István Király V.

The analyses in the book investigate the possibilities and foundations of a completely new philosophy of history, although outlined in dialogue with M. Heidegger. The fundamental questions the author asks are: Why, wherefrom is there history? Why are we humans historical? Why is there historiography? Primarily and ultimately, the response to each of these questions is: because we are MORTAL. Accordingly, the first chapter tackles the possibilities and lays the foundations of an ontology of history. Built upon these, the second chapter analyses the being of the PAST and its existential characteristics – as NOT-BEING-ANY-MORE, as HAD-BEEN-NESS. Chapter three turns towards the FUTURE and analyses its existential characteristics as NOT-YET-BEING. Chapter four is an explicit return to the dialogue with Heidegger, which surfaces the main aspects of the essential belonging together of the fundaments and origins of philosophy and history. The Appendix is an applied philosophical research related to the previous subjects which examines the interlacements of DEATH and SECRET in the phenomenon of TERRORISM.

The book attempts to conceptualize the “ancient” issues of human death and human mortality in connection to the timely and vital subject of euthanasia. This subject forces the meditation to actually consider those ideological, ethical, deontological, legal, and metaphysical frameworks which guide from the very beginning any kind of approach to this question. This conception – in dialogue with Heideggerian fundamental ontology and existential analytics – reveals that, on the one hand, the concepts and ethics of death are originally determined by the ontology of death, and, on the other hand, that, on this account, the question of euthanasia can only be authentically discussed in the horizon of this ontology. It is only this that may reveal to whom dying – our dying – pertains, while it also reveals our relationship to euthanasia as a determined human potentiality or final possibility. Thus euthanasia is outlined in the analysis as the possibility of becoming a mortal on the one hand, while on the other hand it appears in relation to the particularities of its existential structure, which essentially differ from the existential and ontological structure of any other possibility of dying. This is why it should not be mixed up with, or mistaken for, any of these.

From the rather original recognition that Aristotle’s categories are questions, this essay focuses on issues of the pote (ποτέ), i.e., the question of the “When”, and of chronos (χρόνος), the “concept” of time. This “concept” is born from and associated with the question of the “When”. It is a hermeneutical and (existential)-ontological dialogue, enabling us to think jointly about the so-called “objectivity” of time and its ontological, phenomenological, and hermeneutical relatedness to ourselves. The APPENDIX is an ontological and existential analysis of the question: “What is man?”. It’s conclusion: that this question cannot, and indeed must not be given a definition-like answer, filled with information and facts. The “response” – and not “answer” – cor-responding to, can only be authentic and open if it claims that: Man is precisely that being who turns his own existence – in a questioning way, both for himself and “other” people, interrogating himself via his own world – into an event. The human and mode-of-being-like questions about the meaning of Being and about the possibility of “What is man?” actually overlap both in their horizons and in their amplitude and radicality.