By setting up a dialogue with contemporary animal research the essay attempts, on the one hand, to expose the limits of Martin Heidegger’s concept of animality in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and, on the other hand, to propose some new ways of thinking the being of those animals that most distinctly show themselves as being other than Heidegger’s claims. I suggest, with reference to Heidegger’s thesis of the animal as “poor in world,” that the being of the cognitively most (...) complex animals is better understood in terms of otherworldly worlds within the world of human world forming. With this concept I aim to develop and continue, rather than criticize, Heidegger’s way of thinking the being of animals and deepen the productive relationship between science and philosophy that Heidegger proposed in this work. (shrink)

What every medievalist knows about medieval Iceland is that it had no king, at least not until 1262 when it passed under the control of the Norwegian crown. In the rapidly growing discussion of early Iceland in the last forty years there has, however, been relatively little comment on what it may have meant for Iceland to have no king, specifically what it may have meant for the unique flowering of Icelandic letters beginning in the late twelfth century and persisting (...) in full vigor into the early fourteenth century. In what follows I will argue that the absence of a king and the increasingly palpable presence of the Norwegian king were significant factors in the shaping of Icelandic literature, not least of all that peculiar triumph of medieval narrative, the Icelandic saga. (shrink)