George Kovacs

Death and the question of immortality

Abstract Thanatology today hardly can be accused of being a springboard of eternity; it is not a discourse on the nature and the immortality of the human soul. The human awareness of death is separated from the question of immortality. This essay shows that there is a weakening of the philosophical connection between the study of death and the question of immortality even when the question of immortality is considered in contemporary thanatology. According to Scheler, the main reason for the decline of the belief in immortality can be found in the modern human tendency to deny death itself. People today do not live in the presence of death but retain just an abstract knowledge of death in general; they repress the intuitive certainty of death. If there is no death, then there is no need either for immortality as the victory over death. The concern with immortality in contemporary thanatology comes about more as a personal, experiential conviction and as a religious faith attitude. This shows that the ques...

Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy: The Challenge of Its Translation

This study shows the uniqueness and the philosophical significance of Beitrage, as well as the exactions of the venture to render it into English (1); it explores the language and the way of thinking, the be-ing-historical, enowning perspective, endemic to Heidegger’s second main work, and identifies the “ideal” and the difficulties of its translation as a hermeneutic labor, as well as the inadequacy of “an archival perspective” for guiding the translation and the grasping of this text (2). Based on these insights, this study, then, leads to a critical response to the hyperbolic, acerbic, despairing reactions to Contributions as a work of translation, thus exhibiting the collapse of their gratuitous claims, assertions, and assumptions under their own weight, as well as the failure of the “archival” approach to the translation (and ultimately to the assessment of Heidegger’s thinking) (3); it concludes with showing the nature and the disclosive power of Contributions, as well as its significance for the future of Heidegger studies (4).

Heidegger’s Experience with Language

This study explores the following dimensions of Heidegger’s hermeneutics of language: the uniqueness and significance of his lifelong concern with the nature, origin, and “place” of language in human destiny and culture (1); his sustained experience with language as the discernment of what is ownmost (Wesen) to language, of “what” and “how” language really is or can be (2); the transition from metaphysical, representational, and instrumentalized (objectified) view of language to the be-ing-historical understanding of language as the coming of be-ing, of the phenomenon and essential sway of “to be,” into the word (3); the hermeneutic lessons entailed in his experience with (rediscovery and liberation of) language, that is, its contribution to the recognition of the disclosive power of language, to the understanding of the interplay between language (speaking) and thought (thinking), between ratio and oratio, to the interpretation of texts, to the openness of attunement to the spoken and written word (4).