Simon Skempton

This article is an inquiry into how the relationship between the principle of non-contradiction and the limits of thought has been understood by thinkers as diverse as Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, and Graham Priest. While Heidegger and Levinas focus on the question of temporality and Priest takes a formal approach, all these philosophers effectively maintain that the principle of non-contradiction imposes a restriction on thought that disables it from adequately accounting for its own limits and thus what lies beyond those limits, the implication being that the violation of the principle is necessary for such an accounting to take place. However, the ultimate argument here is that, contrary to Priest’s interpretation, Hegel’s philosophy can be convincingly read as supporting the idea that the mind’s ability to go beyond any particular limit of thought can actually be said to involve an adherence to a normative demand to locate and dispel the contradictions that emerge through the very setting of determinative limits. This is a non-formal consistency that evinces a “logic” that is unknowingly followed by the Heideggerian and Levinasian phenomenological philosophies of transcendence.

This article proposes a new interpretation of the ontological significance of the Biblical statement ‘I am that I am’ that focuses on the relationship between the Heideggerian notion of the being that is beyond all entities and the German Idealist concern with the irreducibility of subjectivity. This focus is put forward as an effective way of philosophically elaborating what are argued to be the twin aspects of the statement—the being that transcends predication, and an irreducibly first person ontology. This elaboration is performed by discussing the way in which these two themes have been approached at certain pertinent points in the history of metaphysics. With regard to the theme of transcendent being, an overview of the medieval Scholastic debates on the issue precedes a direct discussion of the Heideggerian position. As for the theme of the irreducibility of first person ontology, an overview of the relevant theories of the various German Idealist philosophers precedes a direct engagement with what Heidegger has to say on this issue. The overall argument here is that it is possible coherently to conceive of the pure being that transcends all entities in terms of the ‘I’ of an absolute subject without eliding the difference between being and entities, without succumbing to what Heidegger regards as an onto-theological oblivion of being

Hegel’s distinction between the bad and true infinites has provoked contrasting reactions in the works of Alain Badiou and Graham Priest. Badiou claims that Hegel illegitimately attempts to impose a distinction that is only relevant to the qualitative realm onto the quantitative realm. He suggests that Cantor’s mathematical account of infinite multiplicities that are determinate and actual remains an endlessly proliferating bad infinite when placed within Hegel’s faulty schema. In contrast, Priest affirms the Hegelian true infinite, claiming that Cantor’s formal mechanisms of boundary transcendence, such as ‘diagonalization’, are implicit in Hegel’s dialectic. While arguing that a clear dividing line can be drawn here between these two interpretations of the relationship between Hegel and Cantor, this paper also mounts a defence of the Hegelian true infinite by developing Priest’s suggestion that Cantorian diagonalizing functions are prefigured by Hegel’s dialectical overcoming of limits.

This article argues that theories which regard the mind as merely a form of information processing are guilty of a fallacious conflation of the informational contents of consciousness with consciousness itself, with the consciousness of those contents. Such theories lie behind the thought that a consciousness could be transferred or uploaded onto a substrate other than the brain it initially occurred in. It is argued here that the ontology of information is that of a formal structure that can be instantiated in physical reality innumerable times, whereas the ontology of consciousness is that of an irreducibly singular subjective experience of being alive.