S. McGrath

Drawing an analogy with Kant, Carman argues that Being and Time is a transcendental analytic of the hermeneutic conditions of the possibility of intelligible experience. In defense of this thesis Carman makes a well-stated case for the implementation of the phenomenological attitude in the philosophy of mind. Against thinkers like Daniel Dennett, who insist on interpreting consciousness as a thing among things, Carman argues that intentionality, the defining feature of consciousness, can be properly accessed only as it shows itself, that is, from within intentional experience itself. This leads to a solid critique of contemporary analytic interpretations of intentionality, whether objectivistic or subjectivistic. Intentionality is neither objectively explicable nor merely subjective; the phenomenon shows the inadequacy of the objective/subjective distinction. This, according to Carman, is the main contribution of Being and Time: intentionality is only possible on the grounds of an a priori belonging to the world. Being and Time’s archeology of the “situatedness” of understanding breaks with Husserl’s naive Cartesian approach to consciousness, for it shows how the human being always understands things in historical contexts: first, the pragmatic contexts of everyday human activities; second, the social contexts of received beliefs and interpretations. It follows that the analytic of Dasein is utterly unlike the investigation of any natural phenomenon; it requires a sensitivity to historicity typically foreign to metaphysics.

The early Schelling and the romantics constructed the unconscious in order to overcome the modern split between subjectivity and nature, mind and body, a split legislated by Cartesian representationalism. Influenced by Boehme and Kabbalah, the later Schelling modified his notion of the unconscious to include the decision to be oneself, which must sink beneath consciousness so that it might serve as the ground of one's creative and personal acts. Slavoj Zizek has read the later Schelling's unconscious as a prototype of Lacan's reactive unconscious, an unconscious that only exists as the excluded other of consciousness. This reading, though close to the text of Schelling, misses something essential: the unconscious for Schelling is not a repression but a condition of the possibility of life and love.

Building on recent research exposing Hegel’s debt to esoteric Christianity (both Gnostic and Hermetic traditions), the aim of this paper is to show how Hegel and Schelling resolve an ambiguity in Boehme’s theology of evil in opposing ways. Jacob Boehme’s notion of the individuation of God through the overcoming ofopposition is the central paradigm for both Hegel’s and Schelling’s understanding of the role of evil in the life of God. Boehme remains ambiguous on the question of the modality of evil: Is it necessary to God’s self-unfolding, or is it rather an anarchic act that God permits in the interest of preserving the autonomy of finite freedom? If the former, Boehme becomes much more closely aligned to Gnosticism by identifying finitude with evil. This identification is shown to be exactly Hegel’s solution to the ambiguity, one Hegel opts for in the interest of maintaining the absolute rationality of the system. Hermeticism opposes Gnosticism on this point: for the Hermeticist, finitude / material being / nature is not evil but ‘of God,’ the means of his individuation. This conflict in interpretations of Boehmeilluminates an often overlooked but essential difference between Gnosticism and Hermeticism. Schelling remains faithful to the Hermetic tradition by sacrificing system for the sake of preserving the contingency of evil, and disidentifying finitude and evil.

While scholars have generally agreed that the Cynegetica, a didactic epic in four books from the third century CE falsely ascribed to Oppian of Cilicia, are missing their ending, the structural implications of this loss are rarely considered seriously. This article brings together all available evidence (or lack thereof) from the poem itself and the secondary tradition about the intended scope of the Cynegetica. It argues that the Cynegetica were probably never completed, with the final 29 lines being a blueprint of an unfinished product, and that the Cynegetica were most likely conceived with a five book structure in mind.

Schelling has been exploited for a variety of psychoanalytical projects, from Marquard’s revision of Freud, to various readings of Jung, to Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan. What we have not seen is an elaboration of the psycho-therapeutical implications of Schelling’s metaphysics on its own terms. What we find when we read Schelling as metapsychologist is a nonpathologizing theory of dissociation. Like anything that lives, the psyche dissociates for the sake of growth. The law of productive dissociation is the source of psyche’s adaptive power and an explanation of the structure of its illnesses

This paper explores the possible therapeutical applications of Schellingian psychological principles. A Schellingian analysis would enable us to retrieve the largely forgotten heritage of Romantic psychiatry, in particular the dissociationist model of the psyche, which was strategically rejected by Freud and somewhat clumsily revised by Jung, but which has its own intelligibility and applicability. Schellingian analysis would be dissociationist rather than repressivist, and would depart from Freud and Jung in being both a metaphysical and a moral therapy. But the open-ended eschatological nature of the model of the psyche employed would prevent the therapy from dogmatizing or moralizing the inner life of the analysand

I argue against current deflationary trends in Schelling scholarship that positive philosophy is not negative philosophy by other means but exceeds it in content and form. While nature-philosophy gives to positive philosophy the means to think the positive, the latter is not “natural” but revealed. I situate the turn to the positive in Schelling’s 1809 Freedom essay, which introduces the possibility of a real distinction between nature and God for the first time in Schelling’s thought, a possibility which becomes actual in the positive philosophy as the difference between creation and its creator. Without this distinction revelation is a meaningless concept.

Against the prevalent trend in eco-criticism which is to deny the human difference, I summon a set of untimely tropes from metaphysics in the interest of advancing an ecological humanism: the difference in kind between human consciousness and animal sensibility; the uniquely human capacity for moral discernment; and the human being’s peculiar freedom from the material conditions of existence. While I agree with eco-critics who argue that anthropocenic nature is not only finite, but sick: sickened by our abuse and neglect, I disagree that this abuse is simply a result of insisting on the human difference, nor is species egalitarianism the way forward. On the contrary, the eco-collapse, referred to as the sixth great extinction event, is the consequence of a general disavowal of the human’s special call to take responsibility for the relation between the human and the non-human, and only a re-awakening of this responsibility can restore health to anthropocenic nature. The non-human cannot effect this restoration, for that is not its vocation. A difference in vocation is not necessarily a difference in moral worth, and so the human difference does not justify denying the “intrinsic value” of the non-human. Humanity is uniquely responsible both for the mess we are in and for cleaning it up.

The extent of the influence of Augustine on Heidegger, long only indicated in a few notes in Being and Time, has come into focus with the publicationof Heidegger’s earliest lectures. Far from one among many sources upon which Heidegger draws, we now know that Augustine’s Confessions is a central source of concepts for the early Heidegger. While this is further evidence of the ongoing relevance of Augustine to contemporary philosophy, it does not necessarily makeHeidegger an Augustinian thinker. The question of the degree to which Heidegger’s philosophy is compatible with Augustine’s theology is the subject of a recentlypublished volume of papers, The Influence of Augustine on Heidegger. While the editor, Craig de Paulo, proclaims the advent of an “Augustinian phenomenology”founded upon Heidegger, several contributors exhibit more caution, pointing out important divergences between Heidegger—whom no one would call a Christian—and Augustine. The author sides with the skeptics, reading Heidegger as in fact a subversion of Augustine. Heidegger reverses Augustine’s central insight, that the restless heart is intentionally structured, directed toward union with God. Heidegger’s anxiety in the face of death has no intentional term; it is self-reflective,Augustinian agitation without that which agitates it

In the academic year 1920-1921 at the University of Freiburg, Martin Heidegger gave a series of extraordinary lectures on the phenomenological significance of the religious thought of St. Paul and St. Augustine. The publication of these lectures in 1995 settled a long disputed question, the decisive role played by Christian theology in the development of Heidegger’s philosophy. The lectures present a special challenge to readers of Heidegger and theology alike. Experimenting with language and drawing upon a wide range of now obscure authors, Heidegger is finding his way to Being and Time through the labyrinth of his Catholic past and his increasing fascination with Protestant theology. A Companion to Heidegger's Phenomenology of Religious Life is written by an international team of Heidegger specialists

In this paper we present a model of vocational education and training (VET) that can be used to guide decisions relating to VET in Africa today. This model takes the critique of the neoclassical, neoliberal model of VET as its starting point. Guided by Bhaskar's Critical Naturalism, we use immanent critique to consider the adequacy of proposed alternatives to the neoclassical approach, such as: the heterodox approach, which foregrounds explanations based on human capital and political economy; and Hodgson and Spours' social ecosystem model, which addresses some of the limitations of the heterodox account by including, social and ecosystem elements. Finally, we offer a version of the social ecosystem model that, according to our analysis, explains more of the empirical evidence than previous models. Our version of the social ecosystem model differs from earlier versions in terms of its explicit reference to the critical realist ideas of position- practices and emergence.

The early Freiburg lectures have shown us the degree to which Heidegger is influenced by Luther. In Being and Time, Heidegger designs a philosophy that can co-exist with a radical Lutheran theology of revelation. Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity constitutes a polemic with the Scholastic idea of a natural desire for God and an accommodation of a theology of revelation. However, Heidegger’s implicit assent to the Lutheran concept of God-forsakenness is philosophically problematic. To be God-forsaken is not to be ignorant of God; it is to be abandoned by God, to have a history of dealing with God that has resulted in a decisive rupture and distance. But if this is a theological position, as Luther would be the first to argue, it can be justified only theologically.

In his 1916 _Habilitationsschrift Heidegger enriched Husserl's notion of categorial intuition with Scotus's theory of intellection. The individual is entirely intelligible, even if its intelligibility is never fully defined. The historically singularized thing (essence modified by _haecceitas) speaks a primal word to us, and this original verbum makes possible the inner word of understanding, the _verbum interius. Heidegger argues that if the thing is actually intelligible in its singularity, history cannot be disregarded as ineffable: it becomes a domain of fore-theoretical experience, which exhibits its own proper understandability, one that eludes the objectifications of judgment

Against the prevalent trend in eco-criticism which is to deny the human difference, I summon a set of untimely tropes from metaphysics in the interest of advancing an ecological humanism: the difference in kind between human consciousness and animal sensibility; the uniquely human capacity for moral discernment; and the human being’s peculiar freedom from the material conditions of existence. While I agree with eco-critics who argue that anthropocenic nature is not only finite, but sick: sickened by our abuse and neglect, I disagree that this abuse is simply a result of insisting on the human difference (“anthropocentrism”), nor is species egalitarianism the way forward. On the contrary, the eco-collapse, referred to as the sixth great extinction event, is the consequence of a general disavowal of the human’s special call to take responsibility for the relation between the human and the non-human, and only a re-awakening of this responsibility can restore health to anthropocenic nature. The non-human cannot effect this restoration, for that is not its vocation. A difference in vocation is not necessarily a difference in moral worth, and so the human difference does not justify denying the “intrinsic value” of the non-human. Humanity is uniquely responsible both for the mess we are in and for cleaning it up.