Search

This piece provides a general overview and analysis of the current imperative to decolonize in South Africa, linking the recent turn to identity politics with the transformation of the university i...

This article focuses on Heidegger’s reflection on death in Being and Time, on the question of whether death can be mine, on what the connection between death and mineness can tell us about schizophrenia, and on the relation between Heidegger’s talk of death and mineness and Derrida’s talk of mourning and mineness.

In this paper we present a reconstruction of Hegel's critique of Kant. We try to show the congruence of that critique in both theoretical and practical philosophy. We argue that this congruence is to be found in Hegel's criticism of Kant's hylemorphism in his theoretical and practical philosophy. Hegel is much more sympathetic to Kant's response to the distinction between matter and form in his theoretical philosophy and he credits Kant with ‘discovering’ here that thinking is an activity that always takes place within a greater whole. He, however, argues that the consequences of this are much more significant than Kant suspects and that, most importantly, the model of cognition in which thought (form) confronts something non-thought (matter) is unsustainable. This leads to Hegel's appropriation of Kantian reflective judgements, arguing that the greater whole in which thinking takes place is a socially shared set of meanings, something resembling what Kant calls a sensus communis. From here, it is not far...

Since the 1960s, the intellectual landscape of the humanities has been overshadowed by the question of identity and difference – political and national identity, ethnic and racial identity, gender ...

Born in 1900–1901 with the publication of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, phenomenology, as a critical method of reflection on consciousness and its cognitive achievements against its naturalisation in the natural sciences, has undergone many changes and developments. Critiques of both its methods and tasks have emerged, plus it has served as an inspiration for numerous thinkers, including Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel Henry, Emmanuel Levinas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida, in their attempts to address the question of value, the meaning of being, existence, the lived body, the Other, life, art, history and language in original and fresh ways. The current paper reflects upon the question of what the fate of phenomenology in the twenty-first century could be by considering some of the recent work presented at the first conference of the South African Centre for Phenomenology held at the University of Johannesburg earlier this year.South African Journal of Philosophy 2013, 32(4): 291–294

This article offers a new reading of Heidegger’s thesis of the animal in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Framing Heidegger’s text through a brief analysis of Protagoras’ genetic story of nature and of man’s nature in Plato’s eponymous dialogue, our reading brings out three key elements common to both texts: living nature as a normative rather than a physical order, the poverty of man’s world in relation to the animal, and the attempted redemption of the latter through the acquisition of Weltbildung. Staying with the way Heidegger brings out man’s poverty in world in the text allows us (i) to undo once for all the oft‐repeated charge of Heidegger’s anthropocentric interpretation of the animal, (ii) to stage the hypothesis that philosophy and the life sciences of his day draw upon a common basic experience of the autonomy of life in relation to everything human, all‐too‐human, and (iii) to demonstrate the normativity and poverty of life.

In section 55 of The Will to Power, written on June 10, 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche pens a thought, a terrible and distressing thought, terrible for what it proclaims, distressing for the human who is asked to entertain this thought, the thought of nothing, of its eternal recurrence. Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence (das Dasein) as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: "the eternal recurrence." This is the most extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (das Nichts) (the "meaningless" [das 'Sinnlose']), eternally!1 "Nothing" shall be our topic, the topos from which we intend to set out in this essay. Certainly, the thought of "nothing" seems to invite rather the thought of a certain atopos, a noplace, inviting a strange and uncanny thought into the world. Supposing this thought would assail man as a disturbing emptiness, as an unheard of silence, as an incalculable, unruly dissolution of meaning, it would no doubt defy the prescribed usage of metaphysical-moral discourses in given contexts, interrupting, if not corrupting, constituted normality. To be sure, this does not mean, conversely, that the thought of "nothing" is a thought of the indeterminate, or, as Hegel has it, of indeterminate immediacy. If we cannot yet say what sort of thought it is, we can at least infer from Nietzsche's passage that it is neither immediate to thought or intuition nor conceptually indeterminate. Doubtless, this passage, together with what Nietzsche says elsewhere, poses a perplexing problem. He seems to be saying, on the one hand, that the recurrence of a meaningless and aimless existence, of "nothing," animates the economy of nihilism. But, on the other hand, other texts in Nietzsche's corpus would lead us to suppose that with or in the thought of the eternal return nihilism finds itself overturned, abolished. Does the return, in other words, underscore the life of the nihilist-skeptic, the destroyer of all beliefs, or the life of the overman, the creator and self-creator? To say that the return animates both lives would not get us very much further in disentangling this confusing and confounding knot. So let us start with a simple question. What is nihilism? What does it mean? This seems easy to say. Nietzsche provides us with a succinct definition of nihilism in section 2 of The Will to Power: What does nihilism mean (Was bedeutet Nihilismus)! That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; "why?" finds no answer. (WP 9, WM 10) And yet, isn't it strangely paradoxical for Nietzsche to give us a definition of nihilism, for telling us what it means? We say: "What is-nihilism? What is-its meaning?" Ti estin: the form of the question betrays an ancient prejudice, as Heidegger would be quick to remind us, since by asking for a definition of nihilism, we are in effect asking for its essence, its ground, its meaning. But isn't nihilism the very thought which puts an end to metaphysical and moral foundationalism and essentialism, the thought of utter meaninglessness? Presumably so. And yet nihilism has a meaning: the eternal recurrence of nothing, of the meaningless.-Unless nihilism is that thought which compels us to think the impossibility of ever putting an end to meaning, a thought, in other words, which calls upon us to think the impossibility of nihilism, that even as we think the devaluation of the highest values, the reduction of all meanings to nil, we cannot think this thought unless we think the meaning that attaches to nihilism, we cannot have done with meaning and value if we are still thinking of nihilism. There is no doubt something strangely circular to this thought, but we cannot yet be sure whether this is what Nietzsche wants us to think as nihilism, as the uncanny circle of nihilism. The following essay claims to be an interpretation of the first passage above. Our aim is to bring home the intriguing connection Nietzsche establishes between nihilism and the eternal return, a connection that has scarcely been commented on in the Nietzsche literature. …

In this paper we examine Nietzsche's relation to the life sciences of his time and to Darwinism in particular, arguing that his account of the will to power in terms of technics eschews three metaphysical prejudices, hylemorphism, utilitarianism, and teleological thinking. Telescoping some of Nietzsche's pronouncements on the will to power with a Bergsonian lens, our reading of the will to power, as an operation productive of time, the future or life, offers an alternative to Heidegger's. Rather than being reducible to a technics of domination or mastery, the will to power, we argue, is best interpreted as a technics of material forces that recasts all things past and future, near and far, moment by moment.

This essay presents a defence of the hermeneutical and existential standpoint of Being and Time against Cristina Lafont’s historicist and relativist reading. I show that there are substantive and textual difficulties with the Kantian reading of the understanding of being she endorses, which leads her to ignore the existential and hermeneutical aspects of Heidegger’s theory of meaning. The first section shows that the understanding of being is neither an unrevisable synthetic apriori nor a historically contingent conceptual scheme but that it originates from care and that its articulation depends on the disclosure of a world (meaning). The second section turns to Heidegger’s theory of meaning qua worldhood. In the first place, I demonstrate that the relativity of meaning to Dasein doesn’t entail the kind of relativism Lafont ascribes to Heidegger and, in the second, how it avoids the supposed tension Lafont identifies in Being and Time between the claim that Dasein constitutes the world and the claim that it depends on a historically and linguistically constituted world. I conclude with some remarks on what is novel about Heidegger’s existential and hermeneutical outlook on meaning. South African Journal of Philosophy 2013, 32(2): 149–162