Bernhard Radloff

This essay explores the question of the metaphysical foundations of liberalism in the light of Heidegger’s understanding of the history of being. Liberalism is conceived in conjunction with the epochal transformation of the essence of truth initiated by nominalism. The author focuses on Hobbes’ Leviathan as the ground-laying work of the ahistorical genesis and sociotechnical constitution of a polity. Based on the premise of the ontotheological structure of metaphysics, the author elaborates his discussion of the metaphysical liberalism of Leviathan in terms of its political ontology and theology. The seemingly antithetical discourses of nature and of prophetic revelation in Leviathan are shown to equally derive from Hobbes’ understanding of being as the objective unity and calculable order of beings.

The Truth of Being and the Historicity of the Earth This essay reads Graeme Nicholson’s Heidegger on Truth in conjunction with Frank Schalow’s Heidegger’s Ecological Turn. It calls for the appropriation of Heidegger’s understanding of Da-sein to elaborate a radically other, earth-based political order. Nicholson and Schalow independently draw the conclusion that the technocratic world order, founded in the metaphysics of presence, is incapable of adequate response to a hermeneutic situation defined by instrumental reason and ecological collapse. Schalow’s carefully elaborated contribution to eco-philosophy offers a creative adaption of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology and specifies how it is integrated into the project of the history of being.

The «Theatrum Mundi» of Melville's thought investigated in this work signifies the representational space of modern subjectivity, which posits a «world» of value for itself. The representational theatre of the will manifests itself through the governing discourses of politics, religion, and aesthetics as they are integrated into Melville's fiction. Will and Representation focuses on Moby Dick, revealing the Fundamental metaphysical dispositions illustrated through the historical discourses that Moby Dick integrates and transforms. The metaphysical dispositions themselves determine Melville's reception of classical questions of politics, philosophy, and aesthetics, and his transformation of them.