Walter Brogan

This essay argues that the fundamental premise of Aristotle’s political philosophy is that free citizens are those who rule and are ruled in turn. The virtuous community sustains a mean between these two dimensions of political life, and the decadent regime errs by excess or deficiency from this ideal. Aristotle sees the production and exercise of law as essential to preserve the continuity of the arrangements between citizens. In the production of law, the process of ruling together is best exemplified, and, at the same time, the citizens give themselves over to be ruled by the principles that have been laid down. Since living well is carried out in the realm of the political, we have to learn how to express our life in relationship to the whole that is shared with others. The life of law is achieved when the citizens become lawful.

Purpose. This dissertation aims to open up an avenue for understanding the relation between the thinking of Aristotle and that of Martin Heidegger. This entails a radical re-thinking of Aristotle's thought as the fulfillment of the Greek experience of Being. My thesis wishes to show that Heidegger's "commentary" on Aristotle's Physics, B, 1 reaches beyond this passage and is grounded in a discovery of the fundamental project that governs all of Aristotle's thought--the recovery of the meaning of physis. The thesis maintains that the method of this recovery lies in a proper understanding of logos. ;Sources. The dissertation follows the path of Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle in "Vom Wesen und Begriff der Physis: Aristoteles' Physik B, 1." This short section of Aristotle's Physics on which Heidegger's discussion is based is actually a condensed formulation of the central thought and terminology of Aristotle's philosophy. Heidegger's other writings are considered when they are helpful in understanding the issues raised. The dissertation also examines Aristotle's writings to see to what extent Heidegger's interpretation is justified from a broader consideration of Aristotelian texts. ;Thesis. Aristotle's thinking accomplishes the fulfillment of the Greek understanding of Being. Being was understood in Greek thought as enduring presencing. Because natural beings are characterized by movement, their Being must therefore be an illusion and deception . Aristotle's accomplisment was to not deny the non-being which belonged to such beings and to think this non-being as a characteristic of Being itself. Aristotle was able to win his understanding of physis by paying attention to the logos, the address in which beings are revealed. The failure to see the Being of natural beings resulted from the dominance of the kind of logos employed in the realm of techne which brings forth beings under its direction and for its own use. But this kind of logos is inadequate for an understanding of natural beings because such beings have their genesis in themselves. Aristotle achieves his insight into the Being of natural beings by establishing the difference between physis and techne. In doing so, he reopens the ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings. It is on the basis of a proper understanding of this difference that Aristotle is able to show the sameness of beings in their Being

This article attempts to explore why it is that the “state of exception” is so pivotal to Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty and the possibility of a coming community beyond the sovereign state and its power machines. The essay distinguishes between two senses of the state of exception and tries to explain their interconnection. The “zone of indistinction” opens up an irreparable gap between sovereign power and its execution and between “bare life” and citizenship. These are the spaces that both drive and dismantle the apparatus of State power and permit Agamben to open the discussion of a coming community.

This essay explains what Blanchot understands as writing and the space of literature. For Blanchot, writing is the place where the impossible interruption of the destiny of things is put into play, an interruption that world-formation needs but negates and conceals. Writing belongs to an excess outside of language, an otherness of language. The need to write is linked to the point at which nothing can be done with words. Writing is contrasted with dialectical language and the totalizing aim of the Hegelian system. The essay explains the connection between the disaster of writing (after the holocaust), the neuter and fragmentary style of writing and the passivity of writing