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5Environmental PhilosophyIn Hubert L. Dreyfus & Mark A. Wrathall (eds.), A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, Blackwell. 2006.This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Uncovering the Conceptual Roots of Environmental Devastation From Ontological Method to Eco‐Phenomenological Ethics The Meaning of the Earth Naturalistic Ethical Realism in Eco‐Phenomenology Transcendental Ethical Realism in Eco‐Phenomenology Levinas, Heidegger, and the Ethical Question of Animality.
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1Heidegger and National SocialismIn Hubert L. Dreyfus & Mark A. Wrathall (eds.), A Companion to Heidegger, Blackwell. 2005.This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction From Historicality to Heidegger's University Politics: Restoring Philosophy to Her Throne The Philosophical Lesson.
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15Against Immortality: Why Death is Better than the AlternativeIn 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
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1Understanding technology ontotheologically, or the danger and the promise of Heidegger, an American perspectiveIn Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen Friis, Evan Selinger & Søren Riis (eds.), New Waves in Philosophy of Technology, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
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1Technology, Ontotheology, EducationIn Aaron James Wendland, Christopher D. Merwin & Christos Hadjioannou (eds.), Heidegger on Technology, Routledge. pp. 174-193. 2019.
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6The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project (review)Review of Metaphysics 55 (2): 418-419. 2001.When Kant finished the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, he was 56 years old and had already published more than 25 essays and monographs. In this precritical oeuvre the young Kant unabashedly answered some of the most difficult questions of theoretical physics, physical geography, cosmology, theology, and moral theory, advancing ambitious theories about the origin and history of the universe, the nature of space, the age of the earth and the stability of its rotation, the causes of earthquakes, …Read more
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16The 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
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30Rethinking education after Heidegger: Teaching learning as ontological response-abilityEducational 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
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60Thinking love: Heidegger and ArendtContinental 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
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21The Philosophical Fugue: Understanding the Structure and Goal of Heidegger's BeiträgeJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 34 (1): 57-73. 2003.
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10Martin 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.
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148Heidegger’s perfectionist philosophy of educationin Being and TimeContinental 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
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15Heidegger and the Politics of the UniversityJournal 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
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44Transcendence and the Problem of Otherworldly Nihilism: Taylor, Heidegger, NietzscheInquiry: 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
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69On the advantages and disadvantages of reading Heidegger backwards: White's time and deathInquiry: 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
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947Heidegger, Art, and PostmodernityCambridge 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
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25Review 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
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15Review of Miguel de Beistegui, The New Heidegger (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (9). 2006.
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27Heidegger, Education, and ModernityRowman & 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
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158Iain 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
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132Ontotheology? Understanding Heidegger's destruktion of metaphysicsInternational 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
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66Heidegger on ontological education, or: How we become what we areInquiry: 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
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83The Silence of the Limbs: Critiquing Culture from a Heideggerian Understanding of the Work of ArtEnculturation 2 (1). 1998.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
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17Schönfeld, Martin. The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project (review)Review of Metaphysics 55 (2): 418-420. 2001.
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40In the future philosophy will be neither continental nor analytic but synthetic: Toward a promiscuous miscegenation of (all) philosophical traditions and stylesSouthern Journal of Philosophy 50 (2): 191-205. 2012.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