•  3
    Heidegger on thinking
    Cambridge University Press. 2024.
    Every philosophy is a celebration of the fact that being can be thought, that the world around us yields to concepts that join together into arguments which can lead us to new thoughts and new ways of thinking. Heidegger's great talent was to never lose his philosophical wonder at philosophy, to never stop thinking about thinking. Heidegger's early work favors a somewhat pragmatic view of thinking as organized by and around our projects, emphasizing tacit skills over articulate conscious thinkin…Read more
  •  28
    Derrida’sGiven Time: I. Counterfeit Moneyis one of his most celebrated works, though Volume II only came out in French in 2021. Volume I ends with Session Five of the seminar while Volume II opens with Seven, with Session Six only seeing the light of day in early 2024. My essay explains this missing session and goes into some detail examining the relationship of Derrida’s project to Kant, briefly mentioned a few times in Volume I, as well as to some of Derrida’s own earlier essays. As Given Time…Read more
  •  48
    Nietzsche’s Eternal Return (ER) is interpreted in many ways, including by him. I present it as a hermeneutic device, a way of reading texts, especially those whose influence threatens one’s authorial autonomy and/or are later difficult to take ownership of due to philosophical growth. It returns past texts with new interpretations, similar to the way ER leads one to embrace one’s past without changing anything, which radically changes everything from a resented painful burden into a celebrated e…Read more
  • Later essays and seminars
    In Francois Raffoul & Eric S. Nelson (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 249. 2013.
  • The relationship between anti-realism and epistemology, a much discussed topic in analytic philosophy, has also been central to continental thought. My analysis follows the development of this theme, showing how post-modernism emerges as the fitting conclusion of a coherent evolution. Kant opens the issue by claiming that many features of reality which seem independent of human experience are actually contributed by us. The stability and intelligibility of reality, i.e. the possibility of inters…Read more
  •  30
    The Pursuit of an Authentic Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Everyday by David Egan
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 58 (4): 828-829. 2020.
    The odyssey of twentieth-century philosophy has produced a number of ventures to find a way between the Scylla of continental and Charybdis of analytic philosophy. The pairing of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, arguably the greatest figures of each tradition, has been a particularly strong siren song to many on this quest, who have approached it from different angles.Egan uses Heidegger's explicit discussion of authenticity in his early work to bring out a similar idea implicit in Wittgenstein's lat…Read more
  •  17
    This is a Reader's Guide to the most important and influential essays of Heidegger's later work, crucial to an understanding of his philosophy as a whole.Martin Heidegger is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. His later writings are profoundly original and innovative, giving rise to much of postmodernist thinking, yet they are infamously difficult to approach. "Heidegger's Later Writings: A Reader's Guide" offers a concise and accessible introduction to eight of Heidegge…Read more
  •  27
    Review of Bret W. Davis (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (3). 2010.
  •  39
    Robert C. Scharff has written what we might call, after Nietzsche, a timely meditation. It is timely in that it is aimed at our particular time , and it is a meditation on timeliness, on what it means to do philosophy within time and history . These two topics meet in his depiction of our time as one that is either not fully aware of or that actively suppresses its own timeliness, its own determination by its time and historical context, due largely to analytic philosophy’s remaining caught in t…Read more
  •  22
    Martin Heidegger is among the most important philosophers of the Twentieth Century. Within the continental tradition, almost every great figure has been deeply influenced by his work. For this reason, a full understanding of the course of modern philosophy is impossible without at least a basic grasp of Heidegger. Unfortunately, his work is notoriously difficult, both because of his innovative ideas and his difficult writing style. In this compelling book, Lee Braver cuts through the jargon to p…Read more
  •  56
    Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are two of the most important--and two of the most difficult--philosophers of the twentieth century, indelibly influencing the course of continental and analytic philosophy, respectively. In _ Groundless Grounds_, Lee Braver argues that the views of both thinkers emerge from a fundamental attempt to create a philosophy that has dispensed with everything transcendent so that we may be satisfied with the human. Examining the central topics of their thought …Read more
  •  21
    Leading philosophers and scholars speculate on what Heidegger's unfinished masterpiece might have said, why Heidegger didn't publish it, and what being actually means.
  •  179
    A brief history of continental realism
    Continental Philosophy Review 45 (2): 261-289. 2012.
    This paper explains the nature and origin of what I am calling Transgressive Realism, a middle path between realism and anti-realism which tries to combine their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses. Kierkegaard created the position by merging Hegel’s insistence that we must have some kind of contact with anything we can call real (thus rejecting noumena), with Kant’s belief that reality fundamentally exceeds our understanding; human reason should not be the criterion of the real. The resul…Read more
  •  50
    At a time when the analytic/continental split dominates contemporary philosophy, this ambitious work offers a careful and clear-minded way to bridge that divide. Combining conceptual rigor and clarity of prose with historical erudition, A Thing of This World shows how one of the standard issues of analytic philosophy—realism and anti-realism—has also been at the heart of continental philosophy. Using a framework derived from prominent analytic thinkers, Lee Braver traces the roots of anti-realis…Read more