Daniel Dahlstrom

This paper addresses puzzling issues concerning the ontological status of dispositions. Following review of debates about a traditional conditional analysis as well as Lewis’s “reformed conditional analysis” of dispositions, the paper analyzes attempts to solve the problem of what makes the relevant conditional true. Reasons are presented for rejecting attempts to locate the relevant truth-maker in a causal basis that allegedly dispenses with dispositions or in properties that are universally dispositional. In this way the paper argues that neither “eliminativism” nor “pandispositionalism” provides a successful account of dispositions’ ontological status, and that ontology must find a way to countenance the reality of both dispositional and non-dispositional properties.

This engaging work presents a persuasive argument for placing a morally populist and somatic pragmatism at the center, not only of aesthetics and art, but also of what the author calls "the aesthetic life." In the opening chapter the author begins by situating pragmatist aesthetics in its philosophical context, chiefly through a contrast with analytic aesthetics. Casting the contrast as a renewal of the quarrel between Kantians and Hegelians, the author elaborates the fundamental opposition of analytic aesthetics to Dewey's naturalistic, instrumental, and self-consciously evaluational view of aesthetics, his emphasis on the centrality of art and its profound continuity with science and life in all the historico-political and socio-economic richness of the latter, his refusal to countenance an undemocratic distinction between high and low art, and finally, his insistence on privileging the aesthetic experience over the material object identified as the work of art. The contrast is deepened in the second chapter as the author argues that the currently regnant and supposedly neutral definition of art as a distinct historical practice collapses into art history, naively leaving the question of value to the inner arbitration of the art world and thereby iterating the forced separation of practice and aesthetic experience. Though the author contends that pragmatist aesthetics overcomes these shortcomings, he acknowledges that the reconstructive definition of art as experience, at least as Dewey formulates it, seems "obscurely elusive" and its revisionary aims "too quixotically ambitious". The author attempts to counter these objections by stressing that the definition is meant, not to provide criteria for judgment and not to effect a sweeping reclassification of art, but to enhance and expedite experience. In this respect, however, the author emphasizes how his project "differs from its Deweyan source". Instead of trying to effect a change through a global redefinition of art, his aim is "to make a more specific case for widening art's borders to forms of popular culture and to the ethical art of fashioning one's life". The second chapter concludes with an effective rebuttal of the challenge that theory in general, including that of a nonfoundationalist pragmatist aesthetics, is impotent and impossible.

The "conceptual story" told by Kisiel neatly divides into three parts, reflecting the genesis of SZ respectively "as a topic, as a program, and as a text". Part 1 begins with the 1919 War Emergency Semester and Heidegger's transformation of Husserlian phenomenology into a "pretheoretical science" of pretheoretical origins, leading to the elaboration of a hermeneutics of facticity and its methodological problematic in concert with the demands of a phenomenology of religion. Part 1 is the lengthiest of the three parts, but with good reason. By securing extant transcripts of courses, Kisiel is able to provide illuminating material not found in the published editions. The paraphrase of lectures of the winter semester 1920-21 "Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion," based upon four extant student transcripts, is particularly valuable since Heidegger's autograph of this course is missing and, hence, the lectures presumably will not find their way into the Gesamtausgabe. Kisiel relates how the course undergoes an abrupt change in focus from methodological considerations to the examination of concrete religious phenomena, a change apparently prompted by students' complaints over the lectures' "lack of religious content".

This volume of essays by internationally prominent scholars interprets the full range of Heidegger's thought and major critical interpretations of it. It explores such central themes as hermeneutics, facticity and Ereignis, conscience in Being and Time, freedom in the writings of his period of transition from fundamental ontology, and his mature criticisms of metaphysics and ontotheology. The volume also examines Heidegger's interpretations of other authors, the philosophers Aristotle, Kant and Nietzsche and the poets Rilke, Trakl and George. A final group of essays interprets the critical reception of Heidegger's thought, both in the analytic tradition and in France. This rich and wide-ranging collection will appeal to all who are interested in the themes, the development and the context of Heidegger's philosophical thought.

There are several difficulties, largely the product of the distinctive question and paths of Heidegger's thinking, that beset any attempt to determine his philosophical heritage. In the first part of the following paper, after reviewing these difficulties, the author argues that Heidegger is, nonetheless, singularly and quite rightly preoccupied with the heritage of his thinking. In the second part an attempt is made to show how a particular understanding of being, namely, being as presence and absence, motivates various paths taken by his thinking, paths which, indeed, have given rise to several appropriations of his thinking in the present: pragmatic, religious, hermeneutical as well as in the philosophy of art and technology. In the final part of the paper the author identifies some of these ongoing "Heideggerian heritages," but with the aim of underscoring their dependence upon what for the author is the principal heritage of his thinking, a way of thinking about being that recovers its fundamentally historical character. /// Existem várias dificuldades, as quais são em larga medida produto da questão distintiva e dos diversos caminhos do pensamento de Heidegger, que condicionam toda e qualquer tentativa de determinar a sua herança filosófica. Na primeira parte do presente artigo, o autor, depois de mencionar as sobreditas dificuldades, argumenta que Heidegger, apesar de tudo, está singularmente, e apropriadamente, preocupado com a herança do seu pensamento. Na segunda parte, é feita uma tentativa no sentido de mostrar até que ponto uma compreensão particular do ser, nomeadamente do ser como presença e ausência, deu lugar a diversas apropriações do pensamento heideggeriano no presente: apropriação pragmática, religiosa, hermenêutica, bem como no âmbito da filosofia da arte e da tecnologia. Finalmente, na sua última parte, o presente artigo identifica algumas das "heranças heideggerianas" correntes, mas com a intenção de sublinhar a sua dependência em relação àquilo que para o autor constitui a principal herança do seu pensamento, nomeadamente, um modo de pensar acerca do ser que recupera o seu carácter fundamentalmente histórico.