•  910
    Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity
    Cambridge University Press. 2011.
    Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity offers a radical new interpretation of Heidegger's later philosophy, developing his argument that art can help lead humanity beyond the nihilistic ontotheology of the modern age. Providing pathbreaking readings of Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art' and his notoriously difficult Contributions to Philosophy, this book explains precisely what postmodernity meant for Heidegger, the greatest philosophical critic of modernity, and what it could still mean for…Read more
  •  158
    Iain I remember reading Thomas Jefferson in high school; he wrote so eloquently about our human need for freedom that I got choked up just reading him. When I found out he'd had slaves I was stunned, traumatized intellectually, but I lacked the resources to work through it very far at the time. Reading Heidegger a few years later I had a similar experience, only magnified and more complicated. As I read Heidegger's later work in Hubert Dreyfus's wonderful "later Heidegger" course at UC Berkeley,…Read more
  •  144
    Heidegger’s perfectionist philosophy of educationin Being and Time
    Continental Philosophy Review 37 (4): 439-467. 2004.
    In Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education, I argue that Heidegger’s ontological thinking about education forms one of the deep thematic undercurrents of his entire career, but I focus mainly on Heidegger’s later work in order to make this case. The current essay extends this view to Heidegger’s early magnum opus, contending that Being and Time is profoundly informed – albeit at a subterranean level – by Heidegger’s perfectionist thinking about education. Explaining t…Read more
  •  141
    Andrew Feenberg?s most recent contribution to the critical theory of technology, Questioning Technology , is best understood as a synthesis and extension of the critiques of technology developed by Heidegger and Marcuse. By thus situating Feenberg?s endeavor to articulate and preserve a meaningful sense of agency in our increasingly technologized lifeworld, I show that some of the deepest tensions in Heidegger and Marcuse?s relation re-emerge within Feenberg?s own critical theory. Most significa…Read more
  •  128
    Ontotheology? Understanding Heidegger's destruktion of metaphysics
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8 (3). 2000.
    Heidegger's Destruktion of the metaphysical tradition leads him to the view that all Western metaphysical systems make foundational claims best understood as 'ontotheological'. Metaphysics establishes the conceptual parameters of intelligibility by ontologically grounding and theologically legitimating our changing historical sense of what is. By first elucidating and then problematizing Heidegger's claim that all Western metaphysics shares this ontotheological structure, I reconstruct the most …Read more
  •  121
    Heidegger's Aesthetics
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2010.
    Heidegger is against the modern tradition of philosophical “aesthetics” because he is for the true “work of art” which, he argues, the aesthetic approach to art eclipses. Heidegger's critique of aesthetics and his advocacy of art thus form a complementary whole. Section 1 orients the reader by providing a brief overview of Heidegger's philosophical stand against aesthetics, for art. Section 2 explains Heidegger's philosophical critique of aesthetics, showing why he thinks aesthetics follows from…Read more
  •  82
    Ontology and ethics at the intersection of phenomenology and environmental philosophy
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 47 (4). 2004.
    The idea inspiring the eco-phenomenological movement is that phenomenology can help remedy our environmental crisis by uprooting and replacing environmentally-destructive ethical and metaphysical presuppositions inherited from modern philosophy. Eco-phenomenology's critiques of subject/object dualism and the fact/value divide are sketched and its positive alternatives examined. Two competing approaches are discerned within the eco-phenomenological movement: Nietzscheans and Husserlians propose a…Read more
  •  80
    In 1991 Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs made off with five Academy Awards, including the coveted "Best Picture." Merely to introduce this fact I have already had to ignore several potentially relevant questions. [1] But I will spare you the tedium of endlessly qualifying my choice of subject matter; both existentialism and psychoanalysis teach us that the attempt to get behind our own starting points or render our pasts completely transparent to ourselves is an impossible task. Rather, l…Read more
  •  79
    What's wrong with being a technological essentialist? A response to Feenberg
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 43 (4). 2000.
    In Questioning Technology, Feenberg accuses Heidegger of an untenable 'technological essentialism'. Feenberg's criticisms are addressed not to technological essentialism as such, but rather to three particular kinds of technological essentialism: ahistoricism, substantivism, and one-dimensionalism. After these three forms of technological essentialism are explicated and Feenberg's reasons for finding them objectionable explained, the question whether Heidegger in fact subscribes to any of them i…Read more
  •  68
    On the advantages and disadvantages of reading Heidegger backwards: White's time and death
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (1). 2007.
    In Time and Death: Heidegger's Analysis of Finitude, Carol White pursues a strange hermeneutic strategy, reading Heidegger backwards by reading the central ideas of his later work back into his early magnum opus, Being and Time. White follows some of Heidegger's own later directives in pursuing this hermeneutic strategy, and this paper critically explores these directives along with the original reading that emerges from following them. The conclusion reached is that White's creative book is not…Read more
  •  63
    Heidegger on ontological education, or: How we become what we are
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 44 (3). 2001.
    Heidegger presciently diagnosed the current crisis in higher education. Contemporary theorists like Bill Readings extend and update Heidegger's critique, documenting the increasing instrumentalization, professionalization, vocationalization, corporatization, and technologization of the modern university, the dissolution of its unifying and guiding ideals, and, consequently, the growing hyper-specialization and ruinous fragmentation of its departments. Unlike Heidegger, however, these critics do …Read more
  •  63
    Phenomenology and Technology
    In Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen Friis, Stig Andur Pedersen & Vincent F. Hendricks (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, Wiley-blackwell. 2009.
    As a distinctive philosophical tradition, phenomenology was founded by Husserl and then developed further — into the domain of technology — by Husserl's most original and important student, Heideg ger. Let us begin with this standard view and then develop..
  •  58
    Thinking love: Heidegger and Arendt
    Continental Philosophy Review 50 (4): 453-478. 2017.
    “Thinking Love: Heidegger and Arendt” explores the problematic nature of romantic love as it developed between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, whom Heidegger later called “the passion of his life.” I suggest that three different ways of understanding love can be found at work in Heidegger and Arendt’s relationship, namely, the perfectionist, the unconditional, and the ontological models of love. Explaining these different ways of thinking romantic love, this paper shows how the distinctive p…Read more
  •  46
    Heidegger is now widely recognized as one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the twentieth century, yet much of his later philosophy remains shrouded in confusion and controversy. Restoring Heidegger's understanding of metaphysics as 'ontotheology' to its rightful place at the center of his later thought, this book demonstrates the depth and significance of his controversial critique of technology, his appalling misadventure with Nazism, his prescient critique of the unive…Read more
  •  40
    Transcendence and the Problem of Otherworldly Nihilism: Taylor, Heidegger, Nietzsche
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 54 (2): 140-159. 2011.
    This paper examines Charles Taylor's case against complete secularization in A Secular Age in the light of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's critiques of the potential for nihilism inherent in different kinds of philosophical appeals to ?transcendence?. The Heideggerian critique of metaphysics as ontotheology suggests that the theoretical pluralism Taylor rightly embraces is more consistently thought of as following from a robust ontological pluralism, and that Taylor's own commitment to ontological m…Read more
  •  39
    In this paper, I suggest that the important philosophy of the future will increasingly be found neither in the “continental” nor in the “analytic” traditions but, instead, in the transcending sublation of (all) traditions I call “synthetic philosophy.” I mean “synthetic” both in a sense that encourages the bold combinatorial mélange of existing styles, traditions, and issues, and also in the Hegelian sense of sublating dichotomous oppositions, appropriating the distinctive insights of both sides…Read more
  •  29
    We have never been postmodern
    Educational Philosophy and Theory 50 (14): 1322-1323. 2018.
  •  28
    Rethinking education after Heidegger: Teaching learning as ontological response-ability
    Educational Philosophy and Theory 48 (8): 846-861. 2016.
    This article develops Thomson’s post-Heideggerian view that ontological education is centrally concerned with disclosing being creatively and responsibly. To disclose being creatively and responsibly is to realize the meaning of being, developing our historical understanding of what being means along with our consequent understanding of what it means for us to be, both communally and in the many facets of our own individual lives. As ontological educators, we disclose our own being by becoming w…Read more
  •  26
    Symposium on questioning technology by Andrew Feenberg
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
  •  25
    Review of Santiago zabala, The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (10). 2010.
    Postmodernism isn't what it used to be. As a meaningful philosophical movement (rather than a vague term of disparagement), "postmodernism" primarily designated a diverse series of Heidegger inspired attempts to situate and guide our late modern historical age by uncovering and transcending its most destructive metaphysical presuppositions. Ironically, however, the only major contemporary philosophers still willing to call themselves "postmodernists" have renounced that "utopian" quest for a phi…Read more
  •  21
  •  19
    Heidegger, Education, and Modernity
    with Michael A. Peters, Valerie Allen, Ares D. Axiotis, Michael Bonnett, David E. Cooper, Patrick Fitzsimons, Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, Padraig Hogan, F. Ruth Irwin, Bert Lambeir, Paul Smeyers, and Paul Standish
    Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2002.
    Martin Heidegger is, perhaps, the most controversial philosopher of the twentieth-century. Little has been written on him or about his work and its significance for educational thought. This unique collection by a group of international scholars reexamines Heidegger's work and its legacy for educational thought
  •  15
    Review of Miguel de Beistegui, The New Heidegger (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (9). 2006.
  •  13
    The Human Being
    Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 12 157-212. 2022.
  •  11
    The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945–2015 (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2019.
    This landmark achievement in philosophical scholarship brings together leading experts from the diverse traditions of Western philosophy in a common quest to illuminate and explain the most important philosophical developments since the Second World War. Focusing particularly on those insights and movements that most profoundly shaped the English-speaking philosophical world, this volume bridges the traditional divide between “analytic” and “Continental” philosophy while also reaching beyond it.…Read more
  •  10
    Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is widely considered one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century, and, thanks to his (failed) attempt to assume philosophical leadership of the century’s most execrable political movement (Nazism) and his later critique of the history of metaphysics from Anaximander to Nietzsche as inherently nihilistic, he is also certainly the most controversial.
  •  9
    Heidegger and the Politics of the University
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (4): 515-542. 2003.
    This article examines the development of Heidegger's philosophical views on university education, situates these views within their broader historical and philosophical context, and shows them to be largely responsible for Heidegger's decision to become the first Nazi Rector of Freiburg University in 1933. Did Heidegger learn from this appalling political misadventure and so transform the underlying philosophical views that helped motivate it? It is argued, against the interpretations of Pöggele…Read more
  •  8
    Against Immortality: Why Death is Better than the Alternative
    In Russell Blackford & Damien Broderick (eds.), Intelligence Unbound, Wiley. 2014-08-11.
    Fischer suggests that the endless life of an immortal would be just as desirable as the very long but finite life of a long‐lived mortal. Fischer acknowledges that this is “one of the most difficult and challenging issues surrounding immortality.” This chapter answers the following: Why do we think, conversely, that being able to die makes a crucial difference? Why would an individual existence that could never come to an end necessarily be bad?. An immortal being could conceivably cycle through…Read more