Heidegger and Galileo’s Slippery Slope

Traditional empiricism, the stout defender of the senses, is by all accounts sick. But perhaps a certain empiricist legacy is still fighting for life. Without seeking a resurrection of empiricism, the aim of this paper is to engage in what Levinas calls a ‘rehabilitation of sensation’. I want to resist theorizations of our life that would seek to exclude our sensible relations with things and with others from any intrinsic involvement with our understanding of them; to resist conceptions that regard sensibility as something in itself dumb and brute, something (as tradition would have us have it) ‘merely animal’. However, the trajectory of this discussion will not remain in every part faithful to its Levinasian inspiration. And it will not leave the traditional conception of animality intact either. In what follows, what my five-year-old daughter calls our ‘humanality’ will not be elaborated in terms of (trans)formations of life that Levinas, with the tradition, calls a ‘break’ from ‘animality’ or from ‘the animal condition’. Every other, I want to affirm, is every bit an animal.

This volume addresses two particular lacunae in the scholarship concerning the intersections between Martin Heidegger, politics, and the political. First, it traces the politico-philosophical path that Heidegger took as he moved on to more ontic considerations after publishing his master work – Being and Time – and identifies three significant ‘moments’ in that progression : the Communitarian and Authoritarian moment; the Moment of Place and Polis, and the Defensive Moment. Second, it presents a robust vision of a nascent ‘politics of care’ in Being and Time, dependent upon three key elements: authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), Dasein-with (Mitdasein), and a special type of care (Sorge) – authentic solicitude. The politics of care described herein additionally has several Aristotelian elements, including the notions of human flourishing, práxis, poiēsis, and phronêsis.

The Sein zum Texte does not exhaust the hermeneutical dimension-unless the word 'text'is taken to mean above and beyond its narrower sense the text which 'God has written with his own hand.'i.e., the liber naturaeOne can demonstrate in the reading of this greatest of all 'books'the pattern of tension and resolution which structures understanding and understandability ... and in this respect it's impossible to have any doubt about the universality of the hermeneutic problem.1What makes hermeneutics philosophical is that it holds that the insights into properly understanding texts apply to all instances of understanding. The history of hermeneutics, then, is not to be drawn simply from theories of textual interpretation, but from the history of interpretive understanding as such. The standard histories of hermeneutics either begin with hermeneutics expanding beyond theological texts to all texts-with Friedrich Ast, Johann Martin Chladenius, or Friedrich Schleiermacher-and then they move to hermeneutics expanding beyond texts to all interpretation-with Wilhelm Dilthey and Martin Heidegger. Or they begin with the ancients, detour through theological hermeneutics only to emerge again with the step-wise universalizations of Schleiermacher, Dilthey and Heidegger. Such narratives miss the way the interpretation of texts, the interpretation of actions, and the interpretation of the natural world have been historically bound together. Heidegger's reestablishment of hermeneutics as is a reparation of a split between how we interpret to understand texts and how we interpret to understand natural phenomena. The standard narrative connects literary and natural understanding as if it were a new insight, when in fact it is an old idea that has lost its mooring.The history of hermeneutics has been a history of expanding scope. As the tradition expands and becomes more universal it addresses a wider range of topics and therefore engages a wider range of traditions. To understand hermeneutics in its full scope, we must connect it with those wider traditions, recognizing when it is taking up themes already addressed in the history of philosophy. That nature can be thought of as a text and that we can gain insights into understanding nature by considering what occurs when we understand texts are fundamental themes of hermeneutics. They are not new, however. They have appeared in the past in the conception of nature as a book, the liber naturae. Only by considering this tradition can we better understand the commitments of hermeneutics, especially as formulated by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Above all we will look closely at Gadamer's phenomenology of reading. As he writes,what reading is and how reading occurs still seems to me to be one of the darkest questions and one of the things most in need of phenomenological analysis.2The Book of Nature as an analogue to the Book of Scripture is unthinkable before Augustine.3 The reference to nature as a book goes back at least to Plotinus; understandably a Neo-Platonist would see the world, like a text, as a symbolically ordered means for revealing deeper and more universal meanings. The first Christian ascetic, St. Anthony the Great, compared nature and scripture as texts. When asked how he could approach God alone without any scripture he replied through the text of nature, echoing Tertullian's and Origin's views that we learn of God through nature as well as through scripture. Yet neither Plotinus nor Anthony conceives of nature as something to be read in the same way texts are read. That crucial ancestor of hermeneutics belongs to Augustine. It was only after the fourth century that one could speak of the Book of Scripture with which one could contrast the Book of Nature. It was only with Jerome's translation of Logos as Verbum that medieval thinkers could take seriously the idea that creation was a kind of linguistic act. …

How Disciplined Was Foucault’s Research Process?: A Proposed Method of Research Based on Philosophical and Critical Models OR How the Humanities can Help Students Understand Research

Debates about the legitimacy of embryonic stem-cell research have largely focused on the type of ethical value that should be accorded to the human embryo in vitro. In this paper, I try to show that, to broaden the scope of these debates, one needs to articulate an ontology that does not limit itself to biological accounts, but that instead focuses on the embryo's place in a totality of relevance surrounding and guiding a human practice. Instead of attempting to substantiate the ethical value of the embryo exclusively by pointing out that it has potentiality for personhood, one should examine the types of practices in which the embryo occurs and focus on the ends inherent to these practices. With this emphasis on context, it becomes apparent that the embryo's ethical significance can only be understood by elucidating the attitudes that are established towards it in the course of specific activities. The distinction between fertilized embryos and cloned embryos proves to be important in this contextual analysis, since, from the point of view of practice, the two types of embryos appear to belong to different human practices: (assisted) procreation and medical research, respectively. In my arguments, I highlight the concepts of practice, technology, and nature, as they have been analyzed in the phenomenological tradition, particularly by Martin Heidegger. I come to the conclusion that therapeutic cloning should be allowed, provided that it turns out to be a project that benefits medical science in its aim to battle diseases. Important precautions have to be taken, however, in order to safeguard the practice of procreation from becoming perverted by the aims and attitudes of medical science when the two practices intersect. The threat in question needs to be taken seriously, since it concerns the structure and goal of practices which are central to our very self understanding as human beings.

John Macquarrie (1919–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was the foremost Anglican systematic theologian of the twentieth century. His many books cover a wide range of topics, from studies of existentialist philosophy to expositions of systematic Christian theology, writings on mysticism and world religion, and analyses of ethical thought. Macquarrie was always a theologian of the church, using a philosophical vocabulary that united philosophical idealism, existentialism, and Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy in an original and fruitful way. His masterpiece was the 1966 Principles of Christian Theology, which works through almost every aspect of Christian doctrine in the light of the concepts of human nature and of God that he had forged from idealism, from Martin Heidegger, and from an increasingly sacramental and mystical approach to Christian faith. In 1970, Macquarrie was offered, without his prior knowledge, the Lady Margaret Chair of Divinity at Christ Church, University of Oxford. He received various honours that testify to the high regard in which he was held both in America and in Britain.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY STUDIES Edward Elgar, Modernist. J. P. E. Harper-Scott. (Music in 20th Century.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. [xiii, 255 p. ISBN-10: 0-5218-6200-0; ISBN-13: 978-0-5218-6200-4. $90.00] Illustrations, bibliographical reference, index. In Edward Elgar, Modernist, J. P. E. Harper-Scott advances provocative if questionable thesis that Elgar's music can be best understood through a combination of Schenkerian analysis and philosophy. Harper-Scott thus joins trend of modifying more technical methods of Schenkerian analysis with a more subjective approach to musical meaning. Here, however, seeming incongruity of Heinrich Schenker and Martin Heidegger as well as specificity of Elgar's First Symphony and Falstaff raise questions whether invoking philosophy is a justifiable expansion of Schenkerian theory or just an expedient, and whether claims to broader applications are valid. Schenkerian theory loses not only aesthetics but also syntax of Ursatz, its harmonic-contrapuntal framework, and therefore value of Schenkerian analysis for Elgar's music is debatable. But is precisely these points that make Harper-Scott's book worthwhile reading for Elgarians, Schenkerians, and musicologists in general. Harper-Scott begins by outlining aims of his study and modernist characteristics of Elgar's music. In chapter 2, he discusses problem that Schenkerian analysis poses for Elgar's music, namely that Schenker's Ursatz is based on Beethoven's heroic goal-oriented style. He then reformulates Schenker's Ursatz in relation to Heidegger's Augenblick, which Harper-Scott defines as the moment that changes our perception of ourselves, and that determines future in light of past and present, hence a turning point. Chapter 3 presents an analysis of Elgar's First Symphony that draws on work of James Hepokoski as well as Schenker and Heidegger, and that features immuring and immured tonics of A-flat and D respectively, a static Kopfton, and a single four-movement Ursatz. In chapter 4, Harper-Scott Elgar's symphonic study Falstaff and builds on Hepokoski's premise that symphonic poems must be interpreted through interconnection of text (music) and paratext (non-musical image). The drama of Falstaff, Hal, and Kingship of England plays out through their associated keys of C, E-flat, and E, respectively, which Harper-Scott analyzes through a combination of Schenker's and Hepokoski's methods, especially nonresolving recapitulation deformation and rotational structure. Focusing on Heidegger in chapter 5, Harper-Scott formulates his theory of musical hermeneutics, comparing and contrasting with that of Lawrence Kramer. Harper-Scott's concept of music's mimetic nature derives from quest narrative in literature. Chapter 6 examines a possible existential meaning of temporal unfolding of First Symphony and Falstaff, characterizing as a kind of failed quest narrative which rejects Beethovenian paradigm while-and this is a typically modernist move-ostensibly but disingenuously repeating it (p. 6). Finally, chapter 7 interprets Elgar's modernism as a commentary on man's nature and future. To elaborate on overview above, in Harper-Scott's Heideggerian refinement of Schenker's theory, which is also title of chapter 2, Schenker is essentially no longer Schenker. Harper-Scott asserts, Without acknowledging [the Augenblick], analyst cannot properly account for 'purely musical' parts of work (its grammar and structural logic) (p. 64). For example, in his analysis of First Symphony, By incorporating Augenblick into Schenker's phenomenology, analytical method can be made to accommodate duotonal (and other unorthodox) structures (p. 66). In a sense, Augenblick becomes a substitute for Ursatz, and Harper-Scott discards foundations of Schenker's theory for a more poetic idea and a more subjective analysis. …

On Human Being:A Dispute between Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger Rafal Kazimierz Wilk (bio) 1. Introduction Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger traveled down separate paths in the same direction. There was much that united them. For example, they had the same teacher, Edmund Husserl, and both of them worked very closely with him. There was also much that divided them. Stein, as a woman and a Jew, was not allowed to lecture at a university. Nor was she allowed to present her thesis so as to gain her habilitation. By way of contrast, Heidegger succeeded as an academic teacher, even during the Nazi period in that he was a member of ruling party (NSDAP). He was appointed to the lofty position of rector at the University of Freiburg. In the same year in which Heidegger delivered his famous rector's address, Stein, because of her origin, was forced to resign from her work as a teacher in Münster.1 In fact, Stein was humiliated by Heidegger. She was encouraged by her habilitation director, Eugene Fink, to seek academic help from Heidegger. Initially Heidegger was friendly and offered encouragement. But then, on Stein's view, he said that it would be impractical for him to continue to help her and that she should seek help elsewhere.2 [End Page 104] Heidegger's arrogant attitude toward Stein was also manifested on the occasion of Husserl's seventieth birthday. On this occasion friends of his were preparing a Festschrift, and Stein was invited to contribute. Her dissertation was titled Husserl and Aquinas: A Comparison. Her work, unfortunately, was published in an abridged and reedited version because Heidegger demanded a more "neutral" treatment of the subject matter.3 Another example may be helpful. Stein helped to put in order Husserl's manuscripts. Husserl did not have the time to review the work she had done. This is especially pertinent regarding his text on time-consciousness, "which she recognized as having particular significance for those making comparison with the thought of Bergson and Natorp."4 These pages became the material for Husserl's lecture course on inner time-consciousness. They were prepared for publication by Stein, although Heidegger declared himself to be the editor.5 These are only some of the disturbing examples from the lives of these two philosophers. Quite apart from these personal considerations, there are theoretical connections between the two that deserve attention. For example, what was the conception of human nature found in the two philosophers? That is, what unites and what divides their anthropologies? These are the key questions to be explored in this short article. There are two texts of Stein in which she analyses Heidegger's thought. In the first text (Martin Heidegers Existentialphilosophie) one gets a glimpse of her view of Heidegger's anthropology. In the second text, however, a second level of discussion is found that is much deeper. As J. H. Nota has aptly noted, the very title of this main work of Stein, Endliches und Ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstieges zum Sinn des Seins, shows that it refers to the main book of Heidegger, Sein und Zeit.6 Thus we can say that Stein undertook the task of overcoming the thought of Heidegger, specifically his philosophical anthropology. Any adequate assessment of Heidegger's philosophical anthropology therefore should deal as well with Stein's critique. [End Page 105] 2. An Outline of the Argument regarding Anthropology Time plays a crucial role in human life. Roman Ingarden (a Polish student of Husserl and a friend of Stein) in his essay titled "Man and Time" begins with the words: "We all live in time, and we know it."7 But what is experientially obvious may not be easy to explain. That is, the famous complaint of St. Augustine, that he understands time perfectly unless he is asked to explain it in words, is still valid.8 The time-dependent character of human existence became the foundation for the anthropological research of Stein as well as Heidegger. Time is radically important because it is a determinant of a human's conscious being. As Stein notes, once one becomes conscious that he or she is a certain...

Rafaerwar is a tradition of cleansing the sacred well (Parigi Pusaka) practiced by the Banda Lonthoir community in Central Maluku, Indonesia, and is held once every 10 years. This study aims to explore and reconstruct the scientific elements of the Rafaerwar tradition and align them with primary school natural science concepts. This qualitative descriptive study employed literature and field methods with an ethnoscience approach, conducted over three months in 2024 in Lonthoir Village, Central Maluku, Maluku Province, Indonesia. The study involved 15 informants, including traditional leaders, mosque imams, cultural experts, village heads, teachers, students, and residents. Data were collected through observation, interviews, and documentation and were analyzed qualitatively. Objects, individuals, events, and other associated elements were classified through equivalence analysis, reference synthesis, and informant insights. The findings indicate that the Rafaerwar tradition has potential as a source for strengthening natural science concepts in primary schools.

Medieval ‘books of natural things’ contain various concepts of nature. On the one hand, there is the idea of nature as God’s creation, on the other, the Aristotelian concept of nature shaped by causes and effects and by processes of growth and decline. Practical knowledge about animals pertaining, for instance, to medicine or hunting, appears in late medieval encyclopaedias as well. Konrad’s book shows that these different concepts manifest themselves in the translation from the Latin sources into the vernacular. The choice of German equivalents for Latin words and phrases in Konrad’s ‘book of natural things’ ist guided and shaped by a philosophical reflection upon varying concepts of nature.

NATURE AS ANIMATING: THE SOUL IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES HIS ESSAY ADDRESSES the problem of the fragmentation of knowledge on the contemporary scene, nd proposes that the rediscovery of the Aristotelian concept of nature can go far toward providing a solution.1 Well known is the situation in academe, where specialization is the price of advancement and tenure, and where few professors are capable of ranging outside their fields to assess truth claims or attain a comprehensive overview. No less serious is the compartmentalization of knowledge at research institutes and "think-tanks," where competent scholars are engaged in detailed analyses of problems in economics, political science, and international security, but where it has proven difficult to generate studies that direct prudent action by government leaders. Here the basic problem is the perennial gap that intrudes itself between knowledge and action, between what Aristotle identified centuries ago as theoria and praxis, which we may label, following him, as that between the theoretical and practical disciplines. The direction of sensible action in the sphere of human affairs, in Aristotle's view, pertained to ethics and politics, which he regarded as practical sciences-concerned not merely with knowing but with knowing as ordered to doing. The practical orientation of scholar1 The article is an expanded version of a colloquium paper read at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., on November 8, 1984, with the title "The Idea of Nature: Its Contemporary Relevance for Ethics and Politics." .An earlier draft was read in the Seminar on Problems of .Authority and Participation at the same Center on .August 13, 1984, with the title "The Modeling of Nature: Can the Soul Be Put Back Into the Human Sciences? " The author wishes to thank Edmund Pellegrino and Otto Bird for their helpful commentaries on the colloquium paper, and James Billington, Prosser Gifford, and .Ann Sheffield for providing the stimulating ambience in which it could be written and presented. 61~ THE SOUL IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES 613 ship-the ideal embodied in " knowing as ordered to doing "is a concern that goes far beyond the needs of academe and research institutes. Its neglect on the contemporary scene is but an instance of the more pervasive fragmentation of knowledge that characterizes our culture. The theme of this essay is that the concept of nature, particularly as animating and instantiated in the human soul, can be fruitful in overcoming such fragmentation in a basic way: by reuniting the physical and the human sciences and showing how action or doing can be related to both.2 By the physical sciences we mean the speculative or theoretical sciences concerned with nature, the phusis of the Greeks, whence the term "nature " in our title. Among such sciences one might include physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, psychology in its more theoretical aspects, and so on. The human sciences we take to embrace those concerned with man's affairs: the social and political sciences, ethics and politics, economics, the behavioral sciences in their more clinical aspects, etc. They less obviously are concerned with nature, and yet they are but manifestations of human nature in action, as will be shown in the sequel. Thus nature as seen in the world of nature and as embodied in human nature as part of that world is the concept around which we propose our integration. The regulative idea is simple: nature is an intrinsic principle of perfective activity, and the better we understand a nature or a natural kind the more we can appreciate how it should act. Thus we would bridge the " is " and the " ought " by rooting the norm for action in an objective standard: a nature that is not completely refractory to understanding. Here it is important to observe that there is a vast difference between knowing all there is to know about a nature and having no knowledge of it at all. By the somewhat elliptical expression, " a nature that is not completely refractory to understanding," 2 For an exposition of the concept of nature and the intellectual context in which the following development should be situated, see W. A. Wallace, "The Intelligibility of Nature: A Neo-Aristotelian View," Review of Metaphysics...

This paper investigates contemporary applications of the Aristotelian conception of potentiality in limit cases of life and death arising from developments in modern science in order to argue that in its current usage, the term is often so far from its Aristotelian context that its philosophical rigor and, hence, usefulness is undermined. By analyzing the account of the soul in Aristotle’s De Anima, I argue for the necessity of a conception of nature that can contextualize the relevant sense of potentiality by giving a telos arising from the subject’s nature, which orients that subject’s potentiality. I argue that these contextualizing components of nature and teleology are necessary for using a philosophically rigorous sense of potentiality. I begin by surveying the current use of potentiality to delineate beginning and end-of-life cases in order to show that these various uses are not robust enough to offer answers to the challenging cases of life and death in a non ad hoc way. I then address John Lizza and Joel Feinberg’s suggestions for making the concept of potentiality more robust, namely, a more specified framework of ‘normal’ internal conditions and ‘important’ external conditions to which the subject’s potentialities can be referenced. I argue that the insufficiency of the current uses of potentiality is more specifically due to a lack of an Aristotelian conception of a teleological nature that directs the subject’s potentiality and further that this Aristotelian framework of the subject’s nature can provide an answer to Feinberg and Lizza call for a context of normalcy of internal features and external environment in a more robust way. In the final section, I turn back to the problematic cases of life and death in order to highlight how, given a more specific and robust conception of a teleological nature, my account can offer three suggestions for applying the concept of potentiality.

The essay traces the development of the concept of nature in the Renaissance against the background of a philosophical tradition that has its origins in classical times and with special emphasis on views of nature in natural philosophy. The point of departure is the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata which within the context of Western philosophy involves elements of both Aristotelian and Platonic theories of nature. Additional matters of concern are the relation between art and nature (particularly in Cusanus), the concept of machina mundi in the astronomical tradition and the so-called mechanization of the world-picture. The final decline of an Aristotelian concept of nature occurs within the context of Boyle’s mechanized concept of nature. The individual stages of this development are extensively documented.

Descartes holds that, insofar as nature is a purposeless, unthinking, extended substance, there could be no final causes in physics. Descartes’ derivation of his three laws of motion from the perfections of God thus underwrites a rejection of Aristotle’s conception of natural self-motion and teleology. Aristotle derived his conception of the purposeful action of sublunar creatures from his notion that superlunar bodies are perfect, eternal, living beings, via the thesis that circular motion is more complete or perfect than rectilinear motion. Descartes’ reduction of circular motion to rectilinear motion, achieved through his theological foundation of the laws of motion, thus marks a crucial break from Aristotle’s philosophy of nature. This paper argues that the shift from the Aristotelian conception of nature as self-moving and teleological to the Cartesian conception of nature as purposeless and inert, is not an empirical discovery but is rooted in differing conceptions of where perfection lies in nature.

In the wake of the current revival of the historiography of racism, this article focuses on the claim that Aristotle is the progenitor of the concept in the West. If a purely textual analysis of Aristotelian political writings can lead to such a conclusion, the historicising of these writings leads to a different result. Rejecting the idea that the normative function of the work of Aristotle is limited to the Athenian polis, this article demonstrates that the imperial context should serve as an ‘available light’ by which the meaning of certain Aristotelian key concepts, including nature, the ‘divine man’ and the natural slave. In doing so, the central role of prohairesis in Aristotle's conception of human nature is highlighted.