Heidegger's View Research Articles

RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE AS POETRY: HEIDEGGER's CHALLENGE

This paper examines how Heidegger's view that language is poetry might provide a helpful way of understanding the nature of religious language. Poetry, according to Heidegger, is language in its purest form, in that it both reveals Being, whilst also showing the difference between word and thing. In poetry, Heidegger suggests, we come closest to the essence of language itself and encounter its strangeness and impermeability, and its revelatory character. What would be the implications for viewing religious language in this way? Through examining Heidegger's view that poetry is the purest form of language, I suggest that it would also be possible to view religious language as poetry in this way, in that it also shows the transcendence of what cannot be brought to presence in language, except as concealed. Such a view of religious language does not regard it as a problematic type of language, deserving special treatment, but rather suggests that in religious language the inarticulable relationship between word and world is revealed.

Dwelling in the Sites of Finitude: Resisting the Violence of the Metaphysical Globe

Abstract: In this paper Martin Heidegger's notions about dwelling in the sites of finitude and “power-free” (Macht-los) “letting-be” (Gelassenheit) are explored as fundamental possibilities for resisting the ontological violence posed by global capitalism, the planetary outcome of the metaphysical condition Heidegger calls the “machination” (Machenschaft). Beginning from the planetary machination—the emergence of the flexible and circularly functioning power of calculative intelligibility—resistance is understood ontologically and hence as a radical critique of power as a consummation of the history of the metaphysical constitution of being. The paper culminates in a discussion of Heidegger's view on the awakening of the “other beginning” of the abyssal “Event” of being, a groundless “time-space-play” capable of constituting an alternative modality of relations no longer based upon the calculative functions of power but upon groundless thought and non-violent dwelling in the earth-sites of finite being.

Cossio, Kelsen e a Fenomenologia. Uma abordagem da Experiência Jurídica

Abstract In this paper, I analyze Carlos Cossio’s theory of law, and how his theory was a reaction to Kelsen’s juridical positivism. The most important aspect I highlight is the logical abstract normativism defended by Kelsen, and how it was overcome by a transcendental and existential theory of law, which Cossio develops in a close relationship to Husserl and Heidegger views.

Hölderlin after the Catastrophe: Heidegger — Adorno — Brecht by Robert Savage (review)

9i8 Reviews subjectivity) stretch over fiftyyears. The pace at which Parkes proceeds, linking literary textsdirectly to political moments, may occasionally make his analysis feel a little superficial. All in all, however, this book ishighly readable and informative and is a welcome update of the author's previous monograph. University of Leeds Stuart Taberner Holderlin after theCatastrophe: Heidegger ? Adorno ? Brecht. By Robert Savage. (Studies inGerman Literature, Linguistics and Culture) Rochester, NY: Cam den House. 2008. xvi+234pp. ?40; $75. ISBN 978-1-57113-320-5. This study focuses on the reception ofHolderlin as an ideal example of post-war German poetry problems, since Holderlin had to such an extent been incorporated in the officialNazi ideology. The introduction provides thenecessary background forunderstanding the com plexity of the role Holderlin was to play inGermany after 1945. His first modern editor,Norbert von Hellingrath, had furnished an influential interpretation of the poet as the incarnation of purity?an apolitical myth eagerly taken up by the Stefan George circle. The distortion of thismyth by theHolderlin Society (founded by Goebbels in 1943) in order to use Holderlin as the pure German to justify the idea ofmartyrdom for the fatherland, togetherwith Heidegger's views on the poet, are themost widely treated aspects of the topic and themost convincing ones. The author demonstrates how completely this view changed after World War II, when the distortions of theNazi period were swept away by specialist analysis, which at the same time reinstated themystical approach or disguised the political implica tions of the question. Poets such as Eich and Celan, however, used Holderlin as a stickwith which to beat the smug self-satisfaction of the recovering nation. The chapter on Heidegger presents thephilosophers idea of a non-racial German nationalism as a continuing struggle since itquestions national identity altogether, an idea learnt from Holderlin, whom Heidegger considers the most German of all Germans'. The author shows how Heidegger maintained this view until 1947, classing the Third Reich and the World War as aspects of Western nihilism, and be lieving thatGermans could now, after 1945, as poets and thinkers teach theworld poetical thinking'. Heidegger's 'de-worlded' position takes the form of a conver sation with Holderlin, outside time. The profound transformation' ofHeidegger's Holderlin reception after thewar, however, could have been more sharply defined. The following chapter shows how Adorno organized his reception ofHolderlin around the concept of polemic?less polemic as poetical principle of the poet him self, rather polemic between Adorno and Heidegger. As a result Holderlin fades into the background in the confrontation between the two thinkers,who, as the author elaborates, saymuch the same thing about the poet, but from contrasting positions. The thesis is that they communicate on thepolemic, and thus on Holder lin,precisely by refusing to communicate. The author's sympathies seem to liemore with Brecht, in spite of themeagre references the dramatist makes toHolderlin. Brecht, afterhis return from exile in MLR, 105.3, 2010 919 1947, staged Antigone in Chur, using an adaptation of theHolderlin translation of the play. Brecht's de- and recontextualization of this text is shown to constitute a third paradigm, citation, along with Heidegger's conversation and Adorno's po lemic.These three are presented as exemplary responses to theGerman catastrophe in such a way as tomake a new beginning, employing the figure ofHolderlin. In spite of the play's lack of success the author judges the Brechtian approach to be more flexible and sensitive to the historical moment, as well as more durable and more enduring than the others' attempts to rescue the poet. The epilogue depicts the changes in the reception initiated by the '68 move ment and Pierre Bertaux's stressing of the revolutionary element inHolderlin, a tendency carried forward byMartin Walser and PeterWeiss. The book ends with Rainald Goetz's 1983 presentation of the poet as a pop star and the postmodern arbitrariness after such contrasting employments. According to the author the in terpretation ofHolderlin has become an academic question, though as a classic he retains the potential to inspire a new revolt. The only problem with this fascinating study is itschoice ofmaterial: Holderlin's role is sidelined inBrecht and lacks profile inAdorno, who in...

Entering the World of Pain: Heidegger

Abstract To give oneself over to the essence of pain is to give oneself over to the world. Pain is a fact of the world and in accepting this fact, in entering that world, we break with the tradition of metaphysical subjectivity that dates back to the Greek determination of the human as zôon logon echon. For Heidegger, pain is the surest sign that we wholly belong to this world; in fact, pain is nothing other than our contact with the world and our “openness” to it. In what follows I will first present those aspects of Heidegger's view of pain…

Immensity and A-subjectivity

AbstractThe aim of the present article is to reflect upon comparative procedures at stake in the acknowledgment of differences, following some paths of Husserl's and Heidegger's views on “comparative examination” (vergleichende Betrachtung). Although using the same expression as Husserl, Heidegger presents in this concept, rather, a phenomenology of correspondence. The encounter with otherness is described as correspondence to the immensity of the event of the world in Dasein. From out of a “destruction” of comparative examinations, it becomes possible to seize the a-subjective and ek-static structure of Dasein and claim a corresponding way of encountering otherness. In this corresponding way, the Other appears first as non-otherness, beyond a dialectics of selfhood and otherness.

Early Heidegger's Concept of History in Light of the Neo-Kantians

AbstractThe history of Heidegger's relationship to the neo-Kantians is still largely unwritten, despite the fact that in his formative period Heidegger was very close to the neo-Kantian school, especially Windelband and Rickert, Lask and Natorp. With regard to the concept of history and the importance of historical philosophizing, it is the received view that Dilthey was early Heidegger's main and only source of inspiration. This paper argues against this one-sided view by showing the historical and systematic connections between early Heidegger's views on history and the philosophy of history developed by Windelband and Rickert.

The Twinkling of an Eye

In this paper I challenge the received view of the relationship between Kierkegaard and Heidegger and explore the relationship between phenomenology and theology. Against the received view―the familiar claim that Heidegger secularizes Kierkegaard―I argue that both philosophers attempt to uncover the existential conditions for the possibility of an authentic existence and take the passionate religious life to be one form of such an existence. Therefore, Heidegger's concept of resoluteness does not represent a secularized break with but rather a phenomenological development of Kierkegaard's concept of inwardness; and both concepts represent a mode of existence that is the condition for the possibility of genuine Christian faith. This grounding relationship between resoluteness and faith, I argue, is representative of Heidegger's view of the relationship between phenomenological and theological concepts in general. Thus, my argument not only sheds light on Heidegger's development of Kierkegaard but it also clarifies some important features of the relationship between phenomenology and theology.

Mourir pour?

Relaying reflections from Les Mouches, Morts sans sepulture, Les mains sales and Huis-clos to some important arguments concerning death in L'Etre et le neant, the author discusses the relation between death and freedom. Criticizing Martin Heidegger's views on Sein zum Tode, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that one's relation to death deeply implies relations with the others, the living, but also the dead ones. The experience of death being absurd, the others are those who can make it meaningful, in the same way that I do for their own death. Sartre's philosophy of freedom defends the original choice of the ones that I will remember and cherish, in a community that is more important than the living one: the community established beyond death.

Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (review)

Reviewed by: Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays Peter E. Gordon Drew A. Hyland and John Panteleimon Manoussakis , editors. Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays. Bloomington-Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2006. Pp. xiii + 194. Paper, $24.95. Heidegger's troubled and over-determined interest in Greek philosophy is well known. In the 1933 rectoral address, he declared that genuine science would become possible only "if we again place ourselves under the power of the beginning of our spiritual-historical existence. This beginning is the departure, the setting out, of Greek philosophy." All of Western science, Heidegger concluded, "remains bound to that beginning of philosophy. From it science draws the strength of its essence, assuming that it still remains at all equal to this beginning." Such claims bear witness to his life-long interpretive confrontation with the dawning figures of Western philosophy: Aristotle, Plato, and the pre-Socratics. Heidegger's attitude toward this "beginning" was notoriously complex. Indeed, his method of reading both Plato and Aristotle furnishes perhaps the best example for what he called an Auseinandersetzung: an exegetical confrontation that seeks not merely to comprehend the original texts, but to transform them and thereby to liberate what remains "unthought" in the otherwise ossified doctrines of the philosophical past. No slender volume of essays under the banner of 'Heidegger and the Greeks' could possibly do justice to the many facets of this confrontation. What is therefore so remarkable about this collection is that the authors do not rest content with summarizing Heidegger's views. They themselves engage in their own Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger's account of Greek philosophy: they contest his translations, question his interpretations, and (in several of the essays) set forth bold and thought-provoking philosophical alternatives. As is typical for the proceedings of a conference (some of these essays were first given as papers at a conference on the same topic at the American College of Greece in 2003), the collection covers an astonishing range of topics and perspectives. What holds the volume together is the unusual clarity and creativity each contributor brings to his or her task. Drew Hyland's essay, "First of All Came Chaos," provides a philological and philosophical reading of key texts by Hesiod and Plato, and argues (against Heidegger) that something like the ontological difference remains a prominent theme in both of these authors: Hesiod presents Chaos as a "between," and Plato suggests that both eros and the good are "neither some logos, nor some epistemic knowledge" (Symposium 211a). Hyland concludes with the provocative suggestion that Heidegger was too rash when he charged Plato with "ontological oblivion." Claudia Baracchi's essay, "Contributions to the Coming-to-Be of Greek Beginnings: Heidegger's Inceptive Thinking," argues that Heidegger's larger narrative of a "unity and homogenous 'history of metaphysics' formulaically reduces the Greek beginning," and in particular, misses certain complexities in both Plato and Aristotle that would belie Heidegger's characterization. Walter Brogan's essay, "The Intractable Interrelationship of Physis and Techne," provides a close look at Aristotle's Metaphysics and deepens our appreciation of Heidegger's remarks in the Contributions to Philosophy on "technicity" in relation to nature. An importance consequence of Brogan's reading is to warn us off from any simple-minded belief that Heidegger wished to turn away from techne in favor of a pre-technological nature or physis. Rather, he wished us to understand the necessary if conflictual bond between them, which he summarized in The Origin of the Work of Art as the "strife" between "earth" and "world." In "Translating Innigkeit: The Belonging Together of the Strange," Peter Warnek offers a long meditation on the difficulties of reading Heidegger on Hölderlin, suggesting that Hölderlin's themes of inwardness cannot remain the property of an exclusively German community, and that Heidegger's notion of a metaphysically distinctive conversation between only the Germans and the Greeks is impermissible even according to Heidegger's own logic, "whether Heidegger would admit it or not." Günther Figal's essay, "Heidegger's Philosophy of Language in an Aristotelian Context: Dynamic meta logou," seeks to show that Heidegger never truly abandoned his Aristotelian beginnings; on the contrary, he remained "as a...

Heidegger and Being at the Hanford Reservation: Standing Reserve, Enframing, and Environmental Communication Theory

This essay examines the potential of Heidegger's phenomenology as a foundation for environmental communication theory, emphasizing his critiques of modern science, technology, humanism, and metaphysics. A phenomenological approach to environmental communication provides resources for recognizing metaphysical assumptions that endanger both humans and nature. The Hanford nuclear reservation serves as an illustrative text, exemplifying Heidegger's reading of nuclear energy as a culmination of both Western metaphysics and the instrumental stance that he calls “enframing.” In Heidegger's view, the ordering and control accomplished through enframing obscures the mutually constitutive relationship between humans and nature, and in doing so, diminishes the possibilities for authentic human existence. The chapter examines how both representational and constitutive models of communication contribute to those conditions, and adopts a set of concepts from Heidegger's phenomenology as a foundation for an alternative, “bounded constitutive” model.

Skillful Coping in Everyday Life and in Sport: A Critical Examination of the Views of Heidegger and Dreyfus

(2007). Skillful Coping in Everyday Life and in Sport: A Critical Examination of the Views of Heidegger and Dreyfus. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport: Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 116-134.

Medicine in Danger?

In his recent and interesting contribution ‘On Heidegger, medicine, and the modernity of modern medical technology’ Brassington brings together Heidegger's philosophy of technology on the one hand and medicine as being increasingly dependent on modern technology on the other (Brassington, 2006). Technology, for Heidegger, as Brassington points out, is associated with danger. Given the central role of technology in medicine, this raises the question to which extent medicine is in fact ‘in danger’. Brassington asserts that “technologically-empowered medicine has managed not to import the danger from modern technology” and concludes his paper with the following remark: Heidegger's worries about modern technology do not have to apply to modern medicine; to the extent that medicine is concerned by or for humanity, however that might spin out in practice, its appropriation of technology for the sake of irruptive humanity does not seem to me to have to be problematic. Brassington's argument why medicine has managed to stay out of technological danger is based on a distinction he makes between chronological and historical modernity. He argues that, while modern medicine is in a chronological sense hypermodern and up-to-date, in a historical sense it has retained essentially a pre-modern ethos, safeguarding technologically-empowered medicine from the technological danger. However, is Brassington's view of medicine as being protected from technological danger in accordance with Heidegger's view on medicine and technology? Brassington is not the first author to link medicine and its practice to Heidegger's philosophy (Richardson, 1993). Moreover, from the year 1959 until 1969, Heidegger himself lectured to psychiatric residents and students at the University of Zurich Psychiatric Clinic and, soon after, in Zollikon. The transcriptions of these lectures were published as the ‘Zollikon Seminars’ by the psychiatrist and initiator of these lecture meetings, Medard Boss. In the context of discussing the human body, technology and modern medicine, Heidegger says: There is the highest need for doctors who think and who do not wish to leave the field entirely to scientific technicians. (Heidegger, 2001, p. 103) This phrase, speaking about ‘the highest need’, does not sound as reassuring as Brassington's conclusions. In fact, it seems to indicate that Heidegger's worries about technology do apply to modern medicine and that modern technologically-empowered medicine is not simply safeguarded by any pre-modern ethos or pre-given essence. For if such a pre-given medical ethos would be sufficient, why would Heidegger refer to the need for doctors to think? Brassington claims, in short, that medicine “can be conceived as concerning itself primarily with health or the welfare of the human, not simply with the processes of the body” and that “it is simply not in the character of the discipline” to be endangered by modern technology. It is this assumption about the character of medicine that is not reflected in the Heidegger quote. In addition, it could also be argued that precisely because medicine is essentially concerned with the human person as a whole (not just with technical aspects of the body), modern technology poses such a threat to medicine, since it would endanger this essence. In conclusion, it may well be that modern technology does not constitute a danger to medicine. However, to arrive at this conclusion on the basis of Heidegger's philosophy is more problematic than Brassington suggests: medicine seems not to be immune to technological danger.

Heidegger’s Etymological Method

ProQuest: ... denotes Greek characters omitted (or Cyrillic characters omitted.) The role of etymology in Heidegger's curiously under-studied. In the English-language Heidegger literature, there are currently no book-length studies devoted to it, and discussion of surprisingly absent from books on Heidegger's on language. Frank Schalow's Language and the Etymological Turn of Thought1 apparently the only article to appear as yet that takes the philosophical significance of Heidegger's etymologies, though does not address the etymological method as such. What I want to do in essay, then, look at what Heidegger doing when he does etymology, so that we might see how and why we might do it, too. Lack of reflection on Heidegger's etymological method seems to have left philosophers with two default attitudes toward his etymologies. On one hand, for those generally hostile to Heidegger, the etymologies may come across as the kind of pretentious, inconsequential hand-waving that Plato seems to be sending with the spurious etymologies in the Cratylus-in other words, they may come across as if there were no method to them at all. On the other hand, for those generally sympathetic to Heidegger, his use of etymology may be linked to his supposed goal of retrieving the concepts of earlier times. This essay will argue that there indeed a method behind Heidegger's use of etymology, but that the purpose of method not to replace degraded modem concepts with purer archaic ones. Rather than seeking to discover an original meaning, I argue that Heidegger's etymologies seek to recover the whole range of historical meanings of a word. The etymological method's purpose-in contradistinction to the purpose of philosophical analysis-is to open the to overcome the tendency for the meaning of words-which also to say, their ability to present to us the being of beings-to become restricted over time. Whereas the function of analysis to tighten up and narrow our sense of a term, to precisely define its limits and eliminate equivocation so that we know precisely what at issue in a philosophical investigation, the function of etymology rather the opposite. In the midst of and by way of contrast with his exposition of the etymological links between thinking and thanking, Heidegger warns that academic philosophy-that is, analytic philosophy, broadly speaking-has done its share to stunt the word, that conceptual definitions of terms, while necessary for technical and scientific purposes, are by themselves unfit to assure, much less advance, the soundness of language.2 Of course, one of the later Heidegger's theses that in the current epoch, which he calls the epoch of das Ge-Stell or the be-setting of things by technological enframement, technical and scientific purposes are the only ones that ordinarily can show themselves. Thus when Wittgenstein tells us that language simply a tool, a means of advancing our purposes, he correct, but only for the current epoch (just as, in Heidegger's view, Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power a profoundly acute diagnosis of the times rather than an absolutely true metaphysics).3 But not only in the current epoch that words become less meaningful through their restriction for practical use. It necessarily the case that we almost always do not hear what words say; when so, our discourse takes the form of what Being and Time calls Gerede, talk. In Being and Time, Heidegger tells us that Gerede the mode of discourse belonging to entangled (verfallen) Da-sein-that is, that caught in the practical pursuit of its various everyday endeavors-and that usually so entangled. Heidegger writes that Gerede is the mode of being of the uprooted understanding of Da-sein and that this uprooting constant.4 In idle talk, language does not fulfill its role of bringing us into contact with the being of beings: talk the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation [Zueignung] of the matter; it omits going back to the ground [Boden] of what being talked about. …

Representation and Poiesis

Those who have studied Heidegger's relationship to Kant are familiar with his ontological broadening of the significance of the imagination (Einbildung, Einbildungskraft). But what about Heidegger's view of the imagination in his later works from the 1930s on? In the Kant-reading of the 1920s, especially in his famous Kant-book (Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik) of 1929, Heidegger certainly did not limit the imagination to its more traditional understanding as a faculty of images (Bild, Bilder) (or representations) but rather broadened and deepened it, making its sense coincide with his own notions of the ontological opening of man's being-(t)here (Dasein). The assumption was that the imagination, identified with this ontological opening, is the originary unity from out of which the separate faculties of the cognizing subject, its spontaneity and its receptivity, sprout. This was in reaction to the Neo-Kantian hylo-morphic prioritization of form over matter in cognition. To bridge the gap between form and matter, subject and object, Heidegger looked to the imagination in Kant's placement of it between conceptual understanding and receptive sensibility. In Kant's epistemological system, however, the imagination is a faculty of intuition and of synthesis. That is to say that in its transcendental-formative role, despite its positioning between sensation and understanding, the imagination, strictly speaking, belongs to the stem of spontaneity as opposed to receptivity (to which is relegated raw sense-data). One might then say that the equation of the imagination in Kant with the originary unity of the stems qua ontological opening was founded upon Heidegger's (mis-)taking of one of the stems, intentionally or not, for their deep uniting root. If one takes a look at another work from 1929, Vom Wesen des Grundes, one could also say that this reading of Kantian imagination was based upon the inseparability Heidegger discerned between the (Geworfenheit) and the (Entwurf) of human existence in (Transzendenz).] On the one hand, we always already find ourselves finitized by a whole set of environing conditions, i.e., the world into which we are thus thrown, and on the other hand, we comport ourselves to things in view of a picture or image of the world (Welt-Bild) that we project and that gives meaning to the situation wherein we find ourselves. These two aspects of our being-in-the-world are united in what Heidegger calls the fact that in dealing with beings, we are always simultaneously moving-beyond (transcending) them toward being itself in the assumption of the very meaningfulness (or sense, Sinn) of being underlying those very beings that we are comporting to. In that case, although Heidegger broadens the imagination and equates it with that ontological opening of our being-in-the-world designated as transcendence, Kantian imagination itself in the strict epistemological-representational sense then would itself have to be grounded in that very ontological opening that unites projection and thrownness and that would make the harmonious fitting of spontaneity and receptivity in cognition possible. In his subsequent works-which I would suggest also moves beyond the mere relegation of the sense of being to time as our ontologically finitizing mortality-Heidegger names that opening of being, Ereignis among other names. My focus in this essay lies in Heidegger's attitudes toward the imagination subsequent to his initial Kant reading in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik of 1929.2 A certain shift (Wendung) in his thinking becomes noticeable in the 1930s. In the following decades he turns away from his previous attempt to understand being through an analysis of human existence that makes use of the terminology of transcendence and the horizon of projection, and toward being itself in its historical-epochal unfoldings and as the world-opening enowning event (Ereignis) whereby human existence is itself opened and shaped. …

The Platonic Roots of Heidegger's Political Thought

Heidegger's most notorious political text is the Rectoral Address on ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University’, delivered in Freiburg in May 1933. This work is puzzling in that it manifests not ideology, but what Dominique Janicaud called an ‘exacerbated Platonism’. Accordingly, this article is an attempt to search for the roots of Heidegger's political views in his early work, and above all in the lecture courses on Plato and Aristotle delivered before the publication of Being and Time (1927), a book that still underpins the Rectoral Address. The investigation is in three stages: 1) an analysis of the political elements in Heidegger's thought before 1933; 2) a survey of the development of his political thought after 1933; 3) an examination of the prejudices involved in the Platonist approach to politics, with reference to the work of Hannah Arendt, who was a former student of Heidegger in Marburg.

The Verbal and the Visual in Science: A Heideggerian Perspective

ArgumentHeidegger's philosophy of science is notable for the prominence it gives to visuals and visualization. This is because for Heidegger, truth – including scientific truth – is the consequence of unconcealment, the lifting of a veil. But as scientific truth is a special kind, its visualization is also special: scientific truth reveals itself to us as, in Heidegger's words, “a calculable nexus of forces.” This nexus unconceals itself largely by means of instrumentation: it is this process of revelation that turns objects into objects of science. Despite its focus on visualization, however, Heidegger's philosophy of science cannot be applied directly to scientific visuals. His categories are not designed with visual exegesis in mind. For that purpose, semiotics, the science of meaning as defined by Charles Peirce, is a necessary intermediary between the abstract and the concrete, a taxonomy of icon, index, and symbol that can be employed as a set of hermeneutic probes that permit the exploration of scientific visuals as embodiments and carriers of scientific meaning. But not their sole embodiments and carriers. In achieving scientific semiosis, the verbal and visual must combine their particular strengths. This is also in accord with a Heideggerian view: science moves methodically from the visual to the propositional, though it never leaves the visual behind.

Lyotard, nihilism and education

This paper argues the Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition is to be interpreted as a response to nihilism, especially in relation to the question of the legitimation of knowledge and the so-called crisis of narratives, and that, therefore, it provides an appropriate response to the question of nihilism in educational philosophy. The paper begins with a discussion of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's views of nihilism as a prolegomenon to Lyotard's views concerning European nihilism and the end of grand narratives. These are important sources for a philosophical reception of the problem and the context in which Lyotard formulates his response and the immediate sources against that conditions Lyotard's response. The problem of nihilism raises its head in education in a double way: in relation to both the foundation of knowledge and the problem of its legitimation (The Postmodern Condition) and the problem of values (The Differend).

On the way to a “common” language? Heidegger’s dialogue with a Japanese visitor

In Being and Time, Heidegger compares language to “the house of being", in A Dialogue on Language, the metaphor changes into “saying", and in Nature of Language he calls language as “the flower of the mouth". These different metaphors show the turning from ontological to cosmological aspect of Heidegger's view of language, and at same time reveal the possibility of cross-cultural communication.

Concerning technology: thinking with Heidegger.

In human lives, technology holds sway in mundane and extraordinary ways, such as in the ways we work, entertain, transport, and feed ourselves, and importantly in the ways we encounter and manage health, disease, illness, and death. A significant area of Heidegger's later work is questioning technology. Unlike many current inquiries that centre on contemporary technology's function, utility, and positive transformations, Heidegger offers a radical way of thinking about technology through developing an inquiry that uncovers technology's essence of revealing. In this article, Heidegger's thinking about technological modes of revealing in regard to bodies, health, and illness is explored. In Heidegger's view, the ordered revealing of modern technology has overshadowed other modes of revealing. This article highlights how remembering concealment and unconcealment in its many modes can be relevant to nurses and others involved in health care. Through tracing Heidegger's thinking about technology, a more critical approach to the effects and outcomes of modern technologies within health care systems can be generated.