysis of shame and his ontology of life feeds into a rethinking of community and belonging. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Bounds of Self: An Essay on Heidegger's by R. Matthew ShockeyNicolai KnudsenR. Matthew Shockey. The Bounds of Self: An Essay on Heidegger's Being and Time. New York: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 224. Hardcover, $160.00.In this rich and ambitious book, R. Matthew Shockey controversially claims that Heidegger's Being and Time (SZ) is an heir to the rationalism of Descartes and Kant. To show this, Shockey develops a provocative account (...) of phenomenological ontology as the normatively inert outcome of reflective and imaginative philosophical self-questioning.Four questions of an increasingly higher order frame the book (2–6): (1) How shall I live? (2) What is it to be the kind of being who can and must ask "how shall I live?" (3) What unity is there to the various ways in which things are taken to be? (4) Why should we pursue metaphysics and ontology? Chapters 1–6 reconstruct Heidegger's answers to the second- and third-order questions, while chapter 7 relates them back to the questions of the first- and fourth-order.The key claim is that Heidegger was a "Kantian Cartesian." Shockey, however, admits that Heidegger was not "driven by a need to refute skepticism, a proponent of a worldly subjectivism, a representationalist epistemologist, or a substance dualist" (9). Rather, the claim is that Heidegger follows Kant and Descartes in believing, first, that ontology must identify a form of "a priori knowledge" as the basis of intelligibility and, second, that ontological inquiry requires a deliberate, reflective, and self-questioning method.The argument rests on a reconstruction of the published parts of SZ as involving a series of meditative steps that are supposed to take us from the analytic of Dasein (the second-order question) to the meaning of being (the third-order question). Chapter 1 explains why the Seinsfrage (the third-order question) requires the analytic of Dasein (the second-order question) and argues that ontology requires that we abstract from all our ontical characteristics (i.e. all the things that make me, me and you, you) insofar as the aim of ontology is to identify the "bounds" that are shared by any ontological inquirer (47). This, Shockey claims, makes Heidegger's existential analytics critical in a roughly Kantian way and meditational in a roughly Cartesian way (31, 47).Chapter 2 follows the analysis of worldhood and being-with in introducing us to three regions of entities that we are not: the ready-to-hand, the present-at-hand, and other Dasein. The next chapters turn away from our understanding of "outward" entities and initiates a series of "inward" meditative steps supposed to clarify the unitary and a priori basis rendering [End Page 718] these regions intelligible. Chapter 3 analyzes the first meditative step, namely, Heidegger's account of being-in and the trinity of understanding, discourse, and self-finding that constitute the structure of care. Chapter 4 shows, in a second step, that the care structure is unified by originary temporality. Originary temporality is, Shockey argues, the necessary temporal form that Dasein spontaneously gives to itself.Heidegger abandoned the SZ project at this point, but Shockey ambitiously undertakes to complete it by showing, in chapter 5, how Heidegger found a final meditative step in Kant's concept of imagination. On Heidegger's controversial interpretation of Kant, the imagination is the common root of understanding and sensibility and, importantly, an anticipation of his own concept of originary temporality. Imagination, Shockey explains, is the general capacity for "making present that which is absent" (141). Based on this argument, Shockey concludes that "in doing ontology, we imagine ourselves imagining being" (148).Having reconstructed the final and missing meditative step, Shockey in chapter 6 presents what he thinks would have been the story of the unwritten (or discarded) division 3 of SZ, namely, that Descartes and Kant, when read as ontologists rather than epistemologists, were right in claiming that the unity of being is located in our a priori ontological (self-) understanding, although they failed to realize that this unity is imaginative and temporal rather than substantial or logical and that the a priori basis for intelligibility opens up several distinct regions of... (shrink)