Sidra Shahid

Paradigmatic perspectives on evil suggest that the presence of evil threatens the sense or intelligibility of the world by defeating our normative expectations. In this paper, I turn to Arendt, Améry, and Levinas to explore distinctive ways in which the relationship between evil and intelligibility can be understood. I argue that while Arendt’s account of radical evil problematically assumes that perpetrators evade (moral) comprehension, Arendt’s account of banal evil treats perpetrators as (morally) intelligible, and, as a result, makes evil morally tractable. In Arendt’s view, then, evil is intelligible. This, however, is not the final word on evil and intelligibility. A much-neglected way in which evil and intelligibility are related concerns how evil destroys the suffering subject’s ability to make sense of the world. In order to bring out this feature of evil, I put into dialogue Jean Améry’s first-person reports of his experiences of torture and internment, as chronicled in At the Mind’s Limits, with Emmanuel’s Levinas’s essay “Useless Suffering.” Reading Améry through Levinas reveals how suffering condemns the subject to sense-destroying isolation without recourse to intersubjective modes of sense-making. Together, Arendt, Améry, and Levinas reveal the distinctive ways in which the relationship between evil and intelligibility can be understood, whether we are considering the perpetrators of evil, victims, or spectators.

Central concepts of Heidegger’s later work emerge from his engagement with Hölderlin’s poetry. Therefore, commentators frequently take Hölderlin to be a patron of Heidegger's later philosophy. That Heidegger’s imaginative reading of Hölderlin is not exegetically faithful is well-known. In this paper, we critically appraise Heidegger’s engagement with Hölderlin on philosophical rather than exegetical grounds. We maintain that the ontology that can be derived from Hölderlin’s river poetry runs counter to Heidegger’s appropriation of these poems, which we show with respect to three main concepts: locality, journeying, and the distinction between “one's own” and the foreign. While Heidegger gives ontological priority to home, origins, and “one's own,” Hölderlin's philosophical vision of the “free use of one's own” does not prioritize these notions and instead remains radically open to the presence of the other. This, we argue, makes Hölderlin a philosophical opponent rather than a patron of Heidegger's thought.

Despite periods of resurgence over the last decades, it is safe to say that transcendental arguments no longer enjoy a prominent presence in the philosophical landscape. One reason for their declining prominence is the sustained suspicion that despite their self‐proclaimed metaphysical neutrality, transcendental arguments are, in fact, metaphysically committed. This paper aims to revive the discussion of transcendental considerations by offering a metaphysically neutral account of transcendental arguments. I argue that a metaphysically neutral conception of transcendental arguments requires a revision of two concepts constitutive of transcendental claims, namely, transcendental necessity and the a priori. I propose a transcendental reading of Wittgenstein's On Certainty, which, I maintain, provides us with an alternative, metaphysically neutral understanding of these concepts. Thus revised, transcendental claims are suitable for what Mark Sacks once described as the “post‐metaphysical” orientation of contemporary philosophy.

Despite the significant amount of debate that Merleau-Ponty’s work has seen over the years, it remains an unresolved issue whether his phenomenology offers what he announces as a ‘new definition of the a priori’. In this paper, I make a case in favor of his claim by clarifying his commitments to the a priori against two dominant lines of interpretation, naturalist and Kantian. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s view that the sciences themselves rely on the a priori method of Wesensschau establishes his basic commitment to apriority. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the a priori differs in important respects from the Kantian a priori and its transcendental idealist ramifications because, on his view, the subject is not the unique ground of constitution. Having tackled these obstacles to understanding Merleau-Ponty’s commitments to the a priori, I argue in light of his conception of ‘radical reflection’ that rather than being a static element of experience, the a priori stands in a dynamic relation with the a posteriori as a distinctive way of articulating structures of lived experience.

Contemporary accounts of evil attempt to identify features or properties that transform an act of wrongdoing into an act of evil. What is missing from the discussion, however, is a phenomenology of evil that engages with the standpoint of the subject that undergoes evil. This paper discusses basic themes for a phenomenology of evil through a critical comparison between Hannah Arendt and Jean Améry’s respective conceptions of evil. Central for this discussion is a claim Arendt and Améry share: evil destroys subjectivity and undermines trust in the world. Furthermore, both argue that the perpetrators of evil inhabit a distorted moral framework. They differ, however, insofar as Améry foregrounds the subject that undergoes evil, a standpoint that remains tacit in Arendt’s account. Recounting his torture by the Gestapo, Améry reveals how embodied subjects experiences evil and how it is in light of these experiences that perpetrators of evil should be understood.