Katherine Davies

In his late work, Martin Heidegger explores the questions of “space” and “place” as fundamentally interrelated through the body. Though often read as a preeminent philosopher of time, spatiality and place nevertheless became significant for his thinking of being. Scholars have demonstrated that after Being and Time, “place” and “space” became more prominent as Heidegger moved beyond the methodological and ontological priority of time in the Dasein analytic. On my reading, the (sculptural) body becomes illustrative of the late Heidegger’s nuanced thinking of “place” and “space,” situated in relation to the history of metaphysics. Although these terms have come to be metaphysically defined in their opposition, for Heidegger, a poetic sense of this history will instead enact a conversation between “place” and “space” that opens new possibilities for bodily being in the atomic age.

The distinction between “knowing” and “thinking” has been of enormous significance for philosophers working in the phenomenological tradition. What implications might this distinction hold in the emerging age of AI? This essay considers this question by exploring what makes the human being unique in the history of Western philosophy through the work of Plato, Kant, Arendt, and Heidegger. What these philosophers discern is that the human being—simultaneously the subject and object of humanities research—is certainly a knower of facts about the material world, but she is also capable of thinking about what does not exist. The human being can consider the meaning of ‘nothingness,’ concretized in the embodied, existential condition of being-toward-death. This spurns the capacity of human thought to interrupt extant patterns of knowing with critical questions about what does not (yet) exist. Such an interruptive impulse constitutes the core of the ethical character of the human being as well as her creative, imaginative potential. Her dual responsibility to take account of both what exists through “knowing” and what does not exist through “thinking” radically distinguishes the human being from AI in its incredible technological capacity to (only) know and reassemble facts about the world that already exist. In short, AI may tempt us to substitute our responsibility to “think” with its expansive capacity to “know,” but this would constitute a grave misstep. Instead, in this rapidly evolving technological terrain, we must acknowledge both what AI can do as well as what it cannot accomplish, so that we remain responsive to the task of being human in its ethical and creative registers.

Surviving the family policing system—too often mischaracterized as “foster care” or “child welfare”—engenders a fluency in making-kin in the wake of state efforts to unmake such bonds. The sanctioned family separations that this system realizes affect some disproportionately and leave others relatively untouched. In actualizing racializing processes, the family policing system indexes one of the myriad afterlives of reproductive slavery in the United States. In this short chapter, I briefly summarize the racial history of this system, which is calibrated to target gendered parenting practices and offers what could be described as carceral conditions of “care” for the children it claims to protect. Family policing is energized through the regulative ideal of the heteronormative, documented, resourced, white, nuclear family form, which federal and state policies have long aimed to reproduce as such. I argue that the “family” is produced as a disciplinary technology of a biopower that shatters some kinship bonds and reinforces others. A recent resurgence in queer and feminist calls for family abolition uncovers the links between the state and the idealized family form that engender the violence subsidized by family policing. The practices of making-kin that survivors of this system enact reveal the possibilities for relationalities beyond the exclusionary logics of the family and violent state efforts to police our bonds with each other.

Throughout his career, Drew Hyland has demonstrated a remarkable attunement to the philosophical importance of conversation. Dialogue aims to open up thinking beyond solipsism and to invite distinct and situated others into the collaborative elucidation of a series of questions. In this chapter, I offer a reading of Hyland’s masterful work on Plato’s Dialogues and Heidegger’s Conversations in which I argue Hyland’s hermeneutic sensitivity and ethical commitment to preserving alterity—as the very precondition of philosophy—is found.

Gloria Anzaldúa’s work has—not without cause—been brought into conversation with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature. For Deleuze and Guattari, minor literature has three characteristics: “the deterritorialization of the language, the connection of the individual and the political, [and] the collective arrangement of utterance.” Pursuing a sense that Kafka—as a Czech Jew writing in German—is a writer of minor literature, Deleuze and Guattari read his work as realizing “the revolutionary conditions of any literature.” Kafka does this, they argue, through his creative deployment of the German language circulating within his particular community. It seems Anzaldúa is also engaged in the practice of writing minor literature. The political importance of the relation between the geography from and languages in which she writes are centrally significant to her work. She is writing from South Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, often in languages that only recently have had purchase in the Americas. Writing as a queer Chicana woman, Anzaldúa is engaged with political efforts to resist a myriad of forms of patriarchal, heteronormative, racial, and colonial oppression. Finally, Anzaldúa’s work is explicitly collective. Not only are plural pronouns replete across her work, but the notion of “nos/otras” permeates her theory of identity, challenging any strong distinction between the individual and the collective. For these reasons, Anzaldúa’s writing may seem to be a minor literature. However, I argue such an assessment obfuscates the revolutionary significance of Anzaldúa’s writing.

Death is a philosophical centerpiece of Heidegger’s thinking. Yet, as Hannah Arendt was first to show, his approach to death undergoes a radical shift over the course of his career. His earlier articulation of an “authentic being-toward-death” as Dasein’s ownmost, nonrelational, indefinite, and insuperable possibility gives way to his later depiction of human beings as the “mortals” who find themselves always already in relation to the fourfold. What occasions this shift? This chapter explores how Heidegger’s encounter with Antigone may illuminate his changing thinking of death. For Heidegger, Antigone “is the purest poem herself” and his interpretation unfolds how and why she is supremely “uncanny” in this way. Heidegger does not substantially pursue the question of Antigone’s relation to her own death and the deaths of those around her. Following several scholars’ provocations, I interrogate the role of Antigone’s gender in Sophocles’ play and how it relates to the death of the woman whose very name means “against birth.” Antigone’s entanglements with others and her acknowledgement of belonging to and with them preclude figuring her life and death on the individual, existential analysis of being-towards-death from Being and Time. Rather, Antigone’s death is predicated upon the later Heideggerian understanding of human beings as “mortals,” that is, as beings who, according to Arendt, occasion “remembrance—the way living mortals think of their dead.” Refiguring the question of death as a communal phenomenon may even align Heidegger’s late thinking of death with Judith Butler’s work on the intersection of queerness and death, in part occasioned by Butler’s own reading of Antigone as a “queer heroine.” Where Butler understands Antigone’s refusal to submit to rigid gender categories in determining to grieve her brother as an instance of her “queerness,” Heidegger describes her as “τὸ δεινόν,” perhaps suggesting a resonance of its own between their views.

Three new conversational texts appeared with the 2025 publication of volume 104 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe. This article introduces these conversations to an anglophone Heidegger studies readership and situates their profound dramatic and thematic interrelations with Heidegger’s previously published conversational texts. A significant concern of his work, Heidegger’s thinking of Gespräch stretches from at least the 1930s through the 1950s. Additionally, recent research has demonstrated its profound importance in the “Four Notebooks” material—drafts and notes for a book project Heidegger ultimately abandoned. Building upon this scholarship, this article offers an interpretation of the new conversations of GA 104 through exploring the significance of the figure of the Stranger in each text.

Between 1944 and 1954, Heidegger wrote five dialogues – or conversations – that stage philosophical discussions. I argue these texts develop a yet unacknowledged Heideggerian pedagogy of conversation. From the characters he conjures to the topics of their discussions, Heidegger underscores the importance of teaching and learning differently in each conversation and shapes his own pedagogical sensibility. Each text uniquely elaborates a particular element of his pedagogy, including the importance of attending to attunement, making mistakes, coming together in community, poetic interpretation, and the dangers of conversational language itself. Only in reading the conversations together does Heidegger’s conversational pedagogy emerge. Above all, the teacher must resist assuming an authoritative role with her students; the Heideggerian teacher must learn to silently gesture toward the locale of the question-worthy by preserving its alterity.

Ciudad Cayalá in Guatemala brands itself as the country’s first private city. I turn to Hannah Arendt to show how and why Cayalá does not and cannot provide the space of appearance she argues is needed to support the possibility of political action. I show how Arendt provides two apparently distinct phenomenological accounts in The Human Condition—one historically-oriented and the other politically-oriented—that articulate how Cayalá fails in its aspiration to privatize the political. Yet the apparent divergence between her accounts raises concern about her relevance for liberatory feminist projects. To demonstrate how and why Arendt’s political phenomenology is aligned with certain feminist aims, I also generate a Cayaláian reading of Arendt to demonstrate the coherence of her two phenomenological accounts through interpreting her thinking by way of Cayalá’s architecture. This article enacts a dialogue between Arendt and Cayalá, mediated by feminist and architectural theory, concerning why efforts toward the privatization of cities will fail.

Dialogue, as a philosophical form, enables the exploration of the conditions, limits, and consequences of understanding arguments. Two philosophers who undertook to write dialogues—Plato and Heidegger—feature moments in philosophical conversation in which understanding, on its own, fails to convince an interlocutor of an argument. In this article, I examine the philosophical stakes of the collisions which unfold in Plato’s Gorgias, between Socrates and Callicles, and in Heidegger’s “Triadic Conversation,” between the Guide and the Scientist. Plato’s Socrates is ostensibly unsuccessful in persuading Callicles to adopt his position while Heidegger’s Guide is able to support the Scientist in learning a new way of thinking. I argue that it is Heidegger’s attention to feeling as a philosophically significant phenomenon which can overcome trans-rational resistance which may persist even after truth has been determined.

In the 1920s and 30s, Heidegger developed three explicit readings of Plato’s Phaedrus. These readings emphasize different dimensions of Plato’s dialogue and, at times, seem even to contradict one another. Though Heidegger pursues quite different interpretations of the dialogue, he remains steadfast in praising this Platonic dialogue above all others. I argue that these explicit readings provide fertile ground for reconsidering Heidegger’s engagement with Plato and not just with Platonism. I further develop an argument that a fourth, implicit reading of Phaedrus can be found in Heidegger’s own dialogical text from the late 1940s, “das abendländische Gespräch”. I suggest that it is in this conversational text, where Plato’s name is never once mentioned, that Heidegger manages his most authentic engagement with the Platonic dialogue and with Plato himself.