Simon Glendinning

Heidegger and the question of animality

Abstract It is widely recognized that Heideggers analysis of Dasein outlines a novel dissolution of the epistemological problems of modern philosophy. However it has not been fully appreciated that this analysis presupposes a conception of human beings which radically separates them from all natural, animal life. Focusing on Heideggers analysis of Mitsein it is argued that this separation prevents Heidegger from achieving a conception of human existence which avoids the distortions of the humanist tradition against which it recoils. Against Heidegger, it is argued that a philosophically satisfactory conception of human existence must be more smoothly naturalistic.

John McDowell on Experience: Open to the Sceptic?

The aim of this paper is to show that John McDowell’s approach to perception in terms of “openness”remains problematically vulnerable to the threat of scepticism. The leading thought of the openness view is that objects, events and others in the world, and no substitute, just are what is disclosed in perceptual experience. An account which aims to defend this thought must show, therefore, that the content of perceptual experience does not “all short” of its objects. We shall describe how McDowell defends the openness view with reference to the disjunctive analysis of appearances (sections II and III); argue that his defence includes features which are both inconsistent with and unnecessary for the openness view (section IV); and show how those features call into question the success of McDowell’s route of response to sceptical arguments (section V). Finally, we sketch an alternative approach to openness and conclude that the explosive effect of letting loose the conception of experience advanced by the openness view has yet to be felt in the English-speaking world (section VI).

Japheth's World: The Rise of Secularism and the Revival of Religion Today

This essay explores what it means to say that we live today in “a secular age.” A distinction between two kinds of secularism is introduced and the proposal is made that the secularity that characterises our age belongs to a distinctively Graeco-Christian heritage. This proposal is elaborated and developed in the context of the Nietzschean pronouncement of the death of God and against the background of the decline in theodicial conceptions of history. However, rather than see these issues as connected to a growing nihilism in European society or in terms of a movement towards a widespread atheism, they are interpreted, in many respects optimistically, in terms of the awakening and ongoing movement of a distinctively democratic desire.

The Everydayness of Don Giovanni

‘If ever any kind of history has suggested the interpretations which should be put on it, it is the history of philosophy’.1 In a period of philosophical history which has managed to find itself largely indifferent to philosophy’s historical character, Merleau-Ponty’s sharp observation is a timely reminder that the resources for reading philosophical texts are not wholly independent of the texts of philosophy that have been read. Concerned in his own case that we may unwittingly fall back on traditional interpretive keys for reading a philosophical score that may be performing something new, Merleau-Ponty urges us not to conclude too quickly that we know what is emerging in the movement that is bringing phenomenology to being. It seems to me that a good deal of the controversy over the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in general and the distinctive writing of the Philosophical Investigations in particular has been bound up with a similar problem. It is the problem of coming to terms with the novelty of its teaching, a difficulty of reading posed by the fact that the history of philosophy, its terms of criticism and self-understanding, may stand in the way of ‘letting this book teach us anything’.2

Nietzsche’s Europe: an experimental anticipation of the future

ABSTRACT Like Kant a little over a hundred years earlier, Nietzsche saw the history of Europe as moving towards the formation of an integrated political union. Unlike Kant, however, Nietzsche does not see this development as an unambiguous good. Kant had supposed that European integration would belong to a history of constitutional improvements that would make war between what we would now call “democratic” states in Europe increasingly less likely. Nietzsche also sees it as part of a process of democratization, but he understands that as a movement of “levelling and mediocritizing” of the European peoples, making Europeans into serviceable herd animals, “weak willed highly employable workers”. The general trend of European democratization is simply a movement towards the production of a type that is “prepared for slavery in the subtlest sense”. Nietzsche does not think this is a wholly unhappy development, however, because he thinks the same conditions will also bring about something that he welcomes: “the breeding of tyrants”. It is hardly an attractive picture, and this paper tries to come to terms with Nietzsche’s strange hopes for a Europe to come, and to locate it in the context of a distinctively German tradition of thinking about European unity.

A Time after Copernicus

We live in a time of mutation. We — who? We the inheritors of the understanding of the world and the significance of our lives that belongs to the Greco-Christian epoch we still inhabit, the epoch that Heidegger called the epoch of ‘the first beginning’ (2000: 125), and that Derrida called the epoch of ‘the sign’ (1998: 14). This mutation belongs to a movement of decentring: the displacing of a discourse in which what is called ‘Man’ holds a special position or distinction at the centre of nature and history. In this mutation, Man is knocked of his pedestal.

Settled-there: Heidegger on the work of art as the cultivation of place

ABSTRACT There is only one reference to art (to poetry in fact) in Heidegger’s Being and Time but art is to the fore in his later writings. In this article the path from the earlier to the later writings is traced such that two surprising conclusions can be drawn: first, that Heidegger’s later thinking about art is powerfully pre-figured in the single reference to poetry in Being and Time; and, second, that Heidegger’s later thinking about art does not develop a new discourse on aesthetics but, rather, a discourse that re-visions our self-understanding by elaborating an essential tie—already stressed in Being and Time—between our Being and dwelling. The discussion of Heidegger’s philosophy of art as a philosophy of settlement is developed through a renewed assessment of Heidegger’s famous interpretation of Van Gogh’s picture of a pair of old shoes. It is argued that the picture plays a twin role in Heidegger’s analysis: drawing together the threads of Heidegger’s engagement with our time as belonging to the technological age, while also illustrating Heidegger’s conception of the creation of art not as the production of an object but as involved in the opening up of a world. Together these threads invite us to reflect that, even though the “old rootedness” is being lost in this age, art might still contribute to creating a new settlement in our time—with technology.

Le plaisir de la lecture Reading the Other Animal

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.

Thinking about (going to) the university

Focusing on the possibility of posing questions concerning the essence of the university, the discussion critically explores two traditional shibboleths: the idea of pure learning (the idea that a university education is to be valued not as a means to an end but an end in itself) and the idea of pure inquiry (the idea that research at a university is to be valued not as a means to an end but an end in itself). It is shown that even the most classical conceptions of the idea of a university acknowledged that a state interest in state -funded university activity is not inappropriate. The discussion concludes by proposing that we should understand our reponsibility to the essence of the university through a commitment to negotiating legitimate economic interests that seek quick answers with the possibility of keeping discussions open, the possibility for thought to take its time.