Tobias Keiling

The article sketches two accounts of failure. On a broadly Aristotelian view, failure is conceived as the privation of success; on a view I call existential failure, failure and the capacity to begin anew are seen as explanatorily more basic than success. I distinguish three types of existential failure with regard to (i) individual existence, (ii) a cultural system, (iii) humanity as a whole. While the senses in which agents fail are different on each case, an underlying feature of failing in its different instances is its indirect affirmation of human freedom. To be free is to be capable of failure. I conclude by contrasting these two accounts with the scenario of human extinction. Is it a failure if our species ceases to exist? Drawing on Hans Jonas, I argue that here the contrast between excess and failure returns in a different form.

On May 19th, 1958, the day after Martin Heidegger and Shin’ichi Hisamatsu led a one-day colloquium in Freiburg on the topic of “Art and Thinking,” the two men came together to discuss the success of the colloquium. The conversation soon turned to the work of Paul Klee, the Swiss artist, and from there to the newest developments in Heidegger’s thinking about language. Heidegger had just presented some of this new thinking during his lecture on Stefan George’s poem “Das Wort” in Vienna a week earlier. Having attended the lecture in Vienna, Hisamatsu used the opportunity of the conversation to ask Heidegger for elaboration on this new thinking and to clarify connections between it and language in the Zen tradition. The conversation was transcribed and later published in volume 16 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe.

On May 18, 1958, Martin Heidegger led a one-day colloquium in Freiburg on the topic of “Art and Thinking” together with Shin’ichi Hisamatsu, the Japanese philosopher and Buddhist scholar. The protocol of the colloquium, published in volume 16 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, presents a conversation among the colloquium participants about art in the East Asian world. In this conversation, Heidegger is particularly interested in hearing from Hisamatsu about the conception of art present in the East Asian world prior to the introduction of Western aesthetic concepts and about the relationship between form and formlessness in East Asian aesthetics. The conversation allows Hisamatsu to clarify for the participants what he takes to be the most essential features of Zen art and how these features compare with those found in modern Western abstract art.

If one takes Heidegger at his word then his philosophy is about pursuing different "paths" of thought rather than defining a single set of truths. This volume gathers the work of an international group of scholars to present a range of ways in which Heidegger can be read and a diversity of styles in which his thought can be continued. Despite their many approaches to Heidegger, their hermeneutic orientation brings these scholars together. The essays span themes from the ontic to the ontological, from the specific to the speculative. While the volume does not aim to present a comprehensive interpretation of Heidegger's later thought, it covers much of the terrain of his later thinking and presents new directions for how Heidegger should and should not be read today. Scholars of Heidegger's later thought will find rich and original readings that expand considerations of Heidegger's entire oeuvre.

Heidegger’s discussion of the concept and the phenomenology of ‘world’ is defined by its dual meaning, referring to both the unity of a single, encompassing whole and a number of different meaning contexts, i.e., ‘worlds’ in the plural. Heidegger’s emphasis on the verbal meaning of world (‘worlding’) and the discussion of problems such as the ‘world entry’ of an entity articulate the tension and dynamic between these two meanings. This contribution develops Heidegger’s account by (i) elucidating Heidegger’s early and late discussion of ‘worlding’; (ii) connecting ‘worlding’ to the discussion of ontological pluralism in recent work by Kris McDaniel; and (iii) delineating a specific notion of a metaphysically neutral ‘phenomenological realism’ compatible with Heidegger’s version of ontological pluralism.

Der Raum ist ein eminent philosophisches Thema. Denn so selbstverstandlich es ist, dass wir in Raumen und im Raum leben, so unklar ist, was das bedeutet. Wie verhalten sich lebensweltliche Raume zu `dem Raum` uberhaupt? Gibt es bevorzugte Formen der Raumerfahrung? Wie verhalten sich Raum und Zeit zueinander? Was unterscheidet Nahe und Distanz, Bewegung und Aufenthalt?Die Beitrage des vorliegenden Bandes nahern sich der Philosophie des Raumes aus Richtung der Epistemologie, praktischen Philosophie und Asthetik. Dahinter steht die Uberzeugung, dass der Raum nicht allein ein Thema der theoretischen Philosophie sein sollte, sondern Raumphanomene in allen Bereichen der Philosophie relevant sind. Im Zusammenspiel von klassischen und gegenwartigen Positionen ergibt sich ein Uberblick uber die Moglichkeit, eines der unscheinbarsten Phanomene uberhaupt zu thematisieren. Mit Beitragen von: Diego D'Angelo, Jocelyn Benoist, Christian Bermes, Georg Bertram, Steven G. Crowell, David Espinet, Michael N. Forster, Markus Gabriel, Volker Gerhardt, Tobias Keiling, Ole Meinefeld, Nikola Mirkovi'c, Inga Romer, John Sallis, Alexander Schnel.

Theoretische Philosophie aus phänomenologischer Perspektive Das Verhältnis von Phänomenologie und Metaphysik ist ambivalent. Einerseits richtet sich phänomenologische Deskription gegen leere Spekulation. Andererseits betonen Husserl und seine Nachfolger die Möglichkeit einer kritischen Erneuerung der Metaphysik. Die zwanzig Beiträge dieses Kompendiums untersuchen das Problem einer phänomenologischen Metaphysik von Husserl bis in die Gegenwart und bieten so Antworten auf die Frage, was phänomenologische Metaphysik sein kann und sein sollte.

Phenomenology has primarily been concerned with questions about knowledge and ontology. However, in recent years the rise of interest and research in phenomenology and embodiment, the emotions and cognitive science has seen the concept of agency move to a central place in the study of phenomenology generally. The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Agency is an outstanding reference source to this topic and the first volume of its kind. It comprises twenty-seven chapters written by leading international contributors. Organised into two parts, the following key topics are covered: * major figures * the metaphysics of agency * rationality * voluntary and involuntary action * moral experience * deliberation and choice * phenomenology of agency and the cognitive sciences * phenomenology of freedom * embodied agency Essential reading for students and researchers in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and philosophy of cognitive science The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Agency will also be of interest to those in closely related subjects such as sociology and psychology.

Der Raum ist nicht alles, die Welt schon. Dieser Gedanke legt das Nachdenken über den Raum darauf fest, etwas in der Welt oder an der Welt zu sein: offenbar kein Gegenstand unter anderen, aber doch auch nur etwas, das an Gegenstän- den nicht so vorkommt, dass es deren Zugehörigkeit zum Ganzen der Welt de- nierte. Räumlich zu sein ist, folgt man dieser Überlegung, lediglich ein Aspekt der Zugehörigkeit zur Welt unter anderen. Es gibt andere kategorial-phänomen- ale Charakteristika, die nicht weniger ausmachen, was es heißt, zur Welt zu ge- hören. Über den Raum nachzudenken, heißt dann, die Welt und das Wirkliche nur in einer Hinsicht zum Thema zu machen.

Heidegger’s understanding of technology advances a conceptual critique of what he calls “the enframing” (Gestell), the epistemological and ontological presuppositions underlying technology. Reconstructing the central argument of Country Path Conversation (1945), the chapter focuses the positive contrast to “the enframing” Heidegger finds in the idea of Gelassenheit (“releasement”): releasement defines a form of life marked by an intellectual independence from technology achieved through a specific form of thinking. Drawing from Haugeland, section 1 establishes “enabling” as genuine sense of the German verb lassen (to let); in contrast to the form of thinking determinative of technology, which Heidegger describes as imposing, the “released” and genuine form of human thinking is an enabling thinking. In sections 2 and 3, I reconstruct the reductio ad absurdum Heidegger uses to distance this form of thinking from forms of transcendental philosophy embracing (mediational) representationalism. In section 4, I highlight the (ontic) correlate of such thinking, namely the individual things (Dinge) manifest outside the horizon of understanding presupposed by technology. Not based on or anticipating any positive ontology, I argue that “enabling” thinking is ontologically non-committal. Section 5 contrasts this understanding of Gelassenheit with views advanced by Dreyfus, Rojcewicz, Belu, and Feenberg.

Heidegger’s later philosophy is marked by two conflicting claims about phenomenology. On the one hand, phenomenology and philosophy generally is tasked with “responding to the claim of what is to be thought” in a novel and unprecedented manner. On the other hand, Heidegger recognizes that there have been earlier attempts at thus doing justice to phenomena; in the ontological commitments of earlier thinkers, Heidegger finds accounts of the “things themselves,” each of which has different implications for what phenomenology should concern itself with. Phenomenology, as Heidegger conceives it, should thus both incorporate the history of philosophy and exceed it, yet it is unclear how these ideas can be reconciled. This chapter calls this problem the “dilemma of the historicity of phenomenology” and identifies different versions of it in Heidegger’s works after 1935/6.

This paper discusses the notion of a thing in Heidegger. Its aim is to explain the systematic place of that notion in Heidegger’s thought in relation to his ontological discourse: as what is explained through different understandings of being, things allow for a simultaneous differentiation and discussion of the different epochs in the so-called history of being. Thus a henomenology of things and thingness serves as frame of reference for all explications of ‘what there is.’ If Heidegger is a realist, it is not because he attributes reality to all that is, but rather because all explanations of being refer back to how things are discovered as meaningful.

One of the most prominent notions in Heidegger’s thinking about art is that of the earth. This paper probes the phenomenological potential of Heidegger’s concept by turning to the work of contemporary British artist Andy Goldsworthy. Drawing from Heidegger’s theoretical writings as well as his analysis of a poem by C.F. Meyer in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and his 1936–37 seminar on Schiller, I show that Goldsworthy’s sculptural art exemplifies different phenomenal traits of the “earth.” To supplement Heidegger’s discussion, both Husserl’s claim that the earth defines the “spatiality of nature” and the role of the earth in Hegel’s philosophy of nature are taken into account.

Die Engführung von Muße und theoretischem Tun, die Aristoteles paradigmatisch in der Nikomachischen Ethik entwickelt, hat eine Vor- und eine lange Nachgeschichte bis in die gegenwärtige Philosophie und Theologie hinein. Begründet wird die Engführung von Muße und Theorie bei Aristoteles anthropologisch, weil sich in einer kontemplativen Lebensform die Möglichkeiten der menschlichen Natur auf vollendete Weise verwirklichen. Die Beiträge in diesem Band untersuchen ideengeschichtliche Modelle einer Verbindung von Theorie und Muße daraufhin, wie diese sich zur Frage einer anthropologischen Fundierung der Theorie verhalten. Sie fragen nach der Anthropologie der Theorie.

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 3, pp 406 - 428 Interpretations of the so-called _Black Notebooks_ have emphasized the interaction between Heidegger’s philosophy, particularly his notion of a “history of being”, on the one hand, and his affiliation with National Socialism and his anti-Semitic views on the other. The paper proposes to understand this interaction as in part determined by the inherent logic of Heidegger’s ontological reasoning: Heidegger takes power, violence and brutality as the key for understanding his present day and turns to these phenomena as confirmation of the ontology he envisages at the time. But the notes published so far, ranging from 1931 to 1948, document Heidegger’s incapacity to assign to the events of these years a plausible position in his ontology. This failure deepens a trauma both personal and philosophical. Rather than reject the notion of a history of being altogether, I propose an alternative understanding of its logic motivated by Heidegger’s failure to bring his ontological project to the anticipated completion.