The relation between phenomenology and modern German poetry is a primary concern of Rochelle Tobias' scholarly work. The following set of nine notes are concerned with this relation, and they seek an ...oblique response to a question she poses in her analysis of a roundabout altercation between Heidegger, Benjamin, and Lacoue-Labarthe concerning an open space in which the "logos" of the phenomenon and the work of poetry occasionally meet: "is there another way to understand poetry that accounts for its desire to create a space without subscribing to the mythology of the absent gods or the notion of a divine origin?" (Tobias 1172). A passage from one of Heidegger's posthumously published lectures in which he implicitly poses this question forms the crux of the following notes.
In this paper, I critically examine Dan Zahavi's multidimensional account of the self and show how the distinction he makes among “pre‐reflective minimal,” “interpersonal,” and “normative” dimensions ...of selfhood needs to be refined in order to accommodate what I call “pre‐reflective self‐understanding.” The latter is a normative dimension of selfhood manifest not in reflection and deliberation, but in the habits and style of a person's pre‐reflective absorption in the world. After reviewing Zahavi's multidimensional account and revealing this gap in his explanatory taxonomy, I draw upon Heidegger, Merleau‐Ponty, and Frankfurt in order to sketch an account of pre‐reflective self‐understanding. I end by raising an objection to Zahavi's claim for the primitive and foundational status of pre‐reflective self‐awareness. To carve off self‐awareness from the self's practical immersion in a situation where things and possibilities already matter and draw one to act is to distort the phenomena. A more careful phenomenology of pre‐reflective action shows that pre‐reflective self‐awareness and pre‐reflective self‐understanding are co‐constitutive, both mutually for each other and jointly for everyday experience.
Allegedly, Heidegger never quite finished Being and Time: his initial intention had consisted in the determination of the meaning of Being as such, apart from Dasein’s own existentiality. Afterwards, ...however, and despite the growing public excitement revolving around the published unfinished version of his project, his preoccupations, thematic conceptuality and very language, apparently started to shift away towards a strange and unfamiliar stance which he would never leave. Quite surely, his Nazi flirtation and subsequent withdrawal did not help in bringing clarity over this. On the other hand, this was not necessarily unexpected (although not necessarily to be expected, as well). What I mean to say is that for someone reading Being and time in spirit and not in letter, the possibility of such a substantive rethought of his initial scheme is present throughout the work. One’s changing one’s mind with respect to oneself is, after all, one of the basic possibilities conveyed by Dasein’s achieved resoluteness Entschlossenheit. Furthermore, despite his apparent reorientation, I think we can speak of some sort of attitudinal unity between Heidegger’s initial and later work, conceptually mediated by the relationship between Dasein’s Being-unto-death Sein-zum-Tode and the so called concealedness Verborgenheit of Being.. That is precisely what I aim to lay bare through this conceptual reconstruction of some of his post-Being and time works: (i) On the Essence of Truth (1930) and (ii) Letter on Humanism (1946). Basically, I will try to show that if in Being and Time he tried to come to Being from Dasein, in his later work he tries to get to Da-sein from Being, fact which unsurprisingly brought along some reconsiderations but that, broadly speaking, essentially amounts to what he set out to do in his initial ontological project. Surprisingly, the most concrete instance of this pendulation between Dasein and Being is to be found, at least to my knowledge, in one of his more political works, i.e. (iii) The Question Concerning Technology (1953), around which our present endeavor will mostly revolve.
This article considers the differences between Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in light of Pascal’s distinction between the
esprit de géometrie
and the
esprit de finesse
. According to Pascal, ...the essential “principles” dominating our perceptual lives cannot be clearly and confidently demonstrated in a manner akin to logic and mathematics, but must be discerned in a more spontaneous or intuitive manner.
It is unsurprising that Husserl, originally a student of mathematics, might seem closer to the
esprit de géometrie
, whereas Heidegger, trained in theology and drawn to poets and poetic thinkers, is closer to the
esprit de finesse
. This difference is clear from the styles of writing of these two seminal figures. I consider how this
stylistic
difference is also linked with the
substance
of their respective philosophies, and with the approaches they recommend for exploring subjective life. A related difference concerns how each theorist responds to what Husserl called the “paradox of human subjectivity” and what Michel Foucault later termed the “empirico-transcendental doublet”: the fact that, in doing phenomenology, human consciousness exists as both the subject
and
the object of our knowing. Husserl mostly emphasized the
advantages
, epistemological and existential, that this potential reflexivity can afford. Heidegger was more interested in the
obstacles
or
traps
it sets—both for accurate self-knowledge and for authentic living. These issues are discussed in relation to the “natural attitude” and “everydayness,” and to the linguistic grounding of human existence and knowledge—especially as these issues emerge in Foucault’s
Les mots et les choses
and Eugen Fink’s
Sixth Cartesian Meditation
.
THEOLOGICAL THEOLOGY Allen, Michael
First things (New York, N.Y.),
11/2020
Journal Article
Baby boomers still run much of the world, and sadly, their greatest theologian has already died. ...over the course of his career, he educated himself back into the classical tradition of Protestant ...scholasticism as an extension of patristic and medieval Christianity. ...of his death, he was the most eminent proponent of an unapologetically Protestant project of ressour cement, the "return to the sources" that had done so much to renew Roman Catholic theology in the twentieth century. ...his students did not fix on the relationships of Barth and Hegel or Barth and Heidegger (the usual themes for Barth studies).
During the second year of his seminar Perjury and Pardon, Derrida makes the somewhat offhanded suggestion that one might someday wish to draw up a list distinguishing all those thinkers who lived ...long enough to see the AIDS epidemic from all those who did not. It's 1999, and Derrida makes this curious suggestion in the midst of a discussion of the so-called 'contaminated blood' scandal that was preoccupying France at the time. Such a distinction, Derrida seems to imply, would allow one to make some general observations about the thought or rhetoric of two distinct groups of thinkers and writers separated in time by a global epidemic and everything that came with it. Derrida himself would thus obviously be among those in the first group, while Heidegger, whom Derrida mentions, would be in the second, which can help explain, we might speculate, why the trope or logic of autoimmunity became so important for the one and yet is absent in the other.
"In this bold and original study, Jeff Kochan constructively combines the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) with Martin Heidegger’s early existential conception of science. Kochan shows ...convincingly that these apparently quite different approaches to science are, in fact, largely compatible, even mutually reinforcing. By combining Heidegger with SSK, Kochan argues, we can explicate, elaborate, and empirically ground Heidegger’s philosophy of science in a way that makes it more accessible and useful for social scientists and historians of science. Likewise, incorporating Heideggerian phenomenology into SSK renders SKK a more robust and attractive methodology for use by scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Kochan’s ground-breaking reinterpretation of Heidegger also enables STS scholars to sustain a principled analytical focus on scientific subjectivity, without running afoul of the orthodox subject-object distinction they often reject. Science as Social Existence is the first book of its kind, unfurling its argument through a range of topics relevant to contemporary STS research. These include the epistemology and metaphysics of scientific practice, as well as the methods of explanation appropriate to social scientific and historical studies of science. Science as Social Existence puts concentrated emphasis on the compatibility of Heidegger’s existential conception of science with the historical sociology of scientific knowledge, pursuing this combination at both macro- and micro-historical levels. Beautifully written and accessible, Science as Social Existence puts new and powerful tools into the hands of sociologists and historians of science, cultural theorists of science, Heidegger scholars, and pluralist philosophers of science."
This essay is one of the first to explore the implications of the emerging philosophy known as object-oriented ontology (OOO) for the study and creation of poetry. OOO provides a powerful conceptual ...toolbox for understanding how poetry works. Furthermore, poetry itself may be seen as a template for understanding how any entity—a human, a ball of string, a star cluster—can interact with any other—a toaster, an octopus, an abandoned warehouse. This is because OOO's theory of causality reserves a very unique and powerful place for the aesthetic dimension. In this essay, I read Percy Shelley's A Defence of Poetry in light of OOO.
Martin Heidegger argues against the possibility of Christian philosophy in his Introduction to Metaphysics. Christians, Heidegger tells us, cannot authentically ask the fundamental question of ...philosophy – ‘Why are there beings at all rather than nothing?’ – because they already suppose that they have an answer to this question in their Creator-God. Moreover, Christianity, says Heidegger, takes philosophy to be foolishness and, thus, would never try to answer its questions in the first place. Finally, Heidegger insists that any thoughtful questioning in a Christian context is theology and not philosophy. I argue that none of these reasons for rejecting Christian philosophy ultimately holds up. I also criticize an interpretation of Heidegger on this topic proposed by Walter Kaufmann.
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