Francesco Gandellini

It is widely believed that transcendental philosophy is incompatible with naturalism. Historically, the decline of the former has coincided with the rise of the latter, or so the story goes. I contend that we must revise this story. To show this, I shed some much-needed light on a quite neglected historical case in which transcendental philosophy and naturalism are harmoniously combined, namely Stanley Cavell's distinctive view of ordinary language philosophy. First, I explain in what sense Cavell's approach embodies a form of transcendentalism that transforms Kant's original project. I then examine the naturalism that Cavell's approach, unlike Kant's, integrates, and argue that it dovetails with the approach's transcendental ambitions. Finally, I indicate briefly why Cavell's naturalized transcendentalism is worthy of attention from both transcendentalists and naturalists.

ABSTRACT Filippo Casati’s Heidegger and the Contradiction of Being sheds new and significant light on the intricate philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The book traces Heidegger’s struggle with what he calls the ‘question of Being’ from the philosopher’s early writings up to his late production, where Casati locates Heidegger’s dialetheic apporoach toward the paradox(es) that the question elicits. In my paper, I do not challenge Casati’s interpretation. Instead, I focus on something that the latter leaves unaddressed, namely the relationship between the metaphysical status of entities and their intelligibility. I argue that Heidegger’s commitment to a strong version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason entails that the two cannot be separated and treated apart, with consequences that affect Casati’s main contentions in the book.

This paper intends to offer a new assessment of the “Ontological Difference” (OD), one of Martin Heidegger’s mainstays, in the light of the metaphysical view called “dialetheism”. In the first paragraph I briefly summarize the main argument of Heidegger’s contradiction of Being, where OD is present as a premise. In the second paragraph I introduce dialetheism, indicate two kinds of dialetheic solutions to the paradox and explain why they face comeback troubles from OD. The third paragraph is devoted to a review of Heidegger’s uses of OD and underlines the crucial role of negation in it. In the fourth paragraph I investigate the philosopher’s account of negation and show similarities with the account provided by the paraconsistent logic called “Logic of Paradox”. The fifth paragraph puts forward two possible readings of OD, the first based on the classical notion of negation and the second on the notion of negation pointed out in the previous paragraph. The second reading is proved suitable for dialetheists and in accordance with the exegesis of some textual passages from Heidegger’s late works.