Daniel Dahlstrom

This paper attempts to marshall some of the evidence of the transcendental character of Heidegger's later thinking, despite his repudiation of any form of transcendental thinking, including that of his own earlier project of fundamental ontology. The transcendental significance of that early project is first outlined through comparison and contrast with the diverse transcendental turns in the philosophies of Kant and Husserl. The paper then turns to Heidegger's account of the historical source of the notion of transcendence in Plato's thinking, its legacy in various forms of transcendental philosophy, and his reasons for attempting to think in a post-transcendental way. The paper concludes by identifying four vestiges of the transcendental turn in Heidegger's later thinking.

Challenging twentieth-century skepticism regarding the notion of subjectivity, the author sets for himself the task of elaborating several models of self-consciousness, each differentiated by an advancing degree of complexity. Düsing’s book is accordingly both critical and constructive; its aim is to construct a viable theory of subjectivity and a clear foundation for scientific research, thereby forestalling the naive practice, common among researchers of neural processes, of assuming an arbitrary conception of consciousness and self-consciousness. At the same time, Düsing creatively appropriates theories of subjectivity produced in the period from Kant to Hegel and distinguished by a sophisticated differentiation and combination of concepts of pure self-consciousness and a concrete self.

Immanuel Kant's "critical philosophy" is rightly renowned for its criticism of the metaphysical pretensions of reason unaided by experience. It therefore seems ironic that, within a single generation, some of Kant's most important followers argued that the critical philosophy could be made fully critical only by recourse to the very metaphysical themes that Kant had apparently criticized. The story of the emergence of German Idealism has never been fully told. The story is full of tensions, contradictions, and reversals, all of which seemingly conspire to render a meaningful and unified account impossible. While defying any simple or simplistic explanation, the various and sometimes conflicting impulses that led to the emergence of German Idealism together constitute an intelligible and rich line of development. In this volume, an international group of leading scholars shows how the various aspirations at work in the emergence of German Idealism―moral, religious, aesthetic, political, and epistemological―can be understood as both consummating and overcoming Kant's critical philosophy. The volume also includes a chronology of the major works in the development of German Idealism, as well as a new translation of the seminal and still-controversial essay, "The Earliest System Programme of German Idealism."

Morning Hours is the first English translation of Morgenstunden by Moses Mendelssohn, the foremost Jewish thinker of the German Enlightenment. Published six months before Mendelssohn's death on January 4, 1786, Morning Hours is the most sustained presentation of his mature epistemological and metaphysical views, all elaborated in the service of presenting his son with proofs for the existence of God. But Morning Hours is much more than a theoretical treatise. It also plays a central role in the drama of the Pantheismusstreit, Mendelssohn's "dispute" with F. H. Jacobi over the nature and scope of Lessing's attitude toward Spinoza and "pantheism". In Morning Hours Mendelssohn attempts to set the record straight regarding his beloved Lessing in this connection, not least by demonstrating the absence of any practical difference between theism and a "purified pantheism".

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.

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.

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.