[Image from Common Sense Science] Parmenides of Elea changed the course of early Greek philosophy. His philosophy not only shifted the line of inquiry found in previous accounts (most notably in the Milesians Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes) from cosmology to ontology; the ontology he developed also defined all succeeding accounts as the standard to which…
Tag Archives: Being
[Jan van Kessel's Still Life] In tracing the intellectual development of Karl Marx, Sidney Hook discusses, in addition to G.W.F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, foremost critic of Hegel from the left, whose materialism deeply impressed the young Marx. Analogous to Marx’s own critique, Feuerbach complains of Hegel’s idealism that its “method of deducing existence from essence,…
[The Berkeley Free Speech movement; Image from The Berkeley Daily Planet] In the section of the essay of the book of the same title, Jean-Luc Nancy explicates his notion of being singular plural. Composed of three words that, as Nancy describes, “do not have any determined syntax (‘being’ is a verb or noun; ‘singular’ and…
Fellows, Friends, and Others, I am sending another one of my reports from the field. As stipulated, I am using the species’ own mode of transmission, their own semiology—what is referred to in these parts as “language” (though, technically speaking, they use many “languages” organized in a similar way as a system (i.e. as “language”),…
Bruce Fink presents in The Lacanian Subject his interpretation of Jacques Lacan’s theory of subjectivity. In contrast to the ego (in its many guises: the individual, the conscious subject, the mirror image, the subject of the statement), Fink states that Lacan’s subject—the subject of the “return to Freud,” the true subject of psychoanalysis—is none other…
Bruce Fink presents a more nuanced explication of Jacques Lacan’s (overly?) complex ontology in The Lacanian Subject compared to the more simple (although by no means easy) schematic of parallelisms that Alexandre Leupin establishes between Freud and Lacan in Lacan Today. Leupin’s explication, I think, (and not just because his explication is my first sustained…
[Vincent van Gogh's Peasant Shoes and A Pair of Shoes] [Follows "Technology"] [Based on Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” as interpreted by Greg Schufreider] Dis-close a particular cultural-historical world for a people (das Volk), grounded on the earth. Dasein is no longer the opening up of being; the world is opened…
[Image from Alternative Fuel Sources] [Follows "What is Dasein Like?"] [Based on Martin Heidegger’s “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics” and “The Question Concerning Technology,” as interpreted by Greg Schufreider] We in fact started with Dasein, der Mensch, the human being (but even then not, like Husserl and the rest of the tradition, as a transcendental…
[Lone Wolf by Alfred von Kowalski-Wierusz] I guess one can say that there’s a strong, independent streak in me. I hate the schedule that social life forces me to take. I work on my own time, judge my output based on my own standards. I (try to) do the things I want (despite the overwhelming…
[Rembrandt's Artist in His Studio] [Follows "Husserl's Phenomenological Reductions"] [Based on Martin Heidegger’s “On the Essence of Grounds,” as interpreted by Greg Schufreider] By virtue of the transcendental reduction, Husserl ended up elevating consciousness, the subject, into the transcendental ego, placing it over and above all other beings, constitutive (rather than a part) of the…
