Eric S. Nelson

Rita Widmaier and Malte-Ludolf Babin have done a valuable scholarly service for studies of the early modern European reception of China in collecting letters from Leibniz's extensive correspondence concerning China and translating them from the original Latin and French into German. This multi-lingual and chronologically organized edition gathers letters to and from Leibniz as well as supplementary texts composed between the years 1694 and 1716. It incorporates helpful clarificatory notes as well as an informative and lucid introduction.This edition focuses on the exchanges between Leibniz and the Jesuit theologian and philosopher Barthélemy Des Bosses S.J. and other Jesuits in Europe who were in...

This chapter examines: (1) the Black Notebooks in the context of Heidegger's political engagement on behalf of the National Socialist regime and his ambivalence toward some but not all of its political beliefs and tactics; (2) his limited "critique" of vulgar National Socialism and its biologically based racism for the sake of his own ethnocentric vision of the historical uniqueness of the German people and Germany's central role in Europe as a contested site situated between West and East, technological modernity and the Asiatic. Heidegger did not break with radical right-wing Germanist thought, as some scholars have argued. He at most placed National Socialism within his narrative of the history of being, metaphysics, and technology, and thereby relativized it without addressing either its uniqueness or its totalitarian structures and practices. Heidegger formulated his own metaphysical and ontological version of Antisemitism during the National Socialist period. This vision was deeply connected with his understanding of the "history of being" and was intensified during and immediately after the Second World War. Heidegger could perceive no difference between the Shoah and the Allied bombing, defeat, and occupation of Germany. Heidegger's post-war philosophy (of home, history and technology) is deeply shaped by, and remained complicit with, his thinking during this period.

In diesem Aufsatz, werde ich die Frage des Naturalismus in Plessners Philosophie des organischen Lebens und seiner amerikanischen Rezeption, in besonders die philosophischen-biologischen Schriften von Marjorie Grene, untersuchen. Die amerikanische Philosophin Grene war die Hauptvertreterin Plessners im Englischen Sprachraum in 20sten Jahrhundert, die Plessners anthropologischen Argumentation in ihren Schriften zur Philosophie der Biologie aufgenommen und verwendet hat. Grene kritisierte in ihren frühen Schriften Heidegger, Sartre, und die Existenzphilosophie, die das menschliche Dasein von der Natur radikal absondert und die negative Affekte wie Angst hervorhebt, in Vergleich mit Plessners weiterem Blick der Leibhaften, Sinnlichen, Tierischen Entwicklung des menschlichen Lebens. Die menschliche Existenz kann nicht dualistisch, wo „keine Brücke über den Abgrund zwischen Mensch und Tier führt,“ sondern nur biologisch-lebensphilosophisch oder ökologisch verstanden werden. Plessner und Grene setzen sich mit dem Reduktionismus des modernen Naturalismus auseinander und zeigen, wie das Natürliche weiter und ergänzt gedacht werden muss, weil der Naturalismus keine ausreichenden Begriffe für die Auslegung der Erscheinungen und Ausdrucksformen des organischen Lebens besitzt. Die Unterscheidung zwischen der "zentrischen Positionalität" des Tiers und der "exzentrischen Positionalität" des menschlichen Tiers ermöglicht eine holistisch aber differenzierte Beschreibung der Natur und Kultur, insbesondere die natürlichen Künstlichkeit, die der Kultur und das des gesellschaftlichen Lebens. Diese sind Grundlage für die geschichtliche und soziale Bildung, Aufbau, und Strukturierung der natürlichen Spontaneität, Produktivität, und Expressivität des Lebens und ermöglichen die dezentrierte, utopische, und persönliche Individuation der einzelnen Menschen im Lebenszusammenhang, was wichtige soziologische und auch ethische und politische Konsequenzen für Plessner und Grene hat: Der Mensch ist ein natürliches biologisches Individuum, das durchaus fähig ist, eine verantwortliche Person zu werden , und zwar durch die umfassende Beteiligung an (oder als ein einzigartiger Ausdruck) einer Kultur.

Adorno and Levinas argue from distinct yet intersecting perspectives that there are pathological forms of freedom, formed by systems of power and economic exchange, which legitimate the neglect, exploitation and domination of others. In this paper, I examine how the works of Adorno and Levinas assist in diagnosing the aporias of liberty in contemporary capitalist societies by providing critical models and strategies for confronting present discourses and systems of freedom that perpetuate unfreedom such as those ideologically expressed in possessive individualist and libertarian conceptions of freedom.

Dilthey’s middle works offer alternative strategies for interpreting the debate between naturalism and anti-naturalism. These works traced the limits of natural scientific methods in the face of the felt reflexivity of the subject, the singular nexus of the individual’s life, and the epistemic inability to comprehend life as a universally valid whole. Dilthey naturalistically critiques claims appealing to an uninterpreted immediate givenness and the direct self-access and self-evidence of uninterpreted “inner experience,” while minimalistically confronting naturalism with the reflexively felt, interpretively processed, and reflectively conceptualized and mediated character of the given. Lived-experiences are complex relational wholes, involving purposiveness, which cannot be reduced to discrete “natural” elements abstracted from the life-nexus. Naturalism is the primary orientation of modern science; yet the contents of life and the objects themselves call us to methodological differentiation and the articulation of reality in more complex and multifaceted ways.

Nietzsche has been associated with naturalism due to his arguments that morality, religion, metaphysics, and consciousness are products of natural biological organisms and ultimately natural phenomena. The subject and its mental life are only comprehensible in relation to natural desires, drives, impulses, and instincts. I argue that such typical naturalizing tendencies do not exhaust Nietzsche’s project, since they occur in the context of his critique of “nature” and metaphysical, speculative, and scientific naturalisms. Nietzsche challenges otherworldly projections of this-worldly beings, as his naturalistic interpreters claim, but further the idolization of immanent worldly natural phenomena, including science itself. “Nature” is an idealization of natural organisms and environments in which its construction, projection, and interpretation is forgotten. Nietzsche strategically uses naturalistic scientific strategies of explanation and demystification, while demystifying science, positivism, and naturalism for the sake of life. These do not provide either certainties or foundations for knowledge or life. Naturalism would be anti-natural if it denies of multiplicity and conflict of the forces of life, bracketing the natural and historical conditions of existence, and the interpretive and perspectival character of life and knowledge. The nexus of nature and history in Nietzsche is better clarified through his portrayal of the feeling of life and its intensification, attenuation, and transformation in relation to the forces andconditions of life, which encompass processes of socialization and interpretive and artistic individuation in the context of a life.

The hermeneutical dimensions of Chinese philosophy from the Changes of Zhou through its Confucian, Daoist, and contemporary developments have been a creative inspirational source and guiding intellectual thread in the thought of Chung-ying Cheng. Cheng's extensive engagement with the Classic of Changes, its role in the formation of the Chinese philosophical tradition and its comparative interconnections with occidental philosophies, has disclosed its deep hermeneutical orientation. The Yijing encompasses processes of empirical observation, empathetic feeling, and self-reflection in the generation of “images,” or prototypical models that are “form-objects” or “process-events,” which performatively enact a comprehensive ontological and situationally appropriate understanding of nature, society, and one self. I examine three issues in outline arising from Cheng's works in this situation: to what extent Chinese philosophy is hermeneutical with respect to modern European understandings of hermeneutics, and the possibility of the distinctive “onto-generative hermeneutics” that has been articulated for over forty years in the context of Chinese and Western thought in Cheng's prolific works concerning the Yijing.

I explore how Heidegger and his successors interpret philosophy as an Occidental enterprise based on a particular understanding of history. In contrast to the dominant monistic paradigm, I return to the plural thinking of Dilthey and Misch, who interpret philosophy as a European and a global phenomenon. This reflects Dilthey's pluralistic understanding of historical life. Misch developed Dilthey's insight by demonstrating the multiple origins of philosophy as critical life‐reflection in its Greek context and in the historical matrices of ancient India and China. Misch's approach to Confucius and Zhuangzi reveals a historically informed, interculturally sensitive, and critically oriented life‐philosophy

Western philosophy has been defined through the exclusion of non-Western forms of thought as non-philo-sophical. In this paper, I place the notion of what is “properly” philosophy into question by contrasting the essence/appearance paradigm governing Western metaphysics and its deconstructive critics with the more fluid, dynamic, and participatory forms of encountering and performatively enacting the world that are articulated in Chinese thinking and made apparent in Chinese painting. In this hermeneutical contrast, Western and Chinese thinking themselves are interpeted as co-relational rather than as discrete, mutually indifferent or ethnocentrically nativist traditions.

This paper is about the relevance of the ineffable and the singular to hermeneutics. I respond to standard criticisms of Friedrich Schleiermacher by Karl Barth and Hans-Georg Gadamer in order to clarify his understanding of language, interpretation, and religion. Schleiermacher’s “indicative hermeneutics” is developed in the context of the ethical significance of communication and the ineffable. The notion of trace is employed in order to interpret the paradox of speaking about that which cannot be spoken. The trace is not a brute singularity but bears a fundamental relationship to the word—and ultimately the word of God—for Schleiermacher

Martin Heidegger is one of the twentieth century's most important philosophers, and now also one of the most contentious as revelations of the extent of his Nazism continue to surface. His ground-breaking works have had a hugely significant impact on contemporary thought through their reception, appropriation and critique. His thought has influenced philosophers as diverse as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Adorno, Gadamer, Levinas, Derrida and Foucault, among others. In addition to his formative role in philosophical movements such as phenomenology, hermeneutics and existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction and post-modernism, Heidegger has had a transformative effect on diverse fields of inquiry including political theory, literary criticism, theology, gender theory, technology and environmental studies. The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger is the definitive textbook to Heidegger's life and work, in fifty-nine original essays written by an international team of leading Heidegger scholars. This new edition presents comprehensive coverage of Heidegger life and contexts, sources, influences and encounters, key writings, major themes and topics, and reception and influence, and includes a chapter addressing the controversial Black Notebooks, National Socialism, and Antisemitism. This is the ideal research tool for anyone studying or working in the field of Heidegger Studies today.