Human finitude and its implications have long been one of the central themes of Western philosophy. The essays gathered together in this volume explore various facets of this not altogether pleasing fact with which we must realistically come to terms.

A partir de la divergencia de M. Foucault con Th. Hobbes con respecto a la guerra como principio y fundamento del poder, se muestra la importancia de esa diferencia conceptual para los análisis políticos contemporáneos. Foucault sostiene que, en las sociedades modernas de Occidente, la comunidad política, y más precisamente la política misma, ha sido el terreno de la guerra librada por otros medios. Por extensión, esta tesis significa invertir el principio de von Clausewitz; a saber, que la guerra es (...) la continuación de la política por otros medios. (shrink)

Christian theology has entered into the discourse of finitude via the contrast to the attributes of divine infinity; human finitude is hence interpreted as the culpability of a life form that depends on divine grace and redemption. This chapter elaborates and defends the claim according to which philosophical hermeneutics can be understood as a philosophy of human finitude. In its different versions from Dilthey to Vattimo, philosophical hermeneutics explores human finitude as the prime condition for our (...) worldly engagements and entitlements in all its aspects. The chapter deals with finitude regarding the limits of our knowledge and the opaqueness of our mortal existence, elaborating on the event character of historical understanding and experience. Heidegger relates finitude to the understanding of Being, claiming that we have to understand this joint as the event that originates Dasein and hence indicates the essence of man. (shrink)

This article explores the connection among woman, sex, and finitude. In stuying finitude, the argument follows the articulation of finitude with woman. In a first part, it discusses three “women” writers—Virginia Woolf, Simone De Beauvoir, and Hélène Cixous—to establish their thoughts on woman in terms of finitude. The three of them are identified as women and yet they problematized what to be a woman is. In tracing their thoughts on finitude and woman, sexual difference –the (...) body as enjoying emerges as an issue. Thus, in a second part, it discusses two seemingly opposed positions—Lacanian psychoanalysis, with Joan Copjec, and deconstruction, with Derrida—to think further about the question of woman, sexual difference, the “two,” and finitude. This study compares the Lacanian feminine side with the movement of deconstruction and establishes the necessity of thinking a “two” beyond the binary of phallogocentrism. My thesis is that thinking finitude with woman leads us to a non-oppositional two that correlates with sexual difference. The Lacanian feminine side, and Derrida’s deconstruction aim to think these two logics, delineating two sides: a male one (comparable with phallogocentrism) and a feminine side (comparable with the movement of deconstruction). If the male side considers finitude (death) as the limit of life, the feminine side opens to death and life, and the in-finitude of the undetermined and undecidable. In thinking finitude with woman, the knowledge of what to be a woman is, becomes undetermined and undecidable. (shrink)

Este artigo tem por objetivo analisar a noção de finitude na obra de Sartre como base para a antropologia existencial desenvolvida nela. Perpassando desde O ser e o nada até as últimas entrevistas, discutimos tal tese a partir das análises, sobretudo, de Bornheim, Moutinho e Mészáros. Para isso, num primeiro momento discute a relação entre ser, finitude e negação. Num segundo momento, associamos a noção de finitude com a de singularidade e como por ela é estabelecida a (...) relação entre ontologia, história e psicanálise existencial. Por fim, afere ao jogo dos irredutíveis como a dinâmica própria que subjaz à antropologia existencial. (shrink)

Western modernity was born with a revolution of limits. Western man, who has become the creator of his own destiny, has identified freedom with a conscious and systematic violation of the given conditions, with a future that constantly transcends the present. This modern condition is thus characterised by the fact that it is limited by boundaries that are mobile and can change. From this observation arises the paradoxical situation that growth today is inconceivable if it is not linked to a (...) scenario of scarcity, in contrast to premodern theological views based instead on the abundance of creation, the original richness of the world. Inspired by this vision of a sustainable world, ecological thinking today is immediately associated with a language of finitude. Degrowth, self-limitation, and resource efficiency, these are all terms associated with a universalist model of progress that seems to know no limits. This article argues that the world is doomed to its own inevitable end if sustainability is understood from the perspective of an economically sustainable future defined by the limits of capitalist management. If, on the other hand, we step out of this impoverished and economic perspective of the concept of limit and the condition of finitude, then we open ourselves to an ecocosmic perspective that understands the world as part of a cosmic diversity that cannot be contained within a more or less extended totality of resources. In this article, being finite is understood ecologically as being a non-self-sufficient part of the interrelated possibilities of worldmaking, not as an element of a set of individuals or things. (shrink)

A fundamental theme in Gilbert Meilaender’s work on bioethical issues is the relationship between the ethical claims of finitude and of freedom. This article identifies two ways in which Meilaender articulates this relationship and proposes a third way which avoids the limitations of the first two ways while serving Meilaender’s purpose, which is to redress what he sees as an imbalance in favor of the claims of freedom over those of finitude in contemporary biomedicine and bioethics. The article (...) ends by suggesting that Meilaender’s purpose would be best served by avoiding tensions between finitude and freedom as the third way does. (shrink)

Based on proposition 28 of Part I of Spinoza's Ethics, I argue that the idea of interdetermination set out there is formed by excluding indetermination and finalism. Spinoza conceives reality as an infinite network of singular interdeterminations without hierarchies or outside. From interdetermination itself the problem arises of what it means to be a finite mode of God. This problem, however, is more fully resolved through the notion of 'absolute necessity of relation'. Once we have these conceptual tools, we can (...) understand the way in which finitude and absoluteness merge in singular things, making them cognizable with objectivity. But just because all things are knowable, it does not mean that we can know them all. For the power of our understanding is also limited. Affirming the knowability of all things and the limitation of our capacity to know, Spinoza challenged both irrationalistic scepticism and the mistake of human thought for the infinite understanding of God. (shrink)

En su lectura de la Wissenschaftslehre de 1794, Heidegger acusa a Fichte de no ser capaz de concebir la finitud del conocimiento. El argumento esgrimido por Heidegger es que el rechazo fichteano de la noción de “cosa en sí” implica una negación de la ñnitud. En el presente trabajo se defiende la posición opuesta: Fichte no sólo reconoce enteramente la finitud del conocimiento, sino que la funda también en una dimensión práctica cercana a la noción de Heidegger de “cuidado”.

The confusion surrounding Heidegger's account of death in Being and Time has led to severe criticisms, some of which dismiss his analysis as incoherent and obtuse. I argue that Heidegger's critics err by equating Heidegger's concept of death with our ordinary concept. As I show, Heidegger's concept of death is not the same as the ordinary meaning of the term, namely, the event that ends life. But nor does this concept merely denote the finitude of Dasein's possibilities or the (...) groundlessness of existence, as William Blattner and Hubert Dreyfus have suggested. Rather, I argue, the concept of death has to be understood both as temporal finitude and as finitude of possibility. I show how this reading addresses the criticisms directed at Heidegger's death analysis as well as solving textual problems generated by more limited interpretations of the concept. (shrink)

This article inquires into the clinical figure of paranoia and its constitutive role in the articulation of the nation-state discourse in Europe, uncovering a central tension between a principle of integrity and a dualist spatial configuration. A conceptual distinction between ‘border’ (finis) and ‘frontier’ (limes) will help to expose the political effects of such a tension, unveiling the way in which a solid and striated organisation of space has been mobilised in the topographic antagonism of the nation, sustaining the phantasm (...) of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient finitude. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to the research by H. Petrovsky “Desturbance of the Sign. Culture against Transcendence.” The article attempts a reconstruction of some important conceptual topoi of the book. The ideas of the book are presented through the material of one of the chapters — the photo archive of Zofia Rydet. The second part offers a conceptual variation of a different type, due to J.-M. Vappereau, which is related to the range of issues raised in the book.

The paper formulates and proves a strengthening of ‘Frege’s Theorem’, which states that axioms for second-order arithmetic are derivable in second-order logic from Hume’s Principle, which itself says that the number of Fs is the same as the number ofGs just in case the Fs and Gs are equinumerous. The improvement consists in restricting this claim to finite concepts, so that nothing is claimed about the circumstances under which infinite concepts have the same number. ‘Finite Hume’s Principle’ also suffices for (...) the derivation of axioms for arithmetic and, indeed, is equivalent to a version of them, in the presence of Frege’s definitions of the primitive expressions of the language of arithmetic. The philosophical significance of this result is also discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, I take Philip Rossi’s robust interpretation of critique as an interpretive guide for thinking generally about how to interpret Kant’s texts. I reflect first upon what might appear to be a minor technical issue: how best to translate the term Fähigheit when Kant utilizes it in reference to the human experience of pleasure and displeasure. Reflection upon this technical issue will, however, end up being a case study in how important it is when we are interpreting Kant’s (...) texts to have Rossi’s focus on human finitude in the background. The terrain for these reflections on human finitude will be the realm of feelings of pleasure and displeasure. And the result will be that, counter to recent interpreters, like Elizondo, who have suggested that Kant could welcome a thoroughly active conception of rational feeling, we must instead, as guided by Kant’s commitment to human finitude, remember that every feeling for Kant—even the most rational of feelings, like the moral feeling of respect, or the pleasure he notes that we take in the proper functioning of one’s virtuous rational self—must be understood within the purview and constraints of the finite and sensibly-affected human being. I hope, then, that this brief reflection can be taken as one small piece of that larger story Rossi so aptly describes in his book, the story which answers the question of “What is critique?” in a way that insists upon but also simultaneously celebrates the centrality of finitude in human existence. (shrink)

What does it mean to experience and engage in religious ritual? How does liturgy structure time and space? How do our bodies move within liturgy, and what impact does it have on our senses? How does the experience of ritual affect us and shape our emotions or dispositions? How is liturgy experienced as a communal event, and how does it form the identity of those who participate in it? Welcoming Finitude explores these broader questions about religious experience by focusing (...) on the manifestation of liturgical experience in the Eastern Christian tradition. Drawing on the methodological tools of contemporary phenomenology and on insights from liturgical theology, the book constitutes a philosophical exploration of Orthodox liturgical experience. (shrink)

O artigo tem como objetivo mostrar que o enunciado levinasiano de um outramente que ser se constrói a partir de uma posição estratégica que o conceito de intencionalidade assume na escrita de Levinas. A tomada de posição deste filósofo em relação ao tema da finitude implica, pode-se dizer, uma interpretação não-ontológica do conceito husserliano de intencionalidade.

Quentin Meillassoux’s 2006 After Finitude offered a sharp critique of the phenomenological project, charging that phenomenology was one of the “two principal media” of correlationism—ultimately reducible to an “extreme idealism.” Meillassoux grounds this accusation in an account of givenness that presupposes that “every variety of givenness” finds its genesis within the positing of the subject. However, this critique fails to hit its mark precisely because it presupposes an account of intuitive givenness that is entirely foreign to the phenomenological project. (...) Quite against Meillassoux’s conflation of givenness, the world-for-us, and the positing subject—the very centre of the phenomenological project is the recognition that intuitive givenness cannot be reduced to the constructive activity of the subject. Givenness is marked by a heterogeneity; givenness refers to what is given to us, not to what emerges from us. (shrink)

I evaluate two new objections to an infinitist account of epistemic justification, and conclude that they fail to raise any new problems for infinitism. The new objections are a refined version of the finite-mind objection, which says infinitism demands more than finite minds can muster, and the normativity objection, which says infinitism entails that we are epistemically blameless in holding all our beliefs. I show how resources deployed in response to the most popular objection to infinitism, the original finite-mind objection, (...) can be redeployed to address the two new objections. (shrink)

This book explains how to read Plato, emphasizing the philosophic importance of the dramatic aspects of the dialogues, and showing that Plato is an ironic thinker and that his irony is deeply rooted in his philosophy.

This study underscores The Lily and the Bird's response to despair in The Sickness unto Death. By suggesting in The Lily and the Bird that we look to nature's creatures to learn an attunement and responsiveness to our situation as physical creatures subject to finite constraints, Kierkegaard's text comes into dialogue with a form of misalignment portrayed in The Sickness unto Death as a refusal of the given, “the finite,” and “the necessary.” One way of seeking alignment in The Lily (...) and the Bird entails learning to hear and to answer within one's given environment, opening up the possibility of embodied joy. (shrink)

The chapter approaches the hermeneutic concept of experience introduced by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960) from the perspective of the conceptual history of experience in the Western philosophical tradition. Through an overview of the concept and the epistemological function of experience (empeiria, experientia, Erfahrung) in Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and Hegel, it is shown that the tradition has considered experience first and foremost in methodological terms, that is, as a pathway towards a form of scientific knowledge that is itself (...) increasingly immune to experience. Science strives “beyond” experience because of the limitations inherent in the fundamentally contingent, singular, and negative character of experience: experience comes to us through unpredictable chance encounters and in singular situations and negates, tests, or “imperils” previous knowledge, thereby transforming it. By contrast, philosophical hermeneutics rethinks experience precisely in terms of these limitations. In the hermeneutic approach articulated by Gadamer and Claude Romano, experience is an encounter with the irreducible finitude and historical situatedness of one’s understanding and conceptual framework, an encounter with an otherness that puts our preunderstanding to test and requires us to revise it. Hermeneutic experience is thus a singular event that irreparably transforms us. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article examines Heidegger's assessment of negativity and finitude in the late 1930s and his enlargement of these issues in the name of a leap from one type of philosophy, one type of beginning, to a wholly other beginning. The guiding concerns of this article are negativity, finitude and the leap, and how these overlapping concerns coalesce around Heidegger's attempts to move towards a wholly other type of philosophy; in fact, one which no longer understands itself to be (...) philosophy at all. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of death, sacrifice, and mourning in Heidegger's thought in the 1930s. (shrink)

This response article argues that the question of “extrahuman relations” obtains on not just one level but two. It is not just a question of our relations to nonhuman forms of life—such as, for example, the embodiment and finitude we share with other beings. It's also a question of a second form of finitude that obtains in our prosthetic subjection to any semiotic system whatsoever that makes possible “our” concepts, “our” recognition and articulation of our “nonhuman relations” in (...) the first place. By examining the bird poems of Wallace Stevens, I demonstrate that with the question of extrahuman relations we are always talking, in other words, not about a thematics but about a technics of address. (shrink)

Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) turns on a reading of the productive imagination in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). In siding with the imagination, Heidegger declares his dissent from the neo-Kantianism of his contemporaries. Yet, when Heidegger subsequently elaborates his philosophy of art in the 1930s, he is dismissive of the imagination altogether. His earlier partisanship was qualified. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger treats the productive imagination of Kant’s critical (...) period as still a step short of Heidegger’s own problem of the time of finite human beings. German Idealism’s step past Kant is, for Heidegger, a step beyond, but in the wrong direction. The aesthetics of German Idealism builds on the unification of experience and conceptuality wrought by the productive imagination in its transcendental use, thereby inscribing in the work of art a neglect of finitude that Heidegger will dispute. If what Heidegger holds against the imagination is its transcendental use, the fully empirical concept of the imagination in Kant’s precritical writings invites reassessment in light of an engagement with finitude. I will show it has particular promise for rehabilitating the imagination in a Heideggerian philosophy of art. (shrink)

The thought of Maurice Blondel has been read (representatively by Emmanuel Falque) as the theological aspirational movement of human action towards the divine, and therefore as the pre-emptive presence of the infinite to human experience. In this reading, absent has been the appreciation of an original Blondelian account of finitude as the essential experience of a human being-toward-death. Against this approach, this essay explores Blondel’s notion of human finitude as a ‘metaphysical experience’ of the existentially revelatory function of (...) death. To this extent, Blondel’s account of finitude positions the philosopher of Aix, beyond the usual contexts of twentieth-century Catholic apologetic philosophy, squarely within Continental philosophical proposals of finitude as seen in Heidegger, Foucault, and Deleuze. Blondel brings to prominence a French Spiritualist account of the positive value of endurance and resistance against death as the revelatory site of a finitude that is neither determined by an a priori closed boundary nor theologically overdetermined as an aspiration to the infinite. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss the Heideggerian interpretation of death in relation with two fundamental structures of the existential analysis: understanding and state-of-mind . In the first part, I will highlight how the understanding opens the phenomenon of death as a possibility: this possibility will prove to be a specific imminence, in that it must be assumed by the Dasein in itself, as Dasein’s ownmost and non-relational possibility that cannot be outstripped. In the second part, I will analyse the (...) relation between death and the affectivity, emphasizing the contrast between the traditional position on this subject – which involves the philosophical neutralization of a natural fear of death – and Heidegger’s position, suggesting a dynamic tension between the fear and anxiety, where anxiety is not an annihilation of fear, but its existential radicalization. (shrink)

This book integrates pragmatism and transcendental philosophy in examining the most serious problem defining the human condition, death and mortality. Its analysis of human limits and finitude is intended to be relevant to the concerns of philosophers specializing in, for example, transcendental philosophy, philosophical anthropology, pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and the philosophy of religion. Mortality is studied as providing a necessary framework within which questions concerning the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of human life become possible.

El retorno del lenguaje conlleva la desaparición del hombre como figura cardinal del saber moderno. La muerte del hombre anunciada por Foucault está en estrecha relación con la muer-te de Dios anunciada por Nietzsche. El último hombre ha matado a Dios y debe responder ahora de su propia finitud. La obra de Foucault traza una historia crítica del pensamiento. Su escepticismo es una crítica del conocimiento. Foucault dudó de las verdades de cada época y de las verdades intemporales. En este (...) artículo trazo el recorrido del hombre en la obra fou-cauldiana y muestro que el escepticismo en Foucault deviene una herrramienta importante en su crítica del conocimiento. (shrink)

L’objet de ce texte est de montrer que des fonctions qui appartiennent à une famille vérifiant une propriété de finitude a priori non uniforme sont en fait définissables dans une structure o-minimale.

This article aims to analyze in Sartre's philosophy the notion of personalization. Inserted in the framework of existential psychoanalysis, this notion elucidates about the original choice and the existential project. Since his first works, Sartre has presented an impersonal transcendental conscience, so that freedom as nadification is independent of psychic life. We want to demonstrate that from the development of existential psychoanalysis freedom is not separated from the notion of personalization, but presupposes it due to the finitude condition of (...) freedom. In this case, although it presupposes an impersonal transcendental field, freedom can only be apprehended concretely through personalization. This presupposes a necessary relationship between ontology and existential psychoanalysis in the elucidation of freedom, history, and the man. (shrink)

In a recent article, Martin McQuillan has inaugurated a vigorous Derridean critique of a “violent tone” that has recently arisen in continental philosophy, exemplified by Slavoj Žižek’s attempt to retrieve Robespierre’s notion of “Terror. This article sets out to complicate such critique, opening a new perspective on the Derrida- Žižek debate on the question of politics. In particular, it examines Derrida’s and Žižek’s respective approaches to difference and violence as differing responses to a shared problematic of constructing a consistent politics (...) within the horizon of a finite world. It proceeds by elaborating Žižek’s critique of Derridean deconstruction, highlighting how Derrida’s attempt to minimise violence via maximal openness to difference, within the horizon of the future-to-come, inadvertently reinscribes a minimal but problematic ontotheological trace which ironically circumscribes deconstructive openness to difference. The article goes on to examine how Žižek’s alternative construal of a purified violence and self-difference ends up repeating in somewhat different terms these same problematic features of Derrida’s writings. The article concludes by arguing that each approach requires a theoretically-integrated ethos of ‘becoming other’ in which the unavoidable theoretical anticipation of difference is ruptured by the actual encounter with difference. (shrink)

Eric Weil, Karl Jaspers e Martin Heidegger são três filósofos alemães, um deles, judeu: Weil apresenta na categoria do finito uma possibilidade entre os discursos filosóficos que compreende Heidegger e Jaspers. O presente artigo propõe uma compreensão parcial de Jaspers e Heidegger por meio da categoria do finito weiliana e da retomada operada por essa possibilidade do discurso – a finitude – da categoria da obra, cuja fenomenologia é o nazismo. Para esse objetivo, dividiu-se o artigo em três seções, (...) seguidas de uma introdução. Na Introdução apresentamos a relação entre os três pensadores dada por meio de dois textos de Weil. Também elencamos os motivos da escolha das obras de Heidegger e Jaspers que serão discutidas. A primeira seção do artigo contém uma apresentação dos conceitos weilianos que são a base para as seções seguintes. Na segunda seção, esses conceitos são cotejados com o pensamento heideggeriano. Na terceira seção, aplicamos o mesmo método ao pensar de Jaspers, mostrando as limitações que o pensamento de Heidegger encontra no plano político. Encerramos com um pequeno balanço da discussão. (shrink)

The proposal that the earth has entered a new epoch called “the Anthropocene” has touched a nerve . One unsettling part of having our ecological finitude thrust upon us with the term “Anthropocene” is that, as Nietzsche said of the death of God, we ourselves are supposed to be the collective doer responsible here, yet this is a deed which no one individual meant to do and whose implications no one fully comprehends. For the pessimists about humanity, the implications (...) seem rather straightforward: humanity will die. Yet, as we will explore in this paper, the death that we may be facing cannot be assumed to be simply biological death or extinction. Indeed, even if we are not running headlong into a mass extinction and biological demise, we do seem to be facing an ontological death. Our ecological finitude is the harbinger of our ontological finitude. The vulnerability we confront in the Anthropocene is what Jonathan Lear, in a different context, called ontological vulnerability. Worlds die too; the ways of life they sustain can become impossible, ceasing to make sense and matter. The constitutive susceptibility of all human worlds to their eventual collapse is what we mean by ontological finitude. This is what we face as presumed denizens in a dawning Anthropocene. (shrink)

Stambaugh (philosophy, City U. of New York) elucidates one of the central themes in the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), based on her talks with him, and on her extensive study of his works, several of which she has ...

The paper formulates and proves a strengthening of 'Frege's Theorem', which states that axioms for second-order arithmetic are derivable in second-order logic from Hume's Principle, which itself says that the number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs just in case the Fs and Gs are equinumerous. The improvement consists in restricting this claim to finite concepts, so that nothing is claimed about the circumstances under which infinite concepts have the same number. 'Finite Hume's Principle' also suffices (...) for the derivation of axioms for arithmetic and, indeed, is equivalent to a version of them, in the presence of Frege's definitions of the primitive expressions of the language of arithmetic. The philosophical significance of this result is also discussed. (shrink)

Based on two presentations during a February 2020 South African academic visit at the University of Pretoria and the University of Johannesburg, in this contribution, the authors of this article engage with one of the bestselling recent volumes in philosophy, Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free (here, the 2020 edition; initial publication date, 2019). In this book, Hägglund propagates ideas akin to those promoted within secular humanism. Whilst on the one hand this article elaborates the shortcomings of (...) Hägglund’s criticism of religion, on the other hand it also strives for an empathetic reading of his secular humanist philosophy. The authors place this conversation within the post-secular religio-cultural climate currently rising internationally, along with some further contextualising remarks. The most important part of this article is the last section (‘Pitting some theological voices…’) in which the authors engage Hägglund’s main arguments theologically, which elaborate on the finitude of human life all the whilst denying it a prospect of immortality. The debate in this section procceeds along the lines of religious thought of Emmanuel Falque, Ebenhard Jüngel and Dewi Zephania Phillips, with a view to reconcile the radical awareness of finitude and temporality of human life, characteristic for modern discourse(s), with the religious language practices sustaining belief in eternal life. Contribution: This article engages with how Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free does not fairly convey aspects of the sense of secularism, and can additionally on the senses of finitude and temporality be improved by insights from Emmanuel Falque, Ebenhard Jüngel and Dewi Zephania Phillips. (shrink)

This article aims to analyze the problem of totality in Sartre in its relation with finitude. We begin with the problem of ontological solitude by which we analyze Being as the exteriority of indifference and the event of the it-self or ontological act. Postulating this event as a process of singularization and the life of the individual, we show how the finitude affects totality as totalization and singularization. Image condensed by the singular universal, the finitude, then, is (...) not taken as an isolated totality, but is understood by its opening of the human in the singularization of a life. (shrink)

L’objectif de cette contribution est de montrer de quelle façon la phénoménologie de Renaud Barbaras permet de faire droit à ce que l’on peut définir comme la finitude radicale de la manifestation. Si, chez Barbaras, la finitude constitutive de toute manifestation est radicale, c’est dans la mesure où elle est elle-même finie, c’est-à-dire habitée par une indétermination originaire. L’inachèvement constitutif de toute manifestation est lui-même inachevé. Il y a un polymorphisme de la finitude...

This article explores the consecutive modifications that phenomenology underwent in the works of Heidegger and Levinas. In particular, it discusses their importance for contemporary attempts to expand — and transcend — phenomenology in philosophy and the social sciences. Heidegger and Levinas responded to the problem of subjectivity — and intersubjectivity — in diametrically opposed ways and consequently the exposition of their thoughts involves focusing on conceptual dichotomies like finitude and infinity, time and eternity. Ultimately, it is argued that the (...) very conceptions of the human being that the two thinkers furnish under the guise of Dasein and Autrui reveal the impasses associated with western metaphysics and pave the path for the development of more adequate theorizations of subjectivity, radical otherness and communal being. (shrink)

À partir d’une certaine idée de la finitude, nous avons voulu simplement dénoncer le fantasme d’un monde sans frontières.